Members of the civic-minded Glorious Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1648 and 1673; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1753.1 Their parents were members of the last wave of the idealistic, puritanical Righteous Generation or the first wave of the reactive, nomadic Cavalier Generation.
The Glorious Generation, America's first mostly native-born generation of colonists, grew up as increasingly protected youths after a spiritual awakening. Ending shortly before the birth of the first-wave Glorious Generation had been the great Puritan Enthusiasm (1621-1640), a dramatic resurgence of radical Protestantism waged by their Righteous Generation elders. The self-absorbed Puritans had neglected the nurturing of their Cavalier Generation juniors, a negligence that was corrected with the arrival of the new Glorious babies. Midlife Puritan parents and young-adult Cavalier parents adopted new, more protective ideas of child rearing.
The Glorious Generation (of the Hero archtype in the New World Saeculum, or Cycle) entered a protected childhood of tax-supported schools and new laws discouraging the "kidnapping" of young servants. After proving their valor in the Indian Wars and triumphing in the Glorious Revolution, they were rewarded with electoral office at a young age. As young adults, they took pride in the growing political, commercial, and scientific achievements of England and viewed the passion and poverty of their parents as embarrassments to be overcome. In midlife, they designed insurance, paper money, and public works and (in the South) founded a stable slave-owning oligarchy. As worldly elders, they received the colonies' first war-service pensions and land grants--while taking offense at the spiritual zeal of youth.2
In fact, in 1647, just before the arrival of the first Glorious, lamenting the "great neglect of many parents" that had turned out so many jaundiced Cavaliers, the Massachusetts Assembly ordered towns to provide primary schooling for children--a landmark statute soon copied elsewhere in New England. (Parents in the Chesapeake settlements also became more nurturing; in 1647, Virginia required counties to "take up and educate" abandoned children and the next year opened its first "orphan's court.") In the 1650s and 1660s, colonial parents came under attack for what Increase Mather labeled "cruel usage of poor children." "Do we not grievously neglect them? to instruct them, to cherish and promote any good in them?" worried Harvard president Urian Oakes in 1673.3
Parents of the Glorious children took great interest in them, determined that they would turn out better than the previous generation, the Cavaliers, had. New England churches began teaching good works and civic duty ("preparation of salvation") rather than passive conversion. The Glorious were the beneficiaries of a "more thorough, conscientious, religious, effectual care for the rising generation."4
The Glorious Generation were protected youth in an era of religious intolerance, a time when the idealistic Puritans were determined to protect their theocracy. While sheltering their children from material harm, Righteous and Cavalier elders also urged them to be cooperative achievers able to save their colonies from impending danger. Though telling young New Englanders they were "walled about with the love of God," Urian Oakes also reminded them that "every true believer is a soldier, engaged in a warfare." The Glorious youngsters revered the moral vision of elder patriarchs and never imagined improving it. From childhood on, they understood that their mission was to champion that vision against growing worldly threats--to make it stable and orderly, to give it permanence and power and grandeur.5
As children, the Glorious looked upon the passion and poverty of their parents as an embarrassment to be transcended, however. They were not attracted to spiritual self-discovery at all; they were interested in smart and organized teamwork, in building up the prosperity of their society in the earthly sense, and they could not understand how their elders might view themselves in a different way. Aggressive activity and achievement was the key. "Be up and doing. Activity. Activity," preached Benjamin Colman in his thirties. "This will be most likely followed and rewarded, with triumphant satisfaction."6
The Glorious Generation came of age overcoming the secular Glorious Revolution crisis (1675-1692). Their rite of passage offered few moments of lone introspection. Instead, it forced the coming-of-age Glorious to band together and prove their public spirit heroically in the heat of action. For the first wave (the eldest in their late twenties), the trial began with the Indian wars of 1675-1676. For the last wave (the youngest in their late teens), it culminated in the terrifying riots and rebellions of 1689-1692 that expelled from America Europe's "Great Scarlet Whore," the alleged Catholic conspiracy of James II and Louis XIV. Under the savvy leadership of Cavalier Generation commanders, their dutiful valor won the Indian wars and repelled the French. Their cooperative discipline overthrew Stuart tyranny and quelled social disorder.7
Cotton Mather called the crisis "a happy revolution." And well it might have been for all of his peers, for the crisis "released long-suppressed generational tensions" (according to historian T. H. Breen) and triggered a seismic shift in political authority from old to young. In New England, young Glorious ousted elder militia commanders, set up Committees of Public Safety, voted themselves into public office, and supported the witchcraft frenzy against elders who victimized children.8
The Salem witch trials and hangings were the climax of the secular crisis. At Gallows Hill near Salem, on September 22, 1692, 29-year-old Cotton Mather (the brilliant and energetic Glorious Generation clergyman) was at the foot of the scaffold. The Glorious young adults looked on the hangings with impassive approval--a few of them, like young Cotton himself, scientifically inspecting the witches for damning, last-minute evidence of "maleficium." The Glorious were not suspected of sorcery and, unlike their next-elder Cavaliers, never imagined suspecting themselves. They had always lived up to the principles of thier holy Puritan fathers, just as they had always shared their community's doubts about the shifty Cavaliers. They looked upon the aging (and mostly female) witches as irrational threats to their future. The solution: Get rid of them. With the path thus cleared, many Glorious who witnessed the hangings would later excel in their generational mission to bring confidence, reason, and good works to the colonies.9
Throughout the colonies, energetic young men began elbowing aside their seniors. Rather than "dishonor yourselves," the 27-year-old Mather boldly preached to aging Cavaliers in 1690, "look often into your coffins" and "let your quietus gratify you. Be pleased with the retirement you are dismissed into."10
The Glorious united into a heroic and achieving cadre of rising adults. After helping to topple the Cavalier-age Stuart James II from the throne of England, the Glorious effectively defended their "rightful" colonial liberties from later crown-appointed governors. After dispensing with the witches, they built institutions in the colonies, and they assumed a hubris born of their triumph, a belief in community over self, and a collective confidence in their own achievements that their elders (and their juniors, too) could never match. Over the next quarter century, Thomas Brattle would write on celestial mechanics while his brother William would help found a new church dedicated to a "reasonable" God; John Leverett, as president of Harvard, would encourage the "most useful discoveries"; and Cotton Mather, pitiless witch-baiter in his youth, would help found Yale College and conquer "ignorant" prejudice by introducing the smallpox vaccine to America.11
Rising Glorious men and women encouraged an unprecedented division between sex roles. Men began wearing powdered periwigs, women the whalebone corset--new symbols of what John Cotton in 1699 celebrated as "the industry of the man" and the "keep at home" woman. This was a male-focused generation. Striving like "King" Carter to "preserve the character of the father," Glorious authors such as Beverley and Mather celebrated their male ancestors while admitting with Benjamin Wadsworth that "persons are more apt to despise a mother (a weaker vessel, and frequently most indulgent), than a father." The duty of "Man," announced Thomas Budd in Philadelphia, was "to bring creation into order."12
The children of the Glorious Generation were the last wave of the adaptive Enlightenment Generation and first wave of the idealist Awakening Generation.
Approaching midlife, the Glorious set out not to save themselves personally, but to save their society collectively. They believed that social institutions could improve the "welfare of mankind," that science could be "useful," that prosperity could "advance" over time. Thirtyish Glorious labored to build new institutions that would promote social order and productive activity. Detesting the remnants of the anarchic Cavalier lifestyle, they helped the English rid the New World of piracy and replaced the predatory violence of Chesapeake planters with friendlier substitutes like gambling and horse racing. Unlike the Cavaliers at like age, they did not wander. Planter-statesmen in the South, or farmer-soldiers in the North, the Glorious stayed put, taking pride in their ethos of loyal community-building. Where young voters could empower their own governors (Samuel Cranston in Connecticut or Joseph Talcott in Rhode Island), they made their colonies peaceful and prosperous. Elsewhere, they closed ranks and enforced their will on crown-appointed governors through peer solidarity.13
The Glorious spent their powerful midlife (age 44 through 65) during the Age of Enlightenment, and they exhibited a growing optimism about world affairs. In fact, the Glorious was America's first generation of secular optimists. They deemed the gloomy enthusiasm of their Righteous elders as antisocial and unproductive. Far better, they urged, to regard religion from a more optimistic and rational perspective. Colman affirmed that "a cheerful spirit is a happy and lovely thing."14
Religion underwent a transition from passion to "reason," from fanaticism to "cheer," from mysticism to "clarity." By pushing spiritual emotion toward domesticated mothers, Cotton Mather's "handmaidens of the Lord," the Glorious clergy left fathers free to build. Benjamin Wadsworth called the covenant of grace "most reasonable."15
Midlife Glorious colonists proudly built institutions and performed good works. Worshipping Newton as "our perpetual dictator," Cotton Mather reminded his peers: "Our faith itself will not be found to be good and profitable if good works do not follow upon it." They also expanded commerce. In 1721, clergyman John Wise surveyed the busy coastal ports of America and announced: "I say it is the merchandise of any country, wisely and vigorously managed, this is the king of business for increasing the wealth, the civil strength, and the temporal glory of a people."16
From "Bostonia" to the "idyllic gardens" of the Carolinas, midlife Glorious took pride in their worldly accomplishments. They had reason. Throughout their active adulthood, from the 1670s to the 1720s, they presided over colonial America's most robust era of economic growth, a 50 to 100 percent advance in living standards by most statistical measures: per capita imports from England, number of rooms per home, amount of furniture per family, estate size at death.17
As elders, the civic-minded Glorious were busy, confidently running or overseeing institutions they built around earlier values. Their diaries buzzed with nonstop activity: families, elections, trade, profits, roads, cultivation--all accomplished with only the rarest idle feeling. To Cotton Mather in Boston, who wrote 450 volumes over three decades, "sloth" was inexcusable; to Robert Beverley in Virginia, "laziness" the only sin. Not just any activity would do. It had to be "social," "useful," "serve the public" or "enrich the commonwealth." "All nature is industrious and every creature about us is diligent in their proper work," preached the sixtyish Benjamin Colman. "Diligence is the universal example. Look through the whole creation, and every part it has a work and service assigned to it."18
The Glorious succeeded not with Cavalier risk taking, but rather by establishing "orderly" markets, pioneering paper money, and building what they liked to call "public works." They also introduced new types of property rights, such as private ownership of communal town land--and of black Africans. When the Glorious came of age, a mere 6,000 blacks labored in America, primarily immigrants from other English colonies, many of whom exercised the same rights as indentured servants. This generation changed all that. In the 1690s, young planters began importing blacks directly from Africa by the thousands. By the 1700-1710 decade, Glorious-led assemblies were everywhere enacting statutes that fixed slavery as a monolithic racial and legal institution. Those few Glorious who objected found little support. Samuel Sewall, who wrote The Selling of Joseph in 1700 to keep slaves out of Boston, acknowledged that his opinions elicited "frowns and harsh words" from his peers.19
The aging Glorious could look back on a lifetime of achievement. When they were children, the colonies had been a savage outpost of some 100,000 subjects, chained to a corrupt kingdom. Now they saw around them a wealthy colonial "jewel," with a population pushing one million, attached to the most prestigious empire on earth. They had earned and saved far more during their lifetimes than had the Righteous or Cavaliers ("Our fathers," Colman admitted, "were not quite enough men of the world for us"), and rising land prices gave them a commanding bargaining power over their own land-poor children.20
Yet in their diaries, the elder Glorious complained of physical decline and regretted that their secularized religion offered so little solace. Upon death, they staged such gaudy last rites for old friends that in the 1720s Massachusetts led several other colonies in enacting laws to "restrain the extraordinary expense at funerals."21
Several of the busy Glorious elders were alive during a cultural spiritual upheaval, the Great Awakening (1734-1743), known at the time as "the Great and General Awakening" and referred to ever since as the "Great Awakening." Preoccupied with their lifelong secular achievements, determined to continue reaping rewards from their lifetime of purposeful labor, they were now stolid defenders of institutions that were being attacked by the idealistic Awakening Generation coming-of-age youngsters. They wondered why the young did not show them the same warmth they remembered feeling for their own fathers. Celebrating each other with adjectives such as "honored" and "ancient," they withdrew from the hostile and increasingly value-laden culture of young Awakeners.
In his mid-sixties, Cotton Mather criticized the doctrine of spiritual rebirth gaining popularity among younger ministers by insisting that "going to heaven in the way of repentance, is much safer and surer than going in the way of ecstasy." But he also warned his aging peers: "Our patience will be tried by the contempt . . . among those who see we are going out." Right up to his death, the tireless Mather, author of Essays to Do Good, never stopped marking "GDs" (for "Good Deeds") in the margin of his diary.22
Birthyears for the Glorious Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)
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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), p. 140, citing Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (1960), p. 26; Mather, The Divine Right of Infant Baptism (1690); Oakes, New England Pleaded With (1673). [Back to your place on this page.]
4. Ibid., pp. 137, 140, citing "Beyond Conversionism," in David Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (1972); Perry Miller, "'Preparation for Salvation' in Seventeenth-Century New England," Journal of the History of Ideas (1943); Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (1969); Miller, "The Half-Way Covenant," New England Quarterly (December 1933); and Thomas Shepard. Jr., Eye Salve (1673). [Back to your place on this page.]
5. Ibid., pp. 137, 140-41, citing Oakes, The Unconquerable Soldier (1674). [Back to your place on this page.]
6. Ibid., pp. 9, 137, 139, citing Colman in Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1953), p. 463. [Back to your place on this page.]
7. Ibid., pp. 9, 137, 141, citing David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (1972). [Back to your place on this page.]
8. Ibid., p. 141, citing T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers (1980); and Mather in Miller, p. 159. [Back to your place on this page.]
9. Ibid., pp. 116, 118. [Back to your place on this page.]
10. Ibid., p. 141, citing Mather, Addresses to Old Men and Young Men and Little Children (1690). [Back to your place on this page.]
11. Ibid., pp. 90, 118, 137. [Back to your place on this page.]
12. Ibid., pp. 139, 141-42, citing Cotton, A Meet Help (1699); Clifford Dowdey, The Virginia Dynasties: The Emergence of "King" Carter and the Golden Age (1969), p. 220; and Budd, Good Order Established (1685). [Back to your place on this page.]
13. Ibid., pp. 139, 141. [Back to your place on this page.]
14. Ibid., p. 139. [Back to your place on this page.]
15. Ibid., pp. 139, 142, citing Mather, A Meet Help (1699); Wadsworth in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the LIves of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (1973). [Back to your place on this page.]
16. Ibid., citing Mather, op. cit., and Wise, A Word of Comfort (1721). See also Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1953), chs. 14-16. [Back to your place on this page.]
17. Ibid., citing Gary M. Walton and James F. Shepherd, The Economic Rise of Early America (1979); James Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815 (1973); Terry L. Anderson, "Economic Growth in Colonial New England" (Journal of Economic History, March 1979); and David H. Flaherty, Privacy in Colonial New England (1972). [Back to your place on this page.]
18. Ibid., pp. 137, 143, citing Colman, Sermon after the Funerals of Brattle and Pemberton (1717). [Back to your place on this page.]
19. Ibid., p. 142, citing Sewell, in Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (1967), p. 60. See also: Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968); "A Changing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 1660-1710," in Breen (1980); Paul C. Palmer, "Servant into Slave: The Evolution of the Legal Status of the Negro Laborer in Colonial Virginia" (South Atlantic Quarterly, Summer 1966); and James H. Brewer, "Negro Property Owners in Seventeenth-Century Virginia" (William and Mary Quarterly, October 1955). [Back to your place on this page.]
20. Ibid., citing Colman, in Miller (1953), p. 400. [Back to your place on this page.]
21. Ibid., pp. 142-43, citing David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (1977), p 115. [Back to your place on this page.]
22. Ibid., p. 143, citing Mather, in Stannard (1977), p. 150; and in "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.]
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