because of the great financial reverses that came to the father in their
youth, but every one of them was closely identified with educational
institutions and all were rated as scholarly men and women.




CHAPTER XI

THE MARY EDWARDS DWIGHT FAMILY


After studying at some length the family of the eldest son of Jonathan
Edwards, it is worth while to study the family of one of the daughters.
Mary, the fourth child born at Northampton (1734), was married at the
age of 16 to Timothy Dwight, born in Vermont (1726) and graduated from
Yale in 1744.

It is interesting to find a daughter of Jonathan Edwards marrying a Yale
graduate, who "had such extreme sensibility to the beauty and sweetness
of always doing right, and such a love of peace, and regarded the legal
profession as so full of temptations to do wrong, in great degree and
small" that he persistently refused to study law, though it had been his
father's great desire. The conscientiousness of Major Dwight is well
illustrated by this incident. There was a lottery in the interest of
Princeton college, authorized by the legislature of New Jersey, and
Dwight was sent twenty tickets for sale. He returned them, but the time
required for the mail in those days was so long that they did not reach
the destination until after the drawing. Major Dwight was notified that
one of his twenty tickets had drawn $20,000 and all but one ticket had