Breaking and Withering of the Strong Rods of a Community, June 26, 1748 (Boston, 1748),
Notes to Pages 339–45 ∑π∞
ently) of a letter from Jonathan Belcher to Jonathan Edwards, February 5, 1748, in reply to a lost letter of Jonathan Edwards to Jonathan Belcher, ''desiring his leave to dedicate the book to him,'' which Edwards asked John Brainerd to deliver, December 14, 1747, Works, 16: 241–42. Belcher says ''You are sensible, my good friend, that governors stand in a glaring light.''
55. Ola Winslow, Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 218, citing Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, ed. Franklin B. Dexter (New Haven, 1916), 246.
56. Edwards to John Erskine, October 14, 1748, quoting Jonathan Belcher to Jonathan Edwards, May 31, 1748, Works, 16: 262–63.
chapter 21. ''I Am Born to Be a Man of Strife''
1. Sarah Edwards Jr. to Elihu Spencer, n.d., George Claghorn transcription, from pages from MS sermon notes on Job 36: 26–27 and Hosea 3: 1–3, Beinecke. The date is in the winter 1747–48, shortly before the death of Jerusha on February 14, 1748. As Jerusha was very ill for five days previous, the letter was likely written February 10. It is late winter (the ''forepart'' of the winter is past and her youngest sister [Elizabeth] has been dangerously sick ''all winter''). This draft is the only known copy, and we do not know if the letter was sent. Sarah Jr. married Elihu Parsons in 1750.
2. Thomas Je√erson Wertenbaker, Princeton: 1746–1896 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 29, quoting a student of the College of New Jersey in 1752.
3. ''Joseph Emerson's Diary, 1748–1749,'' Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 44 (1911): 267–80, entries from September 17, 1748, to March 11, 1749. A further index of the activity of the Edwards household: while Emerson was there for four days, November 9–14, 1748, he went to hear ''Mr. Searle'' preach at a house on Wednesday evening and heard Joshua Eaton of Leicester, preach the a.m. Sunday sermon, Emerson himself preaching in the evening.
4. James R. Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, from Its Settlement in 1654, 2 vols. (Northampton, Mass., 1898, 1902), 2: 196–97. 5. Sibley's Harvard Graduates, 5: 113–18. Cf. Trumbull, History of Northampton, 2: 165– 77. 6. This was the occasion when Jonathan wrote, ''we have been without you almost as long as we know how to be.'' Edwards to Sarah Edwards, June 22, 1748, Works, 16: 247.
7. Stoddard eulogy quotations here and below are from God's Awful Judgment in Breaking and Withering of the Strong Rods of a Community, June 26, 1748 (Boston, 1748), from Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Hickman, 2: 37–40.
8. Kevin Sweeney, ''River Gods and Minor Related Deities: The Williams Family and the Connecticut River Valley, 1637–1790'' (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1986), 393–401. Stoddard, despite his own apparent integrity, also seems to have protected his family members, ibid., 399. The businesses of Elisha Williams, the former rector and now a merchant and politician, also profited after he became commander-in-chief of the Connecticut forces. Elisha, though ambitious and dispensing patronage, remained pious and presumably honest. Going to England in 1749, he married into the Whitefield circle. Ibid., 385–92. 9. Trumbull, History of Northampton, 2: 101.