An Influential Life

An Influential Life

The impact of a life matters more than its length.

AARON BURR SR. was born in Connecticut and graduated from Yale in 1735, first in his class. He then became pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Newark, New Jersey.

When a student named David Brainerd was expelled from Yale in connection with his involvement in the Great Awakening, Aaron Burr and Jonathan Dickinson, pastor of the Presbyterian church in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, took an active interest in his case. The two pastors were particularly upset when their alma mater refused to readmit Brainerd after he apologized for offhand comments that had led to his expulsion. Yale’s action confirmed the conviction of the Presbyterian synods of New Jersey and New York that they should found their own college to prepare men for the ministry.

The College of New Jersey, which was to become Princeton University, received its charter from the governor of the state in 1746. Of the organizing seven trustees, all but one were graduates of Yale. Aaron Burr was the youngest. Four of the next five were graduates of the Log College.

The college began in May 1747 in Jonathan Dickinson’s home in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, with David Brainerd, the student initially expelled, as its first official student. The original students studied in Dickinson’s library, had their classes in the parlor, and ate their meals in the dining room with the family. When Dickinson died, they accompanied the family to the funeral and burial.

Aaron Burr was persuaded to take charge of the college at that point, so the students packed up, bid farewell to the grieving Dickinson family, and moved six miles to Newark. They boarded in the town and held their classes at the Burr parsonage. Burr did all the teaching with the assistance of one tutor. A year later Aaron Burr was formally elected the college’s second president, just thirteen years after his own graduation from college.

When Burr became president, he was still a bachelor. Some years earlier he had met fifteen-year-old Esther Edwards, a daughter of pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards. Unable to forget about fair Esther, Burr made a three-day courting visit to the Edwards’s home. Esther accepted his declaration of love, and they were married at Burr’s church in Newark. Burr was thirty-six and Esther twenty-one.

Burr filled the offices of both college president and pastor until 1755 when he resigned his pastorate to devote all his time to the college. He supervised the erection of the college’s first building in Princeton, New Jersey. The trustees wanted to name it Belcher Hall in honor of Governor Belcher, but Burr insisted that it be named Nassau Hall in memory of King William III of the House of Nassau, whose monarchy restored Protestantism to England. In 1756 Burr, the seventy students, and two tutors moved into glorious Nassau Hall, the largest stone building in the colonies.

The following year Governor Belcher died, and though ill, Burr traveled to Elizabethtown to deliver the funeral sermon. Returning to Princeton, Aaron Burr died on September 24, 1757, at the age of only forty-one.

The grieving Esther wrote to her mother, “I think I have been enabled to cast my care upon him and have found great peace and calmness in my mind, such as this world cannot give or take. . . . Give me leave to entreat you both, to request earnestly of the Lord, that I may never despise his chastenings, nor faint under this, his severe stroke.”

Five days later her father, Jonathan Edwards, was chosen to follow his son-in-law as the college’s next president.

Reflection

Even though the life of Aaron Burr Sr. was short, he accomplished much. We don’t know how long we will live, but God has a purpose for each of us, and with his help we can accomplish it, regardless of the length of our lives.

All of us must quickly carry out the tasks assigned us by the one who sent me, because there is little time left before the night falls and all work comes to an end.

John 9:4