A wonderful Great Awakening irreplaceable 43pp unpublished primary resource from the genetic moments of the American Great Awakening with connections to Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Joseph Sewall, the Diptheria Outbreak of 1736-1739, etc.,
Perhaps most importantly, it contains what is one of the very earliest manuscript records of an inter-racial prayer meeting in America with black Americans, noting they go to pray for revival with "some negroes." Prayer meetings with Native Americans have a much more robust history via the missionary societies ranging from John Eliot to David Brainerd, etc.
The 1739-1740 48pp diary of Rev. Joseph Emerson [1721-1775]. This incredibly evocative document details the interior spiritual life of a young pastor caught up in the earliest phases of the Great Awakening. He discusses his interior life and drops important names like he knew we would be reading it hundreds of years later.
He goes to hear Whitefield preach in Boston and discusses the immense crowds, recalls the preaching of Joseph Sewall, Aaron Burr, Jonathan Mayhew, etc., it's a catalogue of important protagonists of the Great Awakening. He discusses the work of the Spirit, the plague of distemper [diptheria], cries of "War, War" in Boston against the Spaniards; presumably King George's War which began the same year, etc.
Importantly, young Emerson was friends with Jonathan Edwards, who was much his senior, and actually courted one of Edwards’ daughters, Esther [1748]. Earlier in the same year Edwards and Emerson preached together at East Windsor. Of course David Brainerd courted another of Edwards’ daughters, etc. and our Joseph is listed as a subscriber to the Life of David Brainerd, Original Sin, and Freedom of the Will by Edwards in the first editions.
Emerson recorded later, in another portion of his diary, now housed at the Library of Congress, of the Edwards’ home, that he was “. . . very courteously treated here. The most agreeable family I was ever acquainted with. Much of the presence of God here.”
Emerson himself was also an important preacher during the run up to the American Revolution. He recounted the acts of God by including in his description of the repeal of the Stamp Act that “the friends of liberty exerted themselves with fixed resolutions not to give up these things . . . under the influence of the God who made them free.” To this day, his "Stamp Act" sermon is considered one of the most important of the pre-Revolutionary period.
Emerson’s later, already-mentioned 1748-1749 diary, is the possession of the Library of Congress [https://www.loc.gov/item/11003365/] and has often been resourced in historical works of the time. The presently offered earlier diary was previously unknown, unresearched, and is an important Great Awakening, Colonial Massachusetts manuscript.
It is also interestingly noted in Emerson's hand that the diary was prepared before the Convention of 1741. Perhaps as a way of adding to the year's controversy, i.e. the ministry of Whitefield and the Revival in general. It was at this Minister’s Convention of 1741 where Edward Holyoke, as the Grand Old Man [then President of Harvard] would formally approve the preaching of Whitefield and the work of the Great Awakening.