Enlightenment Generation

Members of the adaptive Enlightenment Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1674 and 1700; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1780.¹ Many of them were born during the Glorious Revolution Crisis, which began in 1675 with King Philip's War (a deadly struggle between New England settlers and musket-armed Algonquin Indians) and Bacon's Rebellion (a brief civil war in Virginia). The mood of emergency peaked when England, led by King William of Holland, mounted the Glorious Revolution in the fall of 1688 against its Catholic Stuart king, James II. Before learning the outcome, American colonists staged their own "Glorious Revolution" in the spring of 1689 by launching rebellions in New England, New York, Maryland, and the Carolinas. While still in the grip of political turmoil, the New England colonies staved off a determined French invasion from Canada.

First-wave Enlightenment Generation members arrived too late (by this time only at ages 15-16) to take part in the political triumph. The crisis ended in 1692, the year of the Salem witch trials. The jerking and shrieking children "afflicted" and "possessed" by the Salem "witches" were members of the Enlightenment Generation.

Paralyzed by the pervasive dread, understood it was for their sake that the Cavalier Generation witches had to die--just as so many other adults had recently died to protect them from the ravages of riot and war. Most of the "possessed" children would later lose any recollection of the witches who had victimized them. Remembered or not, the trauma shaped all these children. It was their destiny to come of age as colonial America's most sensitive and conformist generation. Almost certainly, one or two of the young Enlightenrs present on Gallows Hill survived long enough to hear news of another epochal event in their extreme old age: the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The last witch hanging at Salem therefore became a unique generational focal point in American history, one of the very few moments when those who had raised John Winthrop's "City on a Hil" stood side by side with those who would someday become citizens of James Madison's "United States." The Enlightenment Generation (of the Artist archtype in the New World Saeculum, or Cycle) grew up as protected children when families were close, youth risk discouraged, and good educations and well-connected marriages highly prized. Coming of age, their rising elite eased into a genteel Williamsburg-style town-and-planter prosperity. As young adults, this inheritor generation provided the colonies' first large cadre of credentialed professionals, political managers, and plantation administrators. In midlife, their Walpolean leadership style betrayed a fascination with youth, whose spiritual zeal they both welcomed and feared. Many elders lived to witness (in the Stamp Act furor) a repudiation of the tea-drinking politeness and rococo complexity on which their provincial world rested.²

Growing up in the midst of rebellion and war, Enlightenment children witnessed the blood shed by elders on their behalf. These youth emulated adults and made few demands on them. They exhibited no desire for early independence and adventure. They learned to split the universe into two halves. On the one side, recalled Samuel Johnson, lurked a gallery of "bogeymen"--dark forests filled with Indians, armies, and infant-hungry devils. On the other side lay the safety of the family, protected by the smothering embrace of their parents.³

Enlightenment children were nurtured during this dangerous crisis in a remarkably overprotective way by their parents, members of the reactive Cavalier Generation (who had themselves been nurtured in a very underprotective way) or the civic-minded Glorious Generation. The nurturing attitude of the parents is exemplified by midlife Cavalier Samuel Willard ("If others in a family suffer want, yet the children shall certainly be taken care for") and by the rising-adult Glorious Cotton Mather ("restrain your children from bad company. . . . You can't be too careful in these matters").⁴

In New England, towns appointed tithingmen "to attend to disorders of every kind in the families under their charge" and set children to "dame schools" in nearby households rather than let them risk long walks outdoors. In the South, the vast influx of bonded young Africans traumatized youths of both races.⁵

With the first glimmers of peace at the end of the century, adults encouraged Enlightenment children to emulate emerging sex-role divisions. Girls privileged to become "virtuous mothers" were tutored in religion, music, and embroidery and learned to wear towering "fontanelle" hairstyles. Boys attired in wigs were sent to writing schools--or to the new colleges. Yale assured parents that the souls of their children were in safekeeping, while the charter of William and Mary promised that young gentlemen would be "piously educated in good letters and manners."⁶

The Enlightenment Generation matured into risk-averse rising adults. They entered adulthood just as peace and prosperity dawned, and they appreciated their good fortune. They did not dare risk upsetting the status quo. They knuckled under too easily to rulebook conformity. Careful to avoid a misstep, the Enlightenment Generation came of age eager to mature into the "better-polished generation" the Glorious had hoped for. And so they became.⁷

As Anglophile rising adults (ages 22-43) during the Age of Enlightenment--an outer-driven era of stability, of secularization of triumphant ideals, of deferred spiritual discontent--this generation brought to America the Queen Anne style of dainty china, walnut cabinets, parquet floors, and what they termed "comfortable" furniture. They also adopted the new English fad of tea drinking, never imagining that their children and grandchildren would someday dump the stuff contemptuously into Boston harbor.⁸

"'Tis no small matter for a stripling to appear in a throng of so many learned and judicious seers," announced a William and Mary student to the Virginia Assembly in 1699 on behalf of his fledgling college. The next young speaker promised that every student would "kindly submit himself to the maternal and paternal yoke," and a third described his peers as the most "docile and tutorable" in the world. "O happy Virginia!" he concluded. "Your countenance is all we crave."⁹

Haunted through youth by fears of "disorder," Enlighteners matured into compliant, immobile, and parent-respecting young adults. Seeking approval, their peer elite mastered structured and value-neutral subjects like botany (John Bartram), mapmaking (Lewis Evans), medicine (Zabdiel Boylston), and especially law (Jeremiah Dummer, Daniel Dulany, and Thomas Lee). Such achievements earned them respect more than admiration.¹⁰

The absence of coming-of-age catharsis, which had been experienced by the Glorious Generation before them, and by the Awakening Generation after them, robbed Enlightenment Generation members of a visceral peer bond. It made them better mediators for other generations than confident leaders of their own--and it impelled them to hunker down early, a caution for which they paid by missing (though often seeking) release later on.¹¹

By the late 1690s, the Glorious began complaining about youthful behavior that failed to meet their own super-straight standard at like age. Elders chafed at the snooty English mannerisms of youth--from coffeehouse etiquette to ribald verse--and suspected them of cowardice during Queen Anne's War (which ended in a stalemate in 1711). They fretted over the young generation's cardplaying, swearing, taverning, and premarital pregnancy--petty vices indicating post-adolescent tension release.¹²

Yet if the Cavaliers and Glorious considered them effete, coming-of-age Enlighteners felt perfectly justified in bringing a touch of wit and class to the dull conformity of post-crisis America. Here a handful of them stood their ground. In 1721, James Franklin set up a Boston newspaper and lampooned the fiftyish (Glorious Generation) Cotton Mather (who, notes historian Perry Miller, "appeared, for the first time, silly"). In 1723, Yale graduate Samuel Johnson shocked New England by announcing his conversion to the Anglican Church. Such tepid, isolated gestures amounted to the closest the Enlighteners ever came to a generational rebellion.¹³

"The Golden Age succeeds the Iron," announced the Rhode Island Gazette in 1732, celebrating the "erudition and politeness" Enlighteners were bringing to colonial "civilization." Outwardly, these rising adults were lucky, setting out in life in a new era of peace and prosperity. Seemingly without effort, their well-groomed elite could inherit or marry into upwardly mobile lifestyles--as town leaders (now versed in law), as genteel planters (now building symmetrical, Williamsburg-style mansions), as colonial agents (now riding in coaches), or as managers of trading empires (now familiar with luxuries).¹⁴

Inwardly, they compensated for their denied catharsis by obsessing guiltily over the rococo interior of their lives. "The Grandeur (ah, the empty grandeur!) of New England," worried 26-year-old Thomas Paine (father of the Revolutionary Paine). "Our apparel, how fine and rich! Our furniture and tables, how costly, sumptuous, and dainty!" William Byrd II studied the Complete Gentleman to improve on the manly virtue of his Glorious father, while hiding his sexual and poetic fantasies in a secret coded diary.¹⁵

The Enlighteners produced the first American writers and aesthetes to compete in erudition with their European peers; the first credentialed professionals in science, medicine, religion, and law; the first printers and postal carriers; and the first specialist-managers of towns, businesses, and plantations. Yet for all their wit and learning, they had one common denominator: a fatal indecisiveness, a fear of stepping too far in any direction. In civic life, the strength of the next-elder Glorious, Enlighteners specialized in stalemating executive action through legislative process. Voicing the consensus of historians, William Pencak notes that "between Queen Anne's and King George Wars"--precisely when Enlighteners began to dominate colonial assemblies--"two styles of politics prevailed in British North America: paralysis and procrastination."¹⁶

The Enlighteners ran America's first bar and clerical associations, managed America's first electoral machines (in Boston and Philadelphia), included the first significant number of doctors and scientists with European credentials, and gained more memberships in the prestigious London Royal Society than any other colonial generation.¹⁷

Founders of many church- and town-based charities, the Enlighteners were the most humanitarian of colonial generations. In the early 1730s, their English peer James Oglethorpe colonized Georgia as a haven for imprisoned debtors. He financed the venture entirely through private donations.¹⁸

The Enlighteners exhibited a deep humility, a sense of irony, and their hunt for catharsis led to nonjudgmental fairness and openmindedness.

Attracted to emotional privacy while inheriting a deep trust in institutions, Enlighteners gathered in "philosophical" associations, "virtuoso" societies, and humanitarian charities. They also produced a new ethos of professionalism and dominated the explosive post-1720 growth in colonial law. Reaching office in the 1720s and 1730s, they became what historian Jack Greene has labeled "the new political professionals"--and their parliamentary bickering marks the dullest pages in colonial history. Compared to the like-aged Glorious, rising-adult Enlighteners were more apt to sue than vote, lobby than build, and advocate private process rather than collective action. Indeed, some of the Enlighteners, such as William Byrd II and Alexander Spotswood, had a refined taste for process and expertise that made others impatient.¹⁹

Behind all the nice ornaments they added to colonial life--the minuets, carriages, and libraries; the lawsuits, vote counting, and purchased pews--lay an inner life of gnawing anxiety. The Enlighteners never stopped worrying that their refinement and sensitivity betrayed an absence of generational power and vision, that their nibbling reforms amounted to mere gesture, and that their leaders tended to defer rather than solve problems.²⁰

Individual Enlighteners are sometimes referred to as "inheritor" or "transitional" figures. Together, they might also be called America's first "silent" generation. Without question, no other American peer group includes so few leaders (James Logan? Cadwallader Colden? Elisha Cooke, Jr.? William Shirley? William Byrd II?) whose names Americans still recognize. The same goes for their precious squabbles, resembling those of their peers in England--Walpole's vote-jobbing, Pope's mock epics, Butler's clockwork universe--full of post-heroic affectation, utterly forgotten today.²¹

Yet the very mood of anonymous stasis the Enlighteners brought to their initial years of power, the 1720s and 1730s, transformed that era into the Williamsburg prototype of colonial life. No other period fits. Earlier, we would have seen hogs instead of coaches on the streets of Boston; later, we would have heard fiery sermons about Antichrist instead of fulsome odes to a golden age of politeness.²²

During the century and a half between Newton and Rousseau, this generation best reflects, as its adult apogee, what historians call the Age of Enlightenment, that delicate equipoise between certainty and doubt, order and emotion, gentility and candor. "Enlightenment" suggests perfect balance, the lifetime goal of a generation that always felt off-balance. It is a name they themselves would have relished.²³

The Enlighteners were the least geographically mobile generation in American history. Among native-born New Englanders, only 23 percent died more than sixteen miles from their birthplace, less than half the share for every generation born before or after. In the southern colonies, they were the first landed planters whose marriages and inheritances were dynastically arranged by (mostly Glorious) parents.²⁴

The children of the Enlightenment Generation were either the idealistic Awakening Generation, who were indulged in their nurturing, or the reactive, nomadic Liberty Generation, who were nurtured in an underprotective way.

The Enlightenment Generation experienced a midlife "passage," an abrupt and liberating personality shift. They took a subversive pleasure in the looser and freer tone of colonial society in the 1730s. Past age 40, many took risks for the first time: speculating in land, launching new businesses, womanizing, poetizing. A few dabbled in skeptical philosophy (of Berkeley and Hume) or in mystical religion (Zinsendorf's Moravian Church).²⁵

All this nervous joviality came to a sudden end in the late 1730s, thanks to the youth-propelled "Great and General Awakening" spiritual upheaval. The late-wave members of the Enlightenment Generation, now in their mid-thirties, had arrived on the scene too early to take part in the spiritual revival, which was being driven by their next-juniors, the Awakening Generation. The Enlighteners could not wholly accept the inner-driven passion of spiritual life, the strength of younger Awakeners. "Zeal" is "but an erratic fire, that will often lead to bogs and precipices," warned Thomas Foxcroft, author of An Essay on Kindness. The function of a minister, according to Nathaniel Appleton, was "pointing out these middle and peaceable ways, wherein the truth generally lies, and guarding against extremes on the right hand and on the left."²⁶

Reaching midlife, when they had finally outgrown the shadow of their elders, Enlighteners took more risks in a society bursting open with enterprise and fashion, art and wit, social mobility and rising immigration. Yet hardly had they begun to enjoy this freshness when they heard the younger moralists condemn them for moving in the wrong direction. Caught in a generational whipsaw, those who had once trying to defend their civic muscle to elders spent their later years trying to defend their moral purity to juniors. Elder-focused conformists early in life, they were junior-focused pluralists later on.²⁷

Midlife Enlighteners had sensed the Great Awakening coming; indeed, their clergymen had long urged "refreshed" emotion in church. Yet face to face with unbridled passion, they quickly realized how little regard the younger Awakeners showed for the Enlighteners' own strengths--credentials, politeness, pluralism, and deference. Condemned by Awakener Jonathan Edwards as "moral neuters," many sank into guilt. "I have studied to preserve a due moderation," admitted Edward Wigglesworth, "and if any expressions have happened to slip from me, that may seem a little too warm or harsh, I shall be sorry for it." While Samuel Niles feared "strife and contention" and Benjamin Doolittle warned of "too much boldness," most Enlighteners responded to their next-juniors with a sympathy, even an envy that revealed their own inner doubts. Nathaniel Appleton, said one observer, became "more close and affecting in preaching" after hearing the youthful enthusiasts. Admiring the passion of the younger George Whitefield, clergyman Samuel Dexter confessed: "ten thousand worlds would I give . . . to feel and experience what I believe that man does."²⁸

The Enlighteners in midlife were indecisive arbitrator "leaders" (with a small instinct for leadership). Dazzled by younger Awakeners and left with anxious memories of their own smothered youth, Enlighteners veered so far toward personal adventure and hands-off parenting that they failed to protect an emerging crop of Liberty Generation children. As a result, these children grew up hardened, and were a source of disappointment and worry.²⁹

As elders (ages 66 through 87) during the French and Indian War, the Enlighteners lived reasonably comfortably; as sensitive ancients, they maintained some influence in society, but little respect. They were still uncertain of themselves. "I don't think I know anything," said the aging Nathaniel Chauncy in 1756 after reading a popular book on religion. "Forty years have I been studying, and this book has told me more than I have ever known." Most Enlighteners entered old age with a remarkable capacity to rethink narrow childhood prejudices, admit failure, and try again. "The greatest and worst sorts of trouble and uneasiness," lamented Samuel Johnson shortly before his death in 1772, "are endless doubts, scruples, uncertainties, and perplexities of mind."³⁰

Superseded as leaders by moralistic midlife Awakeners, many old Enlighteners tried, like Johnson, to be "yet further useful" as elders. When the stakes seemed limited, they behaved with imitative swagger--like William Shirley and William Pepperell, gung-ho leaders of the colonial crusade against the French in the 1740s and 1750s. But later, as the stakes grew larger with the looming trouble with the Mother Country, they usually argued for compromise. Daniel Dulany and Thomas Lee supported "polite" and "friendly intercourse" with the English, and Ebenezer Gay (in the words of one admirer) tried "to point out that there was another side to every controversy."³¹

The handful who lived to see the outbreak of revolution typically hoped, like Daniel Perkins, for "that calmness, dispassionateness, and prudence that may prevent rage and acts of violence." Ultimately, the 79-year-old Perkins was forced by his juniors to sign a statement endorsing the American Revolution. Cadwallader Colden, New York Governor and philosophe, struggled in vain to arrange a compromise in 1776. Watching every symbol of his beloved Mother Country smashed in fury, he died that same year, at age 88, not knowing how the crisis would be resolved.³²

For the few Enlighteners who survived (in their eighties) until the American Revolution, proving themselves to the young was a rearguard battle they rarely won, but never gave up.³³

The Enlighteners were the most decent, accommodating, and pluralist--if also the most colorless--of colonial generations. Their collective legacy can be inferred from their eulogies, which typically reflect a painful struggle for equilibrium. Clergyman Thomas Greaves was remembered as "exact, but unaffected . . . grave, but not morose"; Nathaniel Appleton as "impartial yet pacific, firm yet conciliatory"; William Byrd II as "eminently fitted for the service and ornament of his country," yet "to all this were added a great elegance of taste and life."³⁴

As mediators between the civic hubris of their elders and the inner fire of their juniors, Enlighteners prevented the colonial world from twisting too far in either direction. They pioneered "freedom of the press," used their relative affluence to adorn colonial culture, and cultivated a respect for "due process" that their civic Republican Generation grandchildren later incorporated into a national Constitution. Yet for all the balance they brought to public life, their own personal lives took them on a zigzag path of overcompensation.³⁵

No one called the Enlighteners a great generation, but then again they did not try to be. They sought approval from others and tried to be helpful in great struggles that--often to their secret frustration--never seemed to hit them full force.³⁶

Birthyears for the Enlightenment Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)

• 1674:
  Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, Isaac Watts, Reinhard Keiser, Richard "Beau" Nash, William Byrd II, James Logan
• 1675:
  Antonio Vivaldi
• 1676:
  Robert Walpole, Francis II Rákóczy, Leopold I, Alexander Spotswood
• 1677:
  
• 1678:
  Kaiser Josef I, George Farquhar, Andrew Marvell, Elisha Cooke Jr.
• 1679:
  Zabdiel Boylston, John Chandler II (G12)
• 1680:
  
• 1681:
  Georg Philipp Telemann
• 1682:
  Charles XII of Sweden, Hezekiah Ballard II (G12)
• 1683:
  George II, Elijah Fenton, Jean Philippe Rameau, René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Zebadiah Chandler (G12), Hannah Frye (G12)
• 1684:
  Ludvig Holberg, Jean Antoine Watteau, Samuel Phelps II (G12)
• 1685:
  Kaiser Karl VI, John Gay, George Berkeley, Dominikus Zimmermann, J. S. Bach, Georg Friedrich Händel, Domenico Scarlatti, Daniel Dulany
• 1686:
  Allan Ramsay, Cosmas Damian Asam, Jean Baptiste Oudry, Nicola Porpora, Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit, Andrew Bradford
• 1687:
  Balthasar Neumann, Hannah Dane (G12)
• 1688:
  Friedrich Wilhelm I, Pierre de Marivaux, Alexander Pope, Emanuel Swedenborg, Domenico Zipoli, Joseph Nicolas Delisle, Cadwallader Colden, John Bean (G12)
• 1689:
  Samuel Richardson, Baron de Mntesquieu, Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer
• 1690:
  Nicolas Lancret, Thomas Lee, Johann Conrad Beissel
• 1691:
  Peter Scheemakers, Mann Page
• 1692:
  Carlo Fragoni, Joseph Butler. Egid Quirin Asam, Johann Michael Fischer, Giuseppe Tartini, Rebecka Davis, wife of Hezekiah Ballard II (G12)
• 1693:
  Robert Dinwiddie, George Lillo, G. R. Donner, Nathaniel Appleton
• 1694:
  Voltaire, Francis Hutcheson, John Michael Rysbrack, William Shirley
• 1695:
  Johann Christian Günther, Louis François Roubiliac, Maurice Greene
• 1696:
  Alphonsus di Liguori, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, James Edward Oglethorpe, Samuel Johnson, Sir William Pepperrell, Ebenezer Gay
• 1697:
  Friederike Caroline Neuber, Antoine François Prévost, Richard Savage, Antonio "Canaletto" Canale, William Hogarth, Johann Joachim Quantz, Thomas Foxcroft, James Franklin, Peter Zenger
• 1698:
  Johann Jakob Bodmer, Metastasio, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Henry Baker
• 1699:
  Robert Blair, Jean Chardin, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, Johann Adolf Hasse, John Bartram
• 1700:
  Johann Christoph Gottsched, L. S. Adam, Bartolomeo Rastrelli

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