BURR, Esther Edwards

Born 1732, Northampton, Massachusetts; died April 1758, Princeton, New Jersey

Daughter of Jonathan and Sarah Pierrepont Edwards; married Aaron Burr, 1752

Esther Edwards Burr was the third of 11 children of Sarah Pierrepont and the prominent minister, Jonathan Edwards. At the age of twenty she married Aaron Burr, pastor of the Presbyterian church at Newark, New Jersey, and later a founder and second president of Princeton College. At twenty-six years of age, Burr, having been widowed a year, died from the results of an innoculation against the small pox.

In 1754 Burr began a journal of her daily life and exchanged it periodically with one kept by her friend, Sarah Prince, of Boston. Burr's journal is valuable for the views it gives of the Puritan woman's life in the mid-18th century and for the insights into how Puritan values and habits of mind helped a woman to understand and evaluate the world in which she lived.

The dominant themes of the journal are the loneliness and hardship of everyday existence which are only made endurable by the knowledge of God's providential guidance of human affairs. For example, when her second child was born, Burr was entirely alone, but her faith in God helped her to meet the ordeal: "I felt very gloomy when I found I was actually in labour to think that I was, as it were, destitute of earthly friends—no mother, no husband, and none of my particular friends that belong to the town… only my dear God was all of these relations to me." On another occasion she was visiting her father in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the community was expecting an Indian attack. She had a momentary crisis of faith: "I want to be made willing to die in any way God pleases, but I am not willing to be butchered by a barbarous enemy nor can't make myself willing." Ultimately she trusted in Providence and prayed for survival: the Indians never attacked.

In the Puritan manner the journal records events large and small—for God's will was manifest in every activity of life. Thus the journal tells of visitations to the sick, attendance at sermons, entertainment of the governor's wife with "cakes" on militia day, the depradations of the French and the Indians, the political maneuverings of the Newark community, the circumstances of the religious revival of the mid-1750s, and the problems of moving to Princeton and of establishing the college—all given with frank, moral assessments of what Burr thinks of the behavior of her contemporaries. Her commentary on the protestations of the local government as it prepared to meet the threatened advance of the French and the Indians is typical:

I am perplexed about our publick affairs, the Men say (tho not Mr. Burr, he is not of that sort) that women have no business to concern themselves about 'em but to trust to those that know better and be content to be destroyed—because they did all for the best—Indeed, if I was convinced that our great men did as they really thought was for the Glory of God and the good of the country, it would go a great ways to make me easy.

As a result of this personal evaluation of the events and interests of her time, Burr's journal has a warm, emotional quality which makes the incidents of the past come alive. She is frank and explicit, never falsely sentimental or literary. Like the preachers she heard regularly, Burr kept to the plain style, proudly asserting that the "busy housewife" had no time to be "literary." The journal is, then, a sensitive, lively account of God's way with the Puritan woman. It is a moving story of a woman's growth to maturity within the Puritan tradition of provincial America.

Other Works:

Esther Burr's Journal (1754-1757). A Document of Evangelical Sisterhood (edited by L. Crumpacker and C. Karlsen, in preparation). Esther Burr's Journal (edited by J. Rankin, 1902), an untrustworthy edition containing many pages that appear to be fabrications.

The papers of Esther Edwards Burr are at Yale University, Andover-Newton Theological School (Newton, Massachusetts), and Princeton College.

Bibliography:

Axtell, J., A School Upon a Hill (1974). Cott, N., The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman's Sphere in New England, 1780-1835 (1977). Fisher, J., "The Journal of Esther Burr," in NEQ 3 (1930).

—MAUREEN GOLDMAN