Jonathan Edwards: Family Life

 

For information on Edwards' Family Life, see the following: 

 

  • Kenneth P. Minkema, "Hannah and her Sisters: Sisterhood, Courtship, and Marriage in the Edwards Family in the Early Eighteenth Century," New England Historical and Genealogical Register CXLVI (1992), 35-56.

  • Ola Winslow, Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1940), chs. 1-2.

Edwards’ Family by Kenneth P. Minkema

The Edwardses were of Welch origins, but Jonathan Edwards traced his personal lineage to early seventeenth-century London, when Puritans were hotly criticizing the corruption of the Anglican church. The Reverend Richard Edwards had left his native country to become the rector of the Ratcliffe Free School. Of this figure little is known, except that he died in the plague of 1625. His widow, Anne, married James Cole, a cooper and religious dissenter. James, Anne, her sixteen-year-old son William Edwards, and his daughter Abigail Cole emigrated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1635 to escape debtor’s prison. There they joined the party under Thomas Hooker that was preparing to leave and settle Connecticut colony. James passed on his barrel-making skills to his step-son, who in turn bequeathed the family business to his only son Richard, born in Hartford in 1647. Richard established a thriving merchant business, and in 1708 was appointed as the colony’s first Queen’s Attorney.

    Richard Edwards married Elizabeth Tuthill of New Haven in 1667. From the start, their relationship was conflicted. Just three months after their marriage, she confessed to him that she was pregnant by another man. Rather than put her aside, Richard agreed to have the child raised by his wife’s parents, and he paid the fine for fornication. (In colonial New England, if a married couple had a child within seven months of their wedding, it was assumed they had pre-marital intercourse and so were guilty of fornication.) During the next twenty-four years the couple had seven children—one son and six daughters—though their relationship went from bad to worse. Family tradition has portrayed Richard as the virtuous and long-suffering one, while Elizabeth, if she is mentioned, was assumed to be insane. There was some basis for this; there was a history of violence in her family. Her brother had killed a sister with an axe, and another sister had committed infanticide. Whether or not Elizabeth was insane, or what share Richard had in the couple’s bad relationship, will never be fully known. Reportedly, Elizabeth was subject to fits of depression, violence, and verbal abuse, threatening to kill her husband. Supposedly, she refused to have “conjugal communion” with him. By the testimony of their own children, she abandoned her husband and family for several years. What is clear, too, is that Richard sued for divorce, which was finally granted in 1691. Edwards’ grandparents were among the very first divorced couples in colonial New England. The following year, Richard remarried, to Mary Talcott of New Haven, and the couple had six children, four of whom lived beyond childhood.

    The first child that Richard and Elizabeth had together, Timothy, was born in 1669. He attended Harvard College but was barred from campus in his second year for some indiscretion, possibly stemming from the beginnings of the divorce proceedings of his parents (he was one of the two children who had to testify in court against his own mother). He went to study with Rev. Pelatiah Glover of Springfield, and turned his life around. On July 4, 1691, he came to Cambridge and passed the exams for both the baccalaureate and master’s degrees in one day. From there, he accepted a call to the town of Windsor Farmes, or East (now South) Windsor, Connecticut, on the east side of the Connecticut River across from Windsor. He helped to gather a new church, and began a pastorate of more than sixty years. Timothy’s obsessive personality, longing to control, and jealousy for his pay made the relationship with his congregation strained at times—at one point he even suspended the Lord’s Supper for three years!—but it lasted. Awakenings were a regular feature of church life in East Windsor. Timothy had a reputation as the most successful revival preacher in Connecticut, and was second in New England only to his father-in-law Stoddard, who had a series of “harvests” over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

As his father’s on-gain, off-again relationship with his congregation indicates, Jonathan’s family culture, and the examples he had before him, are important for understanding him. Before Timothy’s settlement at East Windsor, he married Esther Stoddard, daughter of the powerful minister Solomon Stoddard of Northampton. The couple had eleven children, ten girls—Timothy referred to his “sixty feet of daughters”—and one son, Jonathan, born in 1703. Timothy and Esther both educated their children, giving their daughters a college preparatory education alongside their son. Jonathan’s sisters are among the most interesting members of his family. They were almost all of them highly intelligent, highly opinionated, with quick wits and cosmopolitan tastes, while also thoroughly a part of the evangelical religious culture of the Valley. Of Jonathan’s sisters, two—Jerusha and Lucy—died young, victims of epidemics; another, Mary, remained single and took care first of her grandparents and then her parents; and the remainder married clergymen and other high-ranking men. There are many stories of their relations as sisters, their courtships, and marriages, some sad, others humorous. Hannah, for example, was persona non gratis in East Windsor because of an ongoing disagreement with a young man in town who insisted she was legally bound to marry him; only after more than a decade of being harassed was she finally able to marry a person of her choice, and happily. A story regarding Martha gives a taste of her reputation in the family. The Rev. Moses Tuthill came to her father seeking permission to seek her hand. When Timothy hesitated, Moses asked if she was not a religious person. “Oh, yes,” replied Timothy; “Martha is a good girl. But, brother Tuttle, the grace of God will go where you and I cannot.”

Jonathan married Sarah Pierpont of New Haven in 1727, just, in the manner of his father, as he was about to settle at Northampton as the assistant pastor. Jonathan and Sarah, too, had eleven children, eight daughters and three sons, all of whom lived to adulthood except Jerusha, who died after nursing the dying missionary David Brainerd—though she died of a fever, not of tuberculosis, as Brainerd had. The fact that Jerusha nursed David in his last sickness, and that they traveled to Boston together, has given rise to a tradition that they were romantically involved, even engaged. There is no evidence whatsoever to support this. Jerusha was only sixteen at the time she took care of Brainerd, well below the average marrying age at the time. Also, it was common for young men to accompany young women on lengthy trips; this seeming impropriety was actually only offensive to later Victorian sensibilities, and so an “engagement” was invented.

As with Jonathan’s siblings, there are many things to tell of his children, but we must suffice here with only a few illustrative examples. Mary, who married Timothy Dwight (and whose son went on to be the president of Yale and instrumental in the Second Great Awakening), forever carried a grudge against Northampton for dismissing her father. Though she lived in the town till her death, she refused to enter the sanctuary; instead, she sat on a chair in the narthex during services, and took the sacrament in a neighboring church. Esther, of course, married Aaron Burr, pastor of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and Jonathan’s predecessor as president of the College of New Jersey; their son, Aaron Jr., became vice-president of the United States under Jefferson, but his career ended when he shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a notorious duel in 1803. Jonathan, Jr., became a minister and college president like his father, and, in fact, there are many eery similarities between their career paths, including dismissal from a pastorate of many years followed by “exile” in a backcountry church. Pierpont, the youngest son, was sort of a family rebel—he became a Jeffersonian, a Mason, and a lawyer—three strikes against him in Federalist, Calvinist New England. Pierpont’s daughter, Henrietta, married Eli Whitney, the famous inventor.

Jonathan and Sarah: “Uncommon Union”

In 1723 or thereabouts, Jonathan Edwards wrote an apostrophe to a young women of “this town,” meaning in all likelihood New Haven. This brief piece, a prose poem for which there is no original manuscript, has traditionally been interpreted as Edwards’s hymn of praise for the woman he would marry in 1727. If Edwards had not met Sarah Pierpont before coming to study in New Haven, he surely did upon his taking up residence at the college hall in 1719. He was twenty and Sarah thirteen when he apparently presented to the New Haven minister’s daughter a book with an inscription on the flyleaf.  

Edwards’s idea of an epithalamium was not to be witty or elegant. The subject of his meditation was Pierpont’s rich communion with the Creator. The opening of the apostrophe reads:

They say there is a young lady in [New Haven] who is beloved of that almighty Being, who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything, except to meditate on him--that she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be raised out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from him always.

For Edwards, Pierpont was an ethereal, almost angelic being. She had a source of joy that was a mystery to others—though not to him. She had more conversation with the Great Being than with other creatures, and was content with that. Like Edwards, who in the “Personal Narrative” described his experience of “inward sweetness” as culminating in “a kind of vision . . . of being alone in the mountains, . . . sweetly conversing with Christ,” Pierpont loved to “wander in the fields and on the mountains,” where she could commune with God. She epitomized Edwards’s ideal of godliness: sweetness, virtue, purity, and heavenly-mindedness.

    There is in the apostrophe an undercurrent of longing, even envy, for the same access to God that Pierpont enjoyed. Edwards praised her as a model to emulate for her spiritual virtues. In this sense, the person portrayed was an expression of Edwards’s vision of the true saint. Yet Edwards was not the only man to be impressed by Pierpont. George Whitefield prayed that God would send him a wife like Sarah Pierpont Edwards, and Samuel Hopkins, Edwards’s most famous disciple, was highly influenced by her self-negating piety in his formulation of “disinterestedness.”  So Edwards’s effort to portray godliness theoretically and in concrete lives began with his future wife, as real believer and ideal saint, as seen in future compositions including his own “Personal Narrative” and other spiritual biographies. One such opportunity presented itself in 1742, at the height of the Great Awakening, when Sarah experienced a series of dramatic religious episodes. Here, she appeared more human than in the apostrophe and bound up in worldly concerns, but they provided the emotional springboard to sustained trances and “transports” to a “heavenly elysium.” 

    If “On Sarah Pierpont” was symbolic, it was also extremely personal. Jonathan and Sarah were married for twenty-one years, raised eleven children, and suffered many hardships together. But those who observed them and their family all remarked on their extraordinary life together. Whitefield could not recall in all his travels a “sweeter couple.” John Walley wrote, “Surely there is a . . . Union of soul among Believers, a sensible sweetness at some [ti]mes; I think I love Mr. Edwards & his Wife, because I see so much of [the] Image of God in them.” Five years later, Joseph Emerson of Concord described the Edwardses as “the most agreable Family I was ever acquainted with. [M]uch of the Presence of God there.”  On his deathbed, Jonathan spoke of the “uncommon union” that bound him with Sarah, a union that, most importantly for him, was spiritual.

There were, however, less rosy aspects to their relationship. Jonathan’s family had a dark past, including a violent relationship between his grandparents that ended in a protracted divorce case. Sarah’s transports of 1742 began when she worried that she had incurred Jonathan’s “ill-will’ over a “point of prudence,” and, in an unpublished fragment from her narrative, imagined him “horsewhipping” her out of town. Edwards encouraged his wife to write down the narrative of her experiences, which he used in Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival; while commending her highly, he rendered her text in a gender-neutral fashion, effectively “silencing” Sarah’s true voice.

Edwards offered some intriguingly Janus-faced positions on issues of gender. One of the distinctive aspects of Edwards's family was the preponderance of women in it. Jonathan grew up the only son in a family of eleven, and he and his wife Sarah Pierpont raised eight daughters, all of whom were highly educated and erudite.  Members of Edwards's family were quite cosmopolitan in their views of gender and marriage, though they did not refute the received wisdom of early modern European culture that, within the order of nature, women were the “weaker vessels.” Even so, Edwards felt that, within their relative and proper spheres, men and women were equal and that marriage was a companionate relation. We are only beginning to appreciate Edwards's part in gender history. He was a traditional patriarch, but no misogynist. He sought to curtail women's public speech but allowed that they were more spiritual than men. The majority of his supporters in Northampton were women. The persons he chose as exemplars of true sainthood were all women--Abigail Hutchinson, Phoebe Bartlett, his wife Sarah--with the exception of the decidedly non-masculine David Brainerd. And Edwards's so-called "feminized" spirituality, with its emphasis on affections and the expression of emotions, wielded a great influence in the literature of sentimentality that emerged in female writers during the American antebellum period. 

    Edwards and his extended family were part of what has been called “the refinement of America,” in which eighteenth-century British colonists sought to emulate the latest English fashions and tastes.  The inventory of the Edwards’s household goods reveals mostly utilitarian devices, but the family’s relatively refined tastes show through in certain items. Edwards himself sported a beaver hat, a fine calamanco (Flanders wool woven with a satin twill) vest, silver knee buckles, spectacles and a cane. His wife wore rouge, and blue chintz dresses,  and owned a small, silver, engraved patchbox that contained not items for mending but rather round, felt beauty marks, resembling moles, which were adhered to the face.  Even in the wilds of Stockbridge, then, she retained the literal markings of high European culture. The family had a tea service and ate on china plates and cups, with damask tablecloths and napkins, and the walls were decorated with “looking glasses,” or mirrors, and “small pictures”--framed prints or possibly even watercolors painted by Sarah or her daughters—a version of provincially genteel, though unostentatious, living.

Edwards’s sense of status extended to issues surrounding race. Owning slaves was a symbol of social rank, and during his lifetime he owned a succession of African slaves. In fact, Edwards defended the institution of slavery as ordained by God in Scripture. However, he came to oppose the slave trade as an impediment to spreading the gospel in Africa, thereby providing a basis for the abolitionism espoused by his son Jonathan Jr. and disciples such as Samuel Hopkins. For Edwards, just as white society was ordered vertically, there were racial hierarchies as well. For much of his life, he adhered to the accepted wisdom of the time that Africans, Indians, and Jews were culturally inferior to white Christian Europeans.

Sarah, who as regulator of the domestic sphere was probably more directly concerned in the daily oversight of the family slaves than Jonathan, aggressively searched out potential slaves, which shows that women took as active a hand in the slave market as men. Writing in 1746 to a fellow minister acting as an intermediary, Jonathan wrote, "My wife desires that the person you procure. . . to be her maid, be one that is a good hand at spinning fine linen." In 1754 Sarah expressed (via her husband's letter) an interest in purchasing  Rev. Joseph Bellamy's "Negro woman," and again in 1757 she inquired about buying Harry, a slave that had belonged to her deceased son-in-law, Rev. Aaron Burr. Sarah died in Philadelphia from dysentery in October 1758, six months after her husband had succumbed to complications following a smallpox inoculation at Princeton. Her will, composed on her deathbed, made no provision for the manumission of the married slaves Joseph and Sue but rather divided her estate evenly among her children. In 1759 the couple was "sold, conveyed and in open market delivered" by Sarah's designated executors of her last will and testament, her son Timothy and son-in-law Timothy Dwight.

Regardless, later, and event quite recent, evangelical literature have romanticized Jonathan and Sarah’s life together in the interest of creating an idyll of Christian domesticity. Popular religious writers have used the “Apostrophe” and Edwards’s dying words to his wife to create a romantic, picture of the relationship between them, often picking up on his description of their marriage as an ““uncommon union.” The importance of his relationship to Sarah was, we have no reason to doubt, its spiritual nature. Nevertheless, romantics have occasionally used the little historical knowledge we have about Sarah Pierpont to create largely fictitious narratives of the Edwards’ domestic lives. Most notable in this vein is Elisabeth Dodds’ Marriage to a Difficult Man (1971), and her imitators. Some writers have even invented memoirs and letters by Sarah in the interest of creating an idyll of domestic bliss in the Edwards parsonage.

Within the evangelical religious cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these romanticized accounts had a definite didactic aim. They were written to set forth the Edwardses as a model for Christian marriage and family life. As such, these accounts may more accurately be said to reflect the authors’ assumptions than the actual lives of Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Pierpont.

Edwards and His Posterity

At the Jonathan Edwards Center, we frequently get inquiries about Edwards’ descendants. Much has been made of them—including a U.S. president and vice-president, and an English prime minister—and the high ranks they achieved in society over the generations as politicians, college presidents and professors, judges and lawyers, entrepreneurs, and so on. Certainly those of Edwards’ line who did achieve useful and prominent roles in society are to be noticed, but we must be careful of a too selective view of the exemplary virtuosity of the Edwards line. This approach goes back to the end of the nineteenth century, a time when immigration, industrialization, and modernization were perceived as threatening “traditional” national values and character. Basically, and sadly, this was thinly veiled racism and nativism. In response to the invasion of “foreigners”—not to mention the ongoing problem of the descendants of former slaves in their midst--white cultural elites called for the preservation of old “bloodlines” and Anglo-Saxon traits that could be traced back to the early settlers. This pool of “pure bloods” of the “first rank” were deemed of great importance for the republic against threats both internal and external. A pseudo-science, called eugenics, loosely based on Darwin’s theory of evolution, purported to identify superior human beings by their heredity and physical characteristics. Relatedly, genealogy—family history—became very popular at the turn of the nineteenth century, and several genealogies on the Edwards family were published. Among eugenicists, Edwards and his family were a favorite. Both because of his personal example and the stature of his many productive descendants, he was frequently referred to as a fountainhead of American virtue.

In 1900, A.E. Winship published a comparative study of two patriarchs and their posterity—Jonathan Edwards and “Max Jukes,” a lazy Dutch criminal and ne’er do well—to show the importance of heredity and education. The challenge for culturalists such as Winship, faced with “vast multitudes” coming from abroad bringing moral and physical disease, was “of making regenerates out of degenerates.” The claims of the social benefits of “pure blood” were the targets of criticism and satire even back then (the controversial and outspoken lawyer Clarence Darrow--who was defense attorney at the famous Scopes “Monkey” trial in Tennessee in 1925--would later write that he’d rather have had Max Jukes than Jonathan Edwards as a neighbor). In fact, the “Jukes” was an amalgam of a number of families, and eugenicists and genealogists alike ignored or glossed over the fact that Edwards’s grandmother was probably emotionally disturbed and members of her family were guilty of axe-murder and infanticide, that Edwards’s own son, Pierpont, was a libertine; and his grandson, Aaron Burr, a freethinker who killed Alexander Hamilton in an infamous duel. Social engineering, then, became one of the more unusual—and unexpected—ways that Edwards was appropriated as a cultural symbol.

    Below are excerpts from Winship’s work, Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and Heredity, illustrating the bias from which he approached his subjects:

. . . In view of what has been learned regarding Jonathan Edwards, his ancestors and his children, his grandchildren might have found some excuse for presuming upon the capacity and character which they inherited. In their veins was the blood of famous lines of noble men and women; the blood of Edwards, Stoddard, Pierpont, and Hooker was thrilling in their thought and intensifying their character. They had inherited capacity and character at their best, but they did not presume upon it. If ever inheritance would justify indifference to training, it was in the case of the grandchildren of Jonathan Edwards, but they were far from indifferent to their responsibility. . . .

The “Jukes” had no inherited capacity or training upon which they could safely presume. Their only chance lay in nursing every germ of hope by means of industry or education, through the discipline of the shop, the training of the schools, and the inspiration of the church. Did they appreciate it? Far from it. Instead of developing capacity by training, not one of the 1,200 secured even a moderate education, and only twenty of them ever had a trade, and ten of these learned it in the state prison.

On the other hand, although the Edwards family inherited abundant capacity and character, every child has been educated from early childhood. Not all of the college members of the family have been discovered, and yet among the men alone I have found 285 graduates and a surprisingly large number of these have supplemented the college course with post-graduate or professional study. Just as the “Jukes” have intensified their degeneracy by neglect, the Edwards family has magnified capacity and character by industry and education.

Among the 285 college graduates of the Edwards family there are thirteen presidents of college and other higher institutions of learning, sixty-five professors of colleges, and many principals of important academies and seminaries. Forty-five American and foreign colleges and universities have this family among the alumni. . . .

It has already been emphasized that the Jukes always mingled blood of their own quality in their descendants, and that the Edwards family has invariably chosen blood of the same general tone and force. Who can think for a moment that the Jukes would have remained on so low a level if the Edwards blood had been mixed with theirs, or that the Edwards would have retained their intellectual supremacy if they had married into the Jukes. The fact is that in 150 years the Jukes never did mingle first-class blood with their  own, and the Edwards family has not in 150 years degenerated through marriage.

It is pre-eminently true that a mighty intellectual and moral force does plough the channel of its thought and character through many generations. It would be well for any doubter to study the records of thoroughbreds in the animal world. The highest record ever made for milk and butter was by an animal of no family, and she was valuable only for what she could earn. None of her power went to her offspring. She was simply a high-toned freak, but an animal with a clean pedigree back to some great progenitor is valuable independently of individual earning qualities.

No more would any one claim that the Jukes would not have been immensely improved by education and environment, or that the Edwards family could have maintained its record without education, training, and environment. The facts show that the Jukes first, last, and all the time neglected these advantages, and that the Edwards family, with all its intermarrying, has never neglected them.

The Jukes were notorious law breakers, while the Edwards family has furnished practically no lawbreakers, and a great array of more than 100 lawyers, thirty judges, and the most eminent law professor probably in the country. . . .

When one studies the legal side of the [Edwards] family it seems as though they were instinctively and chiefly lawyers and judges. It simply means that whatever the Edwards family has done it has done ably and nobly.  . . .

Of the Jukes, 440 were more or less viciously diseased. The Edwards family was healthy and long lived. Of the eleven children of Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, four lived to be more seventy years of age . . . The record for health and longevity continues through every generation. They have also done much to alleviate the sufferings of mankind. There have been sixty physicians, all marked men . . .

The Jukes neglected all religious privileges, defied and antagonized the church and all that it stands for, while the Edwards family has more than a hundred clergymen, missionaries, and theological professors, many of the most eminent in the country’s history. . . .

Not one of the Jukes was ever elected to a public office, while more than eighty of the family of Jonathan Edwards have been especially honored. Legislatures in all sections of the country, governor’s councils, state treasuries, and other elective offices have been filled by these men. . . . They have represented the United States at several foreign court; several have been members of congress; three have been United States senators; and one vice-president of the United States.

The Jukes lacked the physical and moral courage, as well as the patriotic purpose, to enlist, but there were seventy-five officers in the army and navy from the family of Mr. Edwards. This family has been prominent as officers, chaplains, or surgeons, in the army and navy in the three great wars. . .

The Jukes were as far removed as possible from literature. They not only never created any, but they never read anything that could by any stretch of the imagination be styled good reading. In the Edwards family some sixty have attained prominence in authorship or editorial life. Richard Carvel, is by Mr. Winston Churchill,* a descendant of Mr. Edwards, and I have found 35 books of merit written by the family. Eighteen considerable journals and periodicals have been edited and several important ones founded by the Edwards family.

The Jukes did not wander far from the haunts of Max. They stagnated like the motionless pool, while the Edwards family is a prominent factor in the mercantile, industrial, and professional life of thirty-three states of the union and in several foreign countries, in ninety-two American and many foreign cities. They have been pre-eminently directors of men. . . .

Whatever the Jukes stand for, the Edwards family does not. Whatever weakness the Jukes represent finds its antidote in the Edwards family, which has cost the country nothing in pauperism, in crime, in hospital or asylum service. On the contrary, it represents the highest usefulness in invention, manufacture, commerce, founding of asylums and hospitals, establishing and developing missions, projecting and energizing the best philanthropies. . . .