Solomon Stoddard

Who was Solomon Stoddard?

Solomon Stoddard was the pastor of the Congregationalist Church in Northampton, MA. He succeeded the Rev. Eleazer Mather, marrying his widow around 1670. Stoddard significantly liberalized church policy while promoting more power for the clergy, decrying drinking and extravagance, and urging the preaching of hellfire and the Judgment. The major religious leader of what was then the frontier, he was concerned with the lives of second-generation Puritans. The well-known theologian Jonathan Edwards was his grandson, because Solomon's daughter Esther Stoddard was Jonathan's mother.