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The Reverend Aaron Burr was an important figure in the intellectual and religious movements of the pre-Revolutionary era. Unfortunately, even to those who are at all aware of his existence, he is completely overshadowed by the fierce torrents of light—and of heat—that have beaten interminably upon his brilliant and enigmatical son. Only at Princeton, of which institution he was almost the sole begetter, do they still do him honor. Which is a pity, for he deserves better of posterity.

He was born January 4, 1715, within the limits of the present town of Fairfield, in the Colony of Connecticut. He duly attended the College of Yale at New Haven as all well-born young men of the Colony were accustomed to do. There he proved to be a studious, brilliant youth, small, well-formed, and quick of wit, even as his son after him. A graduate at the age of nineteen with honors in Latin and Greek, he won a scholarship that permitted two further years of graduate study at the College.^[3] But, he writes in 1736, suddenly “God saw fit to open my eyes and show me what a miserable creature I was.” Fortunately, however, “it pleased God at length to reveal his Son to me in the gospel as an all-sufficient Saviour, and I hope inclined me to receive him on the terms of the gospel.”^[4] Whereupon he promptly offered himself as a candidate for orders.

This was not a novel course for the young students of the time. The formalism into which the Protestant churches of England and America alike had set as in a mold had aroused much protest from the earnestly religious. The revolt came almost simultaneously in the Old and New Worlds. Jonathan Edwards, Burr’s future father-in-law, had started a hornet’s nest in Boston; John Wesley had performed the same service in England, and was even now, in this year of young Aaron’s conversion, proselytizing with great enthusiasm among the heathen Indians and the more heathen white folk of the Province of Georgia. George Whitefield was stirring the congregations of London in his master’s absence to a frenzy and was soon to depart for his torrential tour of America.

The yeast of discontent fermented rapidly. The early Protestantism, the Calvinism of old, had jellied into something suspiciously like the authoritarian hierarchies of the Catholic and Episcopalian Churches. Salvation and the approaches to God were locked gates, the keys of which were closely held by the official ministry, and woe betide any man who sought grace and salvation outside the official folds.

Now, this had not been Calvin’s doctrine, nor the doctrine of Luther and Hus. Narrow in their vision they might have been, cheerless and dour in their conceptions of a merciless and vindictive God who separated with harsh finality the elect from the damned, but never had they dreamed that their names would be used as a smoke-screen for the very things they detested and despised more than all else. What was their quarrel with the ancient Churches? That priest and deacon and bishop and pope had interposed themselves between man and his Maker. Protestantism was a personal religion, a meeting of man’s naked soul with God. No minister might intervene except to exhort and advise and direct.

The revival of pure religious emotion that swept the Colonies was an attempt to restore that early nakedness. It caught the Colleges, whose very inception and maintenance were for the greater glory of God and the generous nurture of new ministers to preach the Gospel. No wonder young Aaron, reared of pious parents, surrounded by religious influences, was converted. It was quite the fashion.

“My first sermon,” he wrote, “was preached at Greenfield, and immediately after I came into the Jerseys. I can hardly give any account why I came here. After I had preached for some time at Hanover, I had a call by the people of Newark; but there was scarce any probability that I should suit their circumstances, being young in standing and trials. I accepted of their invitation, with a reserve, that I did not come with any views of settling. My labours were universally acceptable among them, and they manifested such great regard and love for me, that I consented to accept of the charge of their souls.”^[5]

He had found his life-work. Regularly ordained in 1738, the Reverend Aaron Burr was to remain for almost a score of years as the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Newark.

His fame increased apace. The so-called Great Awakening was now in full swing—that remarkable religious revival of which we have just spoken. It swept the emotional depths that lay underneath the hard New England Puritan crust like fire through stubble grass. Jonathan Edwards was thundering in Massachusetts. Whitefield had finally come across the sea and was rousing vast concourses of people to frenzies of religious hysteria. Mr. Burr, intellectual and classicist though he was, was nevertheless sufficiently young and ardent to cast himself headlong into the stream.

Already he had been in communication with Jonathan Edwards. He made religious pilgrimages in 1739 and 1740 to drink at the spiritual fountainhead. And once again in the year 1740 to hear Whitefield preach. When the clamoring people crowded unyielding walls to suffocation, the great revivalist shifted the vast concourse of souls eager to be saved out into the reaches of Boston Common. As many as ten thousand hearkened to his fiery discourse in a single session. So great was the press that in one church there was panic, and some five were killed and many more seriously injured.

The Reverend Aaron Burr was deeply impressed. He laid the basis of a close friendship with the Englishman, and confided to his diary that he was becoming more and more pleased with the man.^[6] In any event, he returned to his pastoral flock filled with a new zeal for the Lord’s work. He preached to his rapt followers in his soft, mellifluous voice, his periods elegantly studied and composed, yet capable of arousing enthusiasm almost as extreme as the sterner quantities of Jonathan Edwards, or the vehement exaltations of George Whitefield.

Very early he became a leader in the Great Awakening. His sermons achieved publication and sold widely. He viewed with alarm the parlous and sinful state of the times, as all revivalists must; he glanced with awful trembling at the prospect of eventual popish domination; he saw Braddock’s disaster as a visitation of God upon them for their sins; and he animadverted on politics, on French Bourbonism, and on the defenseless condition of the Colonies.^[7]

Meanwhile he was gaining new laurels in a different field. Pious parents sent their sons to him to be taught English and the classical languages. His parsonage at the corner of Broad and William Streets in Newark was his schoolhouse. He proved to be the perfect pedagogue. The pupils loved him and imbibed from his lips a thirst for learning. The school grew and the circle of his teaching widened. He wrote a Latin Grammar that rapidly became standard and passed through numerous editions.

But there was something lacking. The Great Awakening had grown and burgeoned mightily under the zealous ministrations of Edwards, Burr and others. Yet there were still untapped wells of souls to be sought out and saved. Out in the hinterlands, on the frontiers, in Pennsylvania and the Southlands, were men and women and little children who perished because there were no preachers of the right persuasion to exhort and open their eyes.

So there were conferences. A training-school for the Presbyterian faith was urgently needed, a breeder of missionaries to the unenlightened. Nor—considering that the Reverend Aaron was himself a teacher of the humanities and a lover of fine books and finer thoughts—were the other adjuncts of learning to be disregarded.

Accordingly, in 1746, Aaron Burr, Jonathan Dickinson, John Pierson, Ebenezer Pemberton, and other gentlemen, both lay and of the cloth, petitioned Jonathan Belcher, Governor of the Province of New Jersey, for “the Establishment of a publick Seminary of Literature in New-Jersey.”^[8]

The good Governor was an enthusiastic devotee and friend of Mr. Burr, and sympathetic with the general aims of the petitioning gentlemen. The charter was granted, and Jonathan Dickinson became the first President of the infant College of New-Jersey.^[9]

The College was first established in May, 1747, at Elizabethtown under very modest auspices. President Dickinson’s tenure of office, however, was pathetically short, for he died in August of the same year. The eight students who comprised the institution were thereupon removed to Newark and installed under the ministering wing of the Reverend Aaron Burr. In September, 1748, a new charter was applied for and granted, and Aaron Burr was unanimously chosen the second President of the College of New-Jersey.

Whereupon the College prospered and waxed mightily. President Burr threw himself into his duties with gusto and alacrity. One suspects that they were more congenial to his sensitive soul than even the pursuit of the Great Awakening. “Under his immediate Tuition and Government,” exulted the Trustees, “this Society has flourished far beyond the most raised and sanguine Expectations. The Number of Students has increased, in the short Space of five Years, from Eight or Ten, to about Sixty; besides near Forty in the Grammar-School.”^[10]

It was not all smooth sailing, however. The College, perforce, for want of accommodations, was conducted at the parsonage, along with President Burr’s other multifarious duties. He still was Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Newark; he still was an active agent in the religious ferment of the times. And the management of the two-story, double stone building with its wing kitchens, barn, yard piled high with winter logs, garden and adjoining pasturage, as well as the temporal care of the attendant pupils, was soon to become a difficult task for a ripely mature bachelor. There was only one solution—marriage!

The Reverend Aaron Burr was thirty-seven. He was a famous preacher, the President of a College, his personality winning and his culture deep. It is a wonder that he had managed to evade matrimony thus long. He cast speculative eyes around, and decided rather suddenly on Esther Edwards, daughter of Jonathan Edwards, his old friend and co-worker in the tillings of the Lord. They were married on June 29, 1752, in Newark. She was only twenty-one and one of eleven children. The Reverend Jonathan Edwards had likewise heeded and obeyed the Biblical injunction.

The circumstances of this hasty courtship and marriage were rather curious. They excited a great deal of comment and some good-natured jesting at the time. The New York Gazette referred to it as a marriage “in the patriarchal mode” and wittily advised the pupils to follow the teacher in this as in all other matters.^[11]

A young student of the College described the whole affair for the benefit of his parents in language that deserves quotation. “In the latter end of May,” he wrote, “he [Burr] took a journey into N England, and during his absence he made a visit of but three days to the Rev. Mr. Edward’s daughter, at Stockbridge, in which short time, tho’ he had no acquaintance with nor, indeed, even seen the lady these six years, I suppose he accomplished his whole design; for it was not above a fortnight after his return here before he sent a young fellow ... into N Engld. to conduct her and her mother down here.

“They came to town on Saturday evening, the 27th ulto., and on the Monday evening followg. the nuptial ceremonies were celebrated.... I think her a person of great beauty, tho’ I must say that, in my opinion, she is rather too young (being 21 years of age) for the President.”^[12]

Yet this same observant young critic was obliged to confess shortly after that “I can’t omit acquainting you that our President enjoys all the happiness the married state can afford.... From the little acquaintance I have with his lady, I think her a woman of very good sense, of a genteel and virtuous education, amiable in her person, of great affability and agreeableness in conversation, and a very excellent Oeconomist.”^[13]

He was not mistaken in his judgment. For the remainder of their lamentably short lives they were to be happy and utterly content with each other, despite the disparity of their years.

With the appearance of Esther Edwards the lines of greatness converged. To the sturdy heredity of the Burrs was added now the taint of genius that the Edwards possessed, not to mention the alleged ducal nobility of the Pierponts.