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.