THE CHILDREN'S START IN LIFE
The eleven children of Jonathan Edwards had an unenviable start in life
so far as their environment was concerned. The oldest was still in her
teens when serious trouble arose in the parish at Northampton. Mr.
Edwards was pastor at Northampton for twenty-five years, and a more
fruitful pastorate or a more glorious ministerial career for a quarter
of a century no man could ask. He made that church on the frontier the
largest Protestant church in the world, and it was the most influential
as well as the best known. There began the greatest religious awakening
of modern times. In his church, resulting from his preaching, began a
revival which stirred into activity every church in Massachusetts, every
church in the colonies, and most of the Protestant churches of Great
Britain and Europe.
After this long and eminently successful pastorate, Mr. Edwards
preached a sermon about the reading and conversation of young people
upon subjects of questionable propriety, which led to such local
excitement that upon the recommendation of an ecclesiastical council
he was dismissed by a vote of 200 to 20, and the town voted that he
be not permitted on any occasion to preach or lecture in the church.
Mr. Edwards was wholly unprepared financially for this unusual
ecclesiastical and civic action. He had no other means of earning a
living, so that, until donations began to come in from far and near,
Mrs. Edwards, at the age of forty, the mother of eleven children with
the youngest less than a year old, was obliged to take in work for the
support of the family. After a little time Mr. Edwards secured a small
mission charge in an Indian village where there were twelve white and
150 Indian families. Here he remained eight years in quiet until, a few
weeks before his death, he was called to the presidency and pastorate of
Princeton, then a young and small college.
The last four years of their life at Northampton were indescribably
trying to the children. Human nature was the same then as now, and
everyone knows how heavily the public dislike of a prominent man bears
upon his children. The conventionalities which keep adults within bound
in speech and action are unknown to children, and what the parents say
behind a clergyman's back, children say to his children's face. This
period of childhood social horror ended only by removal to a missionary
parsonage among the Stockbridge Indians, where they lived for eight
years. Their playmates were Indian children and youth. Half the children
of the family talked the Indian language as well and almost as much as
they did the English language.
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.
Contrast this group of sixteen men and women with the five sons of Max
and the women with whom they lived. In this group there was not a strain
of industry, virtue, or scholarship. They were licentious, ignorant,
profane, lacking ambition to keep them out of poverty and crime.
They drifted into whatever it was easiest to do or to be. Midday and
midnight, heaven and its opposite, present no sharper contrasts than
the children and the children-in-law of Jonathan Edwards and of Max.
The two men were born in rural communities, they both lived on the
frontier; but the one was born in a Christian home, was the son of a
clergyman, of a highly educated man who took the highest honors Harvard
could give, was himself highly educated in home, school, and at Yale
College, always associated with pure-minded, earnest persons, and
devoted his thought and activity to benefiting mankind.
Max was the opposite of all this. There is no knowledge of his childhood
or of his parentage. He was not bad, as bad men go; he was jolly, could
tell a good story, though they were always off color, could trap unwary
animals skillfully, was a fairly good shot; but no one was the better
for anything that he ever said, thought, or did. Jollity, shiftlessness,
and lack of purpose in one man have given to the world a family of
1,200, mostly paupers and criminals; while Mr. Edwards, who never
amused any one, who was always chaste, earnest, and noble, has given to
the world a family of more than 1,400 of the world's noblemen, who have
magnified strength and beauty all over the land, illustrating grandly
these beautiful lines of Lowell:
"Be noble! and the nobleness that lies
In other men, sleeping, but never dead,
Will rise in majesty to meet thine own."