Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and Heredity

by Albert E. Winship

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.