The writing, life, and legacy of Esther Edwards Burr shows that colonial women were more powerful than we give them credit for. Through their daily (and often secret) labors and discoveries, they chipped away at patriarchal authority
March 16, 2022 11:58 AM EDT, Aaron Burr remembers his mother, the late Esther Edwards Burr, with intense, almost apotheotic fondness:Just a legacy to protect.”
In February 1732, Esther was born just as her father, the theologian Jonathan Edwards, was preparing to lead one of the greatest evangelical revivals of the. Growing up in Northampton, Mass., she witnessed thousands of “unconverted” souls flock to her father’s church, where he sermonized on the need for repentance and God’s power to “cast wicked men into hell.”
Raised by his erudite mother and four older sisters, Jonathan Edwards treated Esther very much as a pupil, as did her forward-thinking husband, Aaron Burr, Sr., whom she married in 1752 at the age of 20. Yet even so, Esther’s schooling only went so far., Edwards prioritized Esther’s education primarily as a means to save her soul, believing all children to be “heirs of hell” who must be “born again” through endless introspection and self-castigation. And while he and Burr, Sr.
Adding to the challenges posed by raising the young Aaron, whom Esther called “mischievous” and “sly,” was the sense that her home was a sort of “solitary” prison. Yet in important ways, this confinement was also freeing. Sequestered from the male gaze, Esther’s letters to Sarah allowed her to participate in an organic exchange about God, politics, literature, and war, thus liberating what she called her “other self” from the person she was conditioned to be.
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