In Yale alone have been more than 120 graduates. Among these are nearly twenty Dwights, nearly as many Edwards, seven Woolseys, eight Porters, five Johnsons, four Ingersolls, and several of most of the following names: Chapin, Winthrop, Shoemaker, Hoadley, Lewis, Mathers, Reeve, Rowland, Carmalt, Devereaux, Weston, Heermance, Whitney, Blake, Collier, Scarborough, Yardley, Gilman, Raymond, Wood, Morgan, Bacon, Ward, Foote, Cornelius, Shepards, Bristed, Wickerham, Doubleday, Van Volkenberg, Robbins, Tyler, Miller, Lyman, Pierpont, and Churchill, the author of "Richard Carvel," is a recent graduate. In Amherst at one time there were of this family President Gates and Professors Mather, Tyler, and Todd. Wherever found they are leaders even in college faculties. Those who know what Gates, Mather, Tyler, and Todd have stood for as president and professors of Amherst will appreciate what Jonathan Edwards' blood has done for this college.
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 than seventy years of age,—seventy-three, seventy-five, seventy-seven and seventy-nine,—and three others were fifty, fifty-six, and sixty-three. Only one died unmarried, none died in childhood. 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. Dr. Richard Smith Dewey was an eminent surgeon in the Franco-Prussian war, having charge of the Prussian hospital at Hesse Cassel. Dr. Sereno Edwards Dwight was a physician and surgeon in the British regular army. The physicians of the family have had important connection with insane asylums and hospitals. The legislative action of New York, by which the first insane asylum of the state was built, was largely the result of a physician of this family. The medical superintendent of the Illinois state insane asylum was another of the family. Eminent names in the medical annals of San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston, and other cities can be traced to Jonathan Edwards.
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 100 clergymen, missionaries, and theological professors, many of the most eminent in the country's history. America has had no more brilliant preachers and theologians than some of those that bear the names of Edwards, Dwight, Woolsey, Park, Ingersoll. There have been no more noted missionaries than this family has sent for faithful and successful work in Asia Minor, India, Africa, China, Hawaii, and the South Sea islands. Dwight's famous five volumes on theology are a product of a worthy descendant of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards A. Park, the longtime head of Andover theological seminary, whose vigor of thought, keenness of logic, and pulpit power are unsurpassed, was a descendant of Mr. Edwards. The family has furnished several army chaplains and one eminent chaplain of the United States senate. They have made many churches prominent for the vigor of their pulpit utterances. The famous Second church, Portland, Park street church of Boston, and many in New Haven and other Connecticut cities and towns as well as many churches in the Middle and Western States owe much to the descendants of Mr. Edwards.
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 been mayors of New Haven, Cleveland, and Troy; governors of Connecticut, Ohio, and South Carolina; they have been prominent in the Continental congress, in the constitutional conventions of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. They have represented the United States at several foreign courts; 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. In the Civil war they were at Shiloh, New Orleans, and with the Red river expedition, at Fort Fisher and Newbern, at Big Bethel, Antietam, and Gettysburg, on Lookout mountain with Hooker, with Sheridan in the Shenandoah, and were on the march to the sea with Sherman.
One spinster of the family residing in Detroit expressed much regret that she had no husband. The reason she gave, however, was highly complimentary to the sterner sex,—because she had no husband to send to the Civil war. Having none, she paid the regulation bounty and had a man in the service of her country for three years in lieu of the husband she would have sent if she had had one.
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 135 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. The Pacific steamship line and fifteen American railway systems have had as president, superintendent, or otherwise active in the management one of this family. Many large banks, banking houses, and insurance companies have been directed by them. They have been owners or superintendents of large coal mines in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, of large iron plants and vast oil interests in Pennsylvania, and of silver mines in Nevada. There is scarcely any great American industry that has not had one of this family among its chief promoters. Eli Whitney of cotton-gin fame married a granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards.
Prison reform has found its leading advocates in this family. Wilberforce's best American friend was of this fold, and Garibaldi valued one of the family above all other American supporters.
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.