''Jonathan Dickinson,'' in American National Biography, ed. John Garraty and Mark
Notes to Pages 329–33 ∑∏Ω
have had su≈cient reason to seek out the renowned Edwards, who had befriended him in New Haven four years earlier.
Pettit suggests that Jerusha had contracted Brainerd's disease. However, the suddenness of her demise and the number of other Northampton deaths at that time make this unlikely. That they were buried side by side may have had significance, but there is no way to be sure.
24. Summer 1747 letter quoted in Dwight, Life, 250. The original is apparently lost and so does not appear in the collected letters. Edwards to John Erskine, August 31, 1748, Works, 16: 249.
25. This account is drawn from Pettit, ''Introduction,'' Works, 7: 54–56; Mark Noll, ''Jonathan Dickinson,'' in American National Biography, ed. John Garraty and Mark Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), vol. 6, 571–72; Leonard J. Trinterud, The Forming of an American Tradition: A Re-examination of Colonial Presbyterianism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949), 53–134; and Thomas Je√erson Wertenbaker, Princeton: 1746–1896 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 1–26. 26. The Burr quotation, in Pettit, ''Introduction,'' Works, 7: 56, is from Archibald Alexander, Biographical Sketches of the Founder and Principal Alumni of the Log College (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1851), 77–78. The quotation, which is based on the memory of a woman who said she heard the remark in her father's house when she was a girl, is at least an accurate representation of Princeton lore and is in substance plausible.
27. Edwards to John Brainerd, December 14, 1747, Works, 16: 242. 28. Life of David Brainerd, Works, 7: 153–55; 219–20. 29. Ibid., 102, 149. (Works, 7, prints the original and Edwards' versions in parallel columns.) I am indebted to Pettit, ''Introduction,'' Works, 7: 80–83, for his analysis of these and other passages. Edwards, for instance, leaves out a Bunyanesque vision (''Methought I saw a stately house . . . [etc.]''), which Brainerd uses as an extended metaphor for the worthlessness of his preconversion e√orts, perhaps, as Pettit suggests (p. 81), because he did not want to appear to condone what might be taken to be an actual vision.
30. Life of David Brainerd, Works, 7: 507. Cf. Religious A√ections, Works, 2: 344–45. On the omission of the July 1743 incident, see Pettit, ''Introduction,'' Life of David Brainerd, Works, 7: 45, though the attribution of Edwards' motive is mine.
31. Charles Hambrick-Stowe, ''The Spirit of the Old Writers: The Great Awakening and the Persistence of Puritan Piety,'' in Francis Bremer, ed., Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 277–91.
32. Life of David Brainerd, Works, 7: 299, 91–93. Edwards' recognition of melancholy as a ''disease'' that could be mistaken for ''desertion by God'' doubtless would have applied to his reflections back on his own early diary.
33. Ibid., 400–401. This passage runs counter to any suggestion that Brainerd had a romantic interest in Jerusha when he left for Northampton later that year.
34. Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 62–86. On the contrasting ideals of Edwards and Franklin, see Barbara B. Oberg and Harry S. Stout, eds., Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. Daniel Walker Howe, ''Franklin, Edwards, and the