Chapter Chapter 2 of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

The Sot Weed Factor.

One other book dealing with a picturesque aspect of southern life at this time is worthy of notice; it was one entitled The Sot Weed Factor; or, a Voyage to Maryland, published at London in 1708. The name of its author, Ebenezer Cook, appears on the title-page, but of him we know nothing; he may have been an American, he may have been merely an English visitor to our shores; however, his work is a lively contribution to the literature of the period and presents in rough and ready rhyme a coarse but realistic satire of the writer's adventures among the tobacco agents -- the "sot-weed factors" of Maryland. He asserts his purpose to describe "the laws, governments, courts, and constitutions of the country, and also the buildings, feasts, frolics, entertainments, and drunken humors of the inhabitants." His style may be inferred from these opening lines:--

"Condemned by fate to wayward curse
Of friends unkind and empty purse,--
Plagues worse than filled Pandora's box,--
I took my leave of Albion's rocks;
With heavy heart concerned, that I
Was forced my native soil to fly,
And the old world must bid good-bye.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Freighted with fools, from Plymouth sound
To Maryland our ship was bound."

Jonathan Edwards, 1703-58.

Returning to New England, we find once more the intellectual leader of his age among the ministers. Jonathan Edwards was not only a great scholar and one of the most noted theologians of the century in which he lived, but one of the most brilliant logicians that our country has ever produced; and in the literature of philosophical study, he is still a commanding figure. Edwards was born in Connecticut, and was graduated from Yale College¹ at seventeen. After a brief connection with that institution as a tutor, he became pastor of the church in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he remained until 1750, when he resigned his charge and engaged in missionary work among the Indians in the western part of the colony. In 1758, he was called to the presidency of Princeton College,¹ and died within a few weeks after his installation.

In the records of Edwards's precocious childhood, in the breadth of his interests and in the scope and energy of his scholastic labors there is much that recalls the phenomenal career of Cotton Mather, but there was no real resemblance in the men; Mather was ponderous, Edwards was profound.

A Scientific Student.

When a boy of twelve, Jonathan Edwards was an acute observer of nature and wrote for a naturalist in England an account of his observations on spiders. This interest in natural science he maintained in mature years. He advanced a theory of atoms, he demonstrated that the fixed stars are suns, he made interesting studies on the growth of trees and on the formation of river channels, he studied the principles of sound, the cause of colors, and the tendencies of winds, and anticipated Franklin's discovery of the nature of the lightning.

Theologian.

Edwards's sermons have acquired a fame, not altogether desirable, perhaps, but almost unique in the recognition of their power. His most noted sermon, preached at Enfield, Massachusetts, in 1741, on the theme Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, was so terrifying in its immediate effect that the people bowed in agony and the noise of their weeping and their cries obliged him to call for silence that he might be heard. Edwards became recognized as a defender of Calvinism at a time when strong opposition was developing against it. He was one of the conspicuous leaders in the great revival movement in the forties, known as the Great Awakening -- the religious movement in which the famous English preacher, George Whitfield, was a prominent figure.