Stephen Williams' diary, July 8, 1741, unless otherwise noted.
Notes to Pages 214–20 ∑∂Ω
chapter 13. The Hands of God and the Hand of Christ
1. Edwards to George Whitefield, December 14, 1740, Works, 16: 87. Edwards to Benjamin Colman, March 9, 1741, ibid., 88. Ebenezer Parkman, The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1703–1782 (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1974), December 1740, p. 87, refers to the heavy snows. 2. Edwards to Sarah Edwards, June 25, 1741, Works, 16: 95–96. 3. Kevin Sweeney, ''River Gods and Related Minor Deities: The Williams Family and the Connecticut River Valley, 1637–1790'' (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1986), 173.
4. Ibid., 269. 5. Thomas Prince, account of the awakening in Boston as quoted in Joseph Tracy, The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield, repr. of 1841 ed. (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 115–16.
6. Edwin Scott Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 33–34.
7. Prince's account as quoted in Tracy, Great Awakening, 117–20 8. Edwards to Eleazar Wheelock, June 9, 1741, Works, 16: 90. 9. Kenneth Minkema, ''The Edwardses: A Ministerial Family in EighteenthCentury New England'' (Ph.D. diss., University of Connecticut, 1988), 126–36. See chapter 16, below, for more detail.
10. Edwards to Eleazar Wheelock, June 9, 1741, Works, 16: 89–90. 11. Edwards to Thomas Prince, December 12, 1743, Works, 16: 117–18. 12. Jonathan Parsons, account dated April 14, 1744, regarding Lyme, Connecticut, as quoted from Christian History 2: 136, in Tracy, Great Awakening, 138.
13. Tracy, Great Awakening, 120–212, gives quotations from mostly contemporary sources, especially Prince's Christian History, and provides accounts of such phenomena in many places. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 200, lists a dozen native ''young itinerants,'' and there were doubtless many more, including Parsons and Edwards. The term ''great awakening,'' by which the larger set of events of the era eventually came to be known, was not the standard designation at the time, though contemporaries certainly would have recognized its meaning.
14. Edwards to Deacon Moses Lyman, August 31, 1741, Works, 16: 97. 15. Stephen Williams, diary, September 3, 1740, July 20, 1741 (typescript), Storrs Memorial Library, Longmeadow, Mass. Cf. John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Knopf, 1994), 193–201, for detailed account. Edwards' sermon was on Psalm 119:56, September 1740. Its theme was that people are often blessed for doing their duty, even when the immediate cost is great. On Joseph Meacham, see Sibley's Harvard Graduates, 5: 533–36.
16. This and the following account of the events surrounding the sermon is from Stephen Williams' diary, July 8, 1741, unless otherwise noted.
17. Eleazar Wheelock's account comes from much later and is in Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1818), 2: 145. Trumbull's note says, ''Mr. Wheelock went from Connecticut, who gave me information of the whole a√air.''
18. Hopkins, Life, 47–48.