Biography
Sarah Pierpont was born on January 9, 1710, in New Haven, Connecticut, the daughter of the Reverend James Pierpont, the pastor of the First Church of New Haven and one of the founders of Yale College. Her mother, Mary Hooker, was a granddaughter of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford. She grew up in a home of learning and piety, among the best families of New England. She was a bright and observant child, and she was known for her love of nature and her serious devotion. By the age of thirteen, she was remarkable for her spiritual sensitivity. She was a young woman who loved to be alone in the fields and the woods, to pray.
In 1723, Jonathan Edwards, then a young tutor at Yale, was struck by her. He wrote a short paragraph about her, which has often been quoted. He wrote that there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that Great Being who made and rules the world, and that she is of such a wonderful sweetness, calmness and universal benevolence of mind, especially after this Great God has manifested Himself to her mind, that she will sometimes be found walking in the fields, as if she held communion with some invisible being. He was not yet twenty, and she was thirteen. They were married four years later, on July 28, 1727. She was seventeen.
They made their home in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Jonathan had gone to serve as the assistant to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, the pastor of the church. They had eleven children, three sons and eight daughters. Sarah ran the household with great skill. She was an able manager, an excellent mother and a gracious hostess. She gave her husband the freedom to spend thirteen hours a day in his study. She took care of the farm and the accounts, the meals and the guests. The house was always full of visitors, among them ministers, travelers and, later, converts. Their children were well taught and well mannered. A visitor said that he never saw a family so well ordered. She also was a woman of independent mind and of deep faith.
Her spiritual life was an inspiration to her husband. During the revival that swept New England in the early 1740s, which is known as the Great Awakening, she went through a profound experience. In January 1742, after a period of anxiety and a sense of her own spiritual coldness, she was overwhelmed with the sense of the love of God. For about a fortnight, she was in a state of joy and, at times, she was overcome so that her body failed. She was filled with praise and a desire to see others converted. She spoke to those around her with a new power. Jonathan, who was careful in the matter of religious experience, was moved by her. He wrote an account of her experience, without naming her, in his work, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England, to show what a true work of the Spirit looks like. He held her up as a pattern of humility, of love and of a changed life.
She had her share of trials. In 1750, her husband was dismissed from the church at Northampton, after a dispute over the qualifications for communion. The family was left without income. They moved to Stockbridge, on the frontier, where he served as a missionary to the Mohican Indians. She endured the hardship of poverty and the fear of attack during the French and Indian War. She took in a number of orphans and took a part in the school for the Indian children. She also bore the loss of her daughter, Jerusha, who died in 1748, at the age of seventeen, of a fever that she caught while nursing David Brainerd, the young missionary, who had come to die in their home.
In 1758, her husband was called to be the president of the College of New Jersey, at Princeton. He went ahead of the family. He was inoculated against smallpox and died of the disease on March 22, 1758. Sarah received the news in Stockbridge. She wrote a letter to her daughter, Esther, who had been left a widow when her husband, Aaron Burr Sr., the college's earlier president, had died a few months before. In it, she wrote that the Lord had made her willing to submit and that she had nothing to say, but that it was good. She set out to see her daughter, in Philadelphia, to care for her and her grandchildren. On the way, she caught dysentery. She died on October 2, 1758, at the age of forty-eight, five months after her husband. She was buried beside him in Princeton.
Her descendants were numerous, and many of them became distinguished. They included college presidents, ministers, judges, senators and a vice president. Her life shows the effect of a woman who held the household together, and whose faith was a source of strength to her husband. Without her, the work of Jonathan Edwards would hardly have been possible.