Brainerd, John

Brainerd, John brother of David, was born in Haddam, Conn., Feb. 28, 1720, and, like his brother, was brought up in a strictly religious household, and was educated at Yale College. David, before his death, requested John to take his place in New Jersey as missionary to the Indians. Accordingly, he was licensed in 1748 as a preacher by the Presbytery of New York, and entered the missionary service (under the Scottish Society) in New Jersey, in which labor he spent eight years. During this period he was pressed by pecuniary trouble, his salary being too small to provide even the necessaries of life. In 1752 he married. An attempt to transfer his Indian flock to Wyoming, on the Susquehanna, failed. In 1754 he was elected a trustee of Princeton College, and the year after the Scotch Society dismissed him, because the Indians, having parted with their lands, would soon be obliged to move. Soon after he received a call to succeed president Burr in the church at Newark, accepted it, again engaged with the Scotch Society for the Indians, was dismissed a second time, in September, 1757, and then finally resolved to accept the call of the congregation at Newark. In the summer of 1759 he was at Crown Point, during the Canada war, as army chaplain, and had served in that capacity for a short time in 1756. He was moderator of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia, at Philadelphia, in May, 1762. He took charge of the church at Deerfield, N. J.. in 1777, after the church at Mount Holly had been burned down by the British. From the time of his settlement at Newark in 1757 until his death, he never lost. sight of his poor Indians or their spiritual and temporal welfare, and " his Indians clung to him with affectionate attachment to the last." He died at Deerfield, N. J., March, 1781.-Brainerd, Life of John Brainerd (Philad. 1865).