Members of the reactive, nomadic Cavalier Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1618 and 1647; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1727.1 They were either born in America, or they were brought over as children by their Righteous Generation parents during the Great Migration of the 1630s.
The Cavalier Generation (of the Nomad archtype in the New World Saeculum, or Cycle) grew up in an era of religious upheaval and family collapse. In New England, they were the isolated offspring of spiritual zealots; in the Chesapeake colonies, they were the indentured English youth whose parents' death or poverty consigned them to disease-ridden ships bound for the tobacco fields. Notoriously violent and uneducated, they came of age taking big risks--many dying young, others becoming the most renowned merchants, trappers, mercenaries, rebels, and pirates of their century. In midlife, they struggled bravely against threats to their communities from Old World tyrants and New World native peoples. As politically tainted elders, they seldom protested the vendettas (such as the Salem witch frenzy) that mainly targeted their own peers.2
Cavalier Generation children were brought up in a particularly underprotective, even negligent way by their self-obsessed Puritan parents who were grappling with messianic visions. Growing up without structure and ever criticized as "bad," in large families among towns and churches dominated by their Puritan elders, these children understood that no one cared much about their welfare. Young Michael Wigglesworth wailed into his diary: "I have no confidence in my doings, O wretched worm that I am."3
Cavalier children were too young to participate in the Puritan Awakening (1621-1640); they were left alone and urged to grow up quickly. Their childhood was spent among the isolated and fanatical towns of Puritan John Winthrop's "New Jerusalem," an environment not particularly conducive to the development of self-esteem. Puritan parents frequently castigated youngsters for their palpable unsaintliness, and elder assemblies in Boston soon declared child misbehavior a capital crime.4
Unimpressed by these "heathenish" and "hard-hearted" Cavalier 20-year-olds, Puritans accused them of "cruelty" and "covetousness," of living by "external considerations only, by a kind of outward force without any spiritual life of vigor or delight in them." Early in the 1640s, according to historian Perry Miller: "ministers began to complain that sons and daughters were not exhibiting zeal." The Cavaliers were called a "corrupt and degenerate rising generation," and Puritan Richard Mather was dismayed with "the sad face of the rising generation." Eleazer Mather asked, "What will become of this generation? Are they not in danger to sink and perish in the waters?"5
The generation suffered from considerable self-doubt. "We, poor we, alas what are we!" lamented young William Stoughton, "It is a sad name to be styled 'Children that are Corrupters.'"6
Coming of age in an era of religious intolerance, many in the alienated Cavalier Generation played to their advantage the low expectations of them as dumb, greedy, and soulless. Desiring early independence and adventure, they became notorious risk takers. They were tired of the idealistic Righteous elders whining about problems while being too busy to solve them, and they resented the lies they were inheriting. Their Puritan elders had promised them a "New Jerusalem," but all the youngsters saw around them were miserable exiles and a howling wilderness. The Cavaliers repudiated failed dreams, and they learned that self-interest was the secret of happiness and that power was the source of glory. Tired of bookish principle, Cavaliers avoided Righteous idealism, prompting historian Lawrence Stone to note that "the [Righteous] old were more radical than the [Cavalier] young in the 1640s."7
The Cavaliers followed the Righteous the way flotsam scatters after the crashing of a storm wave: skepticism following belief, egotism following community, devils following saints. At their worst, the Cavaliers were an unlettered generation of little faith and crude ambition--so they were told all their lives, and so many of them believed and behaved. Their roster includes more than the usual number of rogues: adventurers, witches, pirates, smugglers, Indian-haters, and traitors. At their best, they were a generation whose perverse defiance of moral authority gave America its first instinct for individual autonomy, for the "rights" of property and liberty--concepts utterly foreign to their Righteous elders.8
Having been shamed while coming of age, the Cavaliers were pushed into an alienated adulthood with few hopes other than climbing fast and avoiding judgment. But the judgments pursued them anyway, and they judged themselves. Young Quaker Josiah Coale, himself a Cavalier, called his peers "a wicked and perverse generation." According to historian Oscar Handlin, the Righteous Generation original immigrant settlers regarded their Cavalier juniors as "a ruder, less cultivated, and wilder people."9
Many of the Cavalier Generation burned out young, some turned traitor, most seemed to endure heaps of blame. Among their members were some of the most notorious Seventeenth Century American pirates and rebels, and half the women tried and executed for witchcraft. A striking number of them met a violent death. Others became pragmatic materialists: Fitz and Wait Winthrop "grew up a couple of Cavaliers in Israel . . . half-ludicrous, uncertain of their values, and always chiefly absorbed with fashion, status, and accumulation of real estate." But they always felt that they were being judged. As an ex-pat in London, Fitz Winthrop, alienated by elder criticism, tried to stay away from "a city or place where I am known, and where every judgment will pass their verdict upon me."10
According to historian Bernard Bailyn: "By the mid-1650s, the character of the rising generation was discernible, and to the entrenched oligarchy it seemed pitifully weak. The children of the Founders . . . knew nothing of the fire that that had steeled the hearts of their fathers. They seemed to their elders frivolous, given to excess in dress and manners, lacking the necessary fierceness of belief."11
Why not go for it? Everyone kept telling the Cavalier he was a loser anyway. A dead loser, he would no longer have to listen. A rich loser, no one would dare tell him in his presence. With pluck, they went their own way. Apprentices such as John Hull became silversmiths and world traders, fur trappers such as Benjamin Church wandered to the frontier, and the aspiring elite sought attractive posts back in England. But for many, land became an obsession: "Land! Land! hath been the Idol of many in New England," complained Increase Mather about his peers.12
This generation produced some of the toughest leaders, the most effective warriors, some of the most scathingly perceptive artists, and the most successful entrepreneurs. They were not particularly well educated (no Harvard-trained Cavalier minister was ever regarded, or regarded himself, as the intellectual equal of the leading Puritan founders), and they generally regarded history as bunk. But in outgaming Satan--perhaps because many of them were considered "devils" themselves--they could outwit evil, they were practical, they could survive in an ugly, no-second-chance world and later joke about their escapades in America's first adventure tales.13
They reduced courtship, schooling, and career choices to practical, matter-of-fact essentials. Mellowing into midlife, they tired of their earlier bingeing, and they slowed down. They understood how the real world actually functions and they led accordingly. They raised their last-wave heroic, civic-minded Glorious Generation and first-wave adaptive Enlightenment Generation children in a much more protective way, compensating for how they themselves had been raised as children.
The crisis year of 1675 marked the Cavaliers' passage into midlife and inaugurated the darkest two decades in American history until nearly another century afterward. In New England, the bloody Indian rebellion known as King Philip's War killed more inhabitants per capita than any subsequent war in American history. More adversity soon followed: epidemics, riots, the colonial Glorious Revolution, and global war against France. All eyes turned to the Cavaliers for leadership. Could this wild and pragmatic generation handle such adversity? Doubtful Righteous elders, still retaining symbolic authority into extreme old age, shook their heads. But Cavalier savvy leadership prevailed, and did so thanks to talents their elders never possessed--realistic diplomacy (Increase Mather), cunning generalship (Benjamin Church), and reckless courage. They salvaged their reputation for posterity--not by suddenly becoming virtuous, but by fighting gamely according to their own rules.14
The Glorious Revolution crisis ended with the Salem witch trials. At Gallows Hill, near Salem, on September 22, 1692, eight middle-aged Cavalier Generation New Englanders, seven women and one man, stood on a scaffold with nooses around their necks. Their crime: witchcraft. At the foot of the scaffold was 61-year-old William Stoughton, also of the Cavalier Generation, the presiding judge at the trials. This generation watched the hanging with resignation. The witches about to die were their own age, as were the leading magistrates who condemned them. In their hearts, Cavaliers knew they all shared the guilt. Since childhood, they had always been told they were a "lost generation," that their spirit was "corrupt" and "unconverted." Their only escape was the stick of silver, piece of land, or ship passage that could separate them from Righteous judgment. But when they were caught, this generation of traitors and rebels, predators and prey, rarely protested the punishment. More their style was the response of a Cavalier Virginian, William Drummond, when Righteous Governor William Berkeley informed him he would be hanged in half an hour: "What your honor pleases." No excuses. No righteous denial. Cavalier leaders like Stoughton, Increase Mather, and Joseph Dudley--men of brutal realism--would later take America over the threshold of the next century and into a new era of caution and stability. Chastened and mellowed, most Cavaliers were about to enter old age unthanked, forgiving their juniors as they had never been forgiven by their own elders.15
What remained of the Cavalier Generation retired into a reclusive elderhood. Reminiscing over their lives, many Cavaliers no doubt attributed their success to dumb luck, the only sort of grace that most of them had ever prayed for. Even as elders, they never tried to hide their generation's faults, especially their vulgarity and irreligion. "This exile race, the Age of Iron, living here among so many wild beasts and bulls of Bashan," New Yorker Henricus Selyns described them in the 1690s. Increase Mather had a scathing assessment of his peers: "If the body of the present generation be compared with what was here forty years ago, what a sad degeneracy is evident in the view of every man."16
Here is the assessment of contemporary poet Benjamin Tompson:
These golden times (too fortunate to hold),Not many made it into old age. Most Cavaliers died before age 45; the rest entered old age without wealth or pretense--crusty, used up, and unaware of what they had given. In 1691, Boston merchant Joshua Scottow, in his late seventies, wrote Old Man's Tears for Their Own Declensions. Eightyish Jonathan Burt agreed that "the Lord is pleased with the Rod to visit me when Old." They were now living in a world that faulted the elderly, that sermonized on old age with what historian John Demos calls "a note of distaste . . . almost of repulsion."18
Were quickly sin'd away for love of gold.17
Birthyears for the Cavalier Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
See the next generation
See the previous generation
Notes:
1. The information on this page has been adapted with permission from William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991). [Back to your place on this page.]
2. William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (New York: Broadway Books [Bantam-Doubleday-Dell], 1997), p. 131. [Back to your place on this page.]
3. Strauss and Howe (1991), pp. 129, 133. Wigglesworth cited in Richard M. Gummere, Seven Wise Men of America (1967), p. 32. [Back to your place on this page.]
4. Strauss and Howe, p. 133. [Back to your place on this page.]
5. Ibid. Cited on that page are Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (1975), p. 18 (where Eleazer Mather himself was cited); Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953), pp. 11, 28 (where Richard Mather himself was cited). [Back to your place on this page.]
6. Ibid., citing Stoughton's New England's True Interest (1670). [Back to your place on this page.]
7. Ibid., pp. 12, 131, 133-34. Cited on page 131 was Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (1972), p. 133, who went on to declare, "The unexpected conservatism of the young is still puzzling." [Back to your place on this page.]
8. Ibid., p. 129. [Back to your place on this page.]
9. Ibid., pp. 129, 134. Cited are Josiah Coale in David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World (1985), p. 116, and Oscar Handlin, "The Significance of the Seventeenth Century" in Paul Goodman (ed.), Essays in American Colonial History (1967). [Back to your place on this page.]
10. Ibid., p. 131, citing Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630-1717 (1962), pp. vi, 191-92, 199-200. [Back to your place on this page.]
11. Ibid., citing Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955). p. 109. [Back to your place on this page.]
12. Ibid., p. 134, citing Mather's An Earnest Exhortation (1676). [Back to your place on this page.]
13. Ibid., pp. 12, 132, 135. [Back to your place on this page.]
14. Ibid., pp. 131, 134. [Back to your place on this page.]
15. Ibid., pp. 116-118. [Back to your place on this page.]
16. Ibid., p. 135, citing Selyns in Greenwood Press, American Writers Before 1800: A Biographical and Critical Dictionary (1983), and Mather, Pray for the Rising Generation (1679). [Back to your place on this page.]
17. Ibid., citing Benjamin Tompson, New England's Crisis (1676), itself cited in Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, So Dreadful a Judgment (1978), p. 215. [Back to your place on this page.]
18. Ibid., pp. 135-36, citing Burt, A Lamentation (pub. posth., 1720), and Demos, "Old Age in Early New England" in John Demos and Sarane Spence Babcock (eds.), Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family (1978). [Back to your place on this page.]
Other sources
Back to the top
Close this window