CHAPTER IV

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 conventionalties 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 twentytwo, 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 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.

man.

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