Leah

Leah was enslaved by Jonathan Edwards and his wife Sarah Pierrepont Edwards. Edwards referred to her as “my servant maid” in her baptismal record of April 11, 1736, and as “my servant” in the record of her church membership (First Church of Christ Records, section 2, p. 8). 

Leah is mentioned in a letter from Sarah Pierrepont Edwards in 1744. She refers to the letter’s recipient as “constable” so it is either to William Bartlett or Benjamin Alvord. Pierrepont Edwards wrote to ask about payment, presumably of a debt, and ended the letter with a postscript “I and my Children give our Love to Leah.” Since there was no one named Leah in either the Bartlett or the Alvord family at this time, the Jonathan Edwards Center suggests that this Leah could be the woman that the Edwards family enslaved, and that she had either been hired out or sold to the family of the recipient.  This brief mention could shed a light on the type of work Leah was doing in the Edwards home. That the missive is from both Pierrepont Edwards and the children could imply that she was primarily engaged in domestic work and childcare. The expression of affection also shows either Pierrepont Edwards’ genuine emotion toward Leah, or the image of her emotion that she wanted to portray.
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Historians have posited that she and Venus may have been the same person, and that perhaps Edwards changed her name to Leah, or that she chose Leah on her entry into the church (Bailey, “From Goddess of Love to Unloved Wife: Naming Slaves and Redeeming Masters in Eighteenth-Century New England”) and (Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’ Defense of Slavery”).