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Page 9
In the years of aspiration these children were away from all society
life and educational institutions, in the home of a poor missionary
family among Indians when Indian wars were a reality. When Mr. Edwards
accepted gratefully this mission church his oldest child, a daughter,
was twenty-two, his youngest son was less than a year old. All of the
boys and three of the girls were under twelve years of age when they
went to the Indian village, and all but one were under twenty. When
their missionary home was broken up five of them were still under
twenty, so that the children's inheritance was not of wealth, of
literary or scholastic environment, or of cultured or advantageous
society. Everything tends to show how completely Mr. Edwards' sons
and daughters were left to develop and improve their inheritance of
intellectual, moral, and religious aspiration.
In these years Mr. Edwards was writing the works which will make him
famous for centuries. One of the daughters married Rev. Aaron Burr, the
president of Princeton, then a very small institution. Upon the death of
this son-in-law, Mr. Edwards was chosen to succeed him, but while at
Princeton, before he had fairly entered upon his duties at the college,
he died of smallpox. His widowed daughter, who cared for him, died a
few days later leaving two children, and his widow, who came for the
grandchildren, soon followed the husband and daughter to the better
land.
Mr. Edwards died at fifty-six, and his widow a few weeks later. Both
died away from home, for the family was still among the Stockbridge
Indians. The oldest son was but twenty, and there were five children
younger than he. The youngest son was eight and the other only thirteen.
To make the picture more clear it must be understood that to these six
orphans, under twenty-one, there came at the time of their father's and
mother's deaths two little orphans aged four and two respectively, Sarah
Burr and her brother Aaron. Here was a large family from which father
and mother, older sister and brother-in-law had been taken almost at a
single blow, with two extra orphans to care for.
And with all this there was no adequate financial inheritance. The
inventory of Jonathan Edwards' property is interesting. Among the live
stock, which included horses and cows, was a slave upon whom a moderate
value was placed. The slave was named Titus, and he was rated under
"quick stock" and not "live stock," at a value of $150. The silver was
inventoried as a tankard valued at $60, a can and porringer at $47, and
various other articles valued at $85. The chief material legacy was
his library, which was inventoried as consisting of 301 volumes, 536
pamphlets, forty-eight maps, thirty unpublished manuscripts and 1,074
manuscript sermons prepared for the printer. It was valued at $415.
If Jonathan Edwards did not leave a large financial legacy, he did
impart to his children an intellectual capacity and vigor, moral
character, and devotion to training which have projected themselves
through eight generations without losing the strength and force of their
great ancestor. Of the three sons and eight daughters of Jonathan
Edwards there was not one, nor a husband or wife of one, whose character
and ability, whose purpose and achievement were not a credit to this
godly man. Of the seventy-five grandchildren, with their husbands and
wives, there was but one for whom an apology may be offered, and nearly
every one was exceptionally strong in scholarship and moral force.
We have paused long enough on the threshold of the descendants of
Jonathan Edwards. We have seen the estimate in which he was held by his
contemporaries at home and abroad, and by close students of the history
of his times. We have seen what he inherited and by what training and in
what environment he was developed. We have also seen the terrible strain
to which his children were subjected in childhood from lack of school
privileges and pleasing social conditions. It remains to be seen what
kind of men and women these children became with childhood disadvantages,
but with a grand inheritance and the best of home training.
Remember the size, ages, and financial condition of the family when the
father died--the sons being aged eight, thirteen and twenty--and then
consider the fact that the three sons graduated from Princeton, and five
of the daughters married college graduates, three of them of Yale and
one each of Harvard and Princeton. A man might well be content to die
without lands or gold when eight sons and sons-in-laws were to be men of
such capacity, character, and training as are found in this family.
They were not merely college graduates, but they were eminent men.
One held the position of president of Princeton and one of Union
College, four were judges, two were members of the Continental Congress,
one was a member of the governor's council in Massachusetts, one was a
member of the Massachusetts war commission in the Revolutionary war,
one was a state senator, one was president of the Connecticut house of
representatives, three were officers in the Revolutionary war, one was a
member of the famous constitutional convention out of which the United
States was born, one was an eminent divine and pastor of the historic
North church of New Haven, and one was the first grand master of the
Grand Lodge of Masons in Connecticut. This by no means exhausts the
useful and honorable official positions occupied by the eight sons and
sons-in-law of Jonathan Edwards, and it makes no account of their
writings, of noted trials that they conducted, but it gives some hint of
the pace which Mr. Edwards' children set for the succeeding generations.
It should be said that the daughters were every way worthy of
distinguished husbands, and it ought also to be said that the wives of
the sons were worthy of these men in intellectual force and moral
qualities.
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