Members of the reactive Liberty Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1724 and 1741; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1821.1 The parents of the first wave of this generation were members of the adaptive Enlightenment Generation; the parents of the last wave of the Liberty Generation were members of the idealistic Awakening Generation. These parents nurtured their Liberty children in a remarkably underprotective way, leaving them by and large to their own "wildness." The Liberty Generation (of the Nomad archtype in the Revolutionary Saeculum, or Cycle) struggled for parental comfort in an era of Hogarthian child neglect. Coming of age with an economic bust, land pressure, and rising immigration, they cut a swath of crime and disorder. As young adults, they joined the rough-hewn Green Mountain, Paxton, and Liberty Boys and became the unthanked footsoldiers and daring privateers of the French and Indian Wars. Proclaiming "Don't tread on me" and "Give me liberty or give me death," they entered midlife supplying the bravest patriots (including most signers of the Declaration of Independence) as well as the worst traitors of the Revolution. As elders, they led with caution, suspicious of grand causes, while their Anti-Federalists restrained the nationalizing energy of younger people.2
The Liberty Generation needed to grow up quickly in a world of parental self-immersion or even wholesale neglect. During the 1730s and 1740s, colonial newspapers noted the rising number of children abandoned as "bastards," turned over to wetnurses, fed liquor to shut them up, or just left free to run around on their own. For most first-wave Liberty kids, the new nurturing style reflected the midlife Enlightener dash toward personal autonomy. "We should think of little children to be persons," insisted the pedagogue Samuel Johnson. For most last-wave Liberty Generation members, watching young Awakener parents grope for holiness and rage against authority, childhood was an awkward by-product of the Great Awakening. The specter of adults crying out in church, noted Awakener Charles Chauncy, "frequently frights the little children, and sets them screaming."3
Much later, Ezra Stiles, the most learned scholar of the Liberty Generation, puckishly described the Great Awakening as a time when "multitudes were seriously, soberly, and solemnly out of their wits." Their revivalist next-elders were in another world entirely, but they sat in judgment on the young all the same. Liberty kids quickly learned that self-immersed adults at best ignored them, and at worst reviled their streetwise realism. Jonathan Edwards warned them that children "out of Christ" are "young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers." His Bostonian peer Andrew Eliot condemned them as an "evil and adulturous generation."4
While their parents were preoccupied with their spiritual ecstasy, Liberty children were victimized by the deadliest child-only epidemic in American history, the "great throat distemper" (diptheria), which killed an estimated one child in fifteen throughout most of New York and New England.5
Constantly criticized as "bad" by their elders, growing tired of the idealistic critics whining about problems but too busy to solve them, the Liberty Generation matured ultimately into risk-taking, alienated rising adults. They harbored a strong desire for early independence and carefree adventure.6
Benjamin Franklin wrote Poor Richard's Almanac to lecture them on prudence and thrift. But all in vain. Reaching their teens at a time of economic bust, land pressure, and rising immigration, the daunted Liberty set off on their own in quest of fame and fortune. Soon young losers began turning up underfoot everywhere--gambling, begging, stealing in the towns, "strolling" aimlessly on back roads, and sparking America's first Halloween mayhem in Boston.7
Discarded in childhood and punished coming of age, Liberty Generation members chose lives of reckless abandon--not running toward holiness like their next-elders, but running away from it; not praying for grace but rather (like Ethan Allen and Benjamin Harrison) swearing at the Bible. Their lifecycle drove many of them to the brink of madness. Still in their teens, the Liberty rushed from their homes--just in time to bear the full brunt of the colonies' last and largest imperial struggle with France. Here they tasted bitterness and death, and learned a brutal coming-of-age lesson: Get what you can grab, keep what's yours, and never trust authority.8
The colonies fought both of their midcentury wars against the French--King George's War (1744-1748) and the French and Indian War (1754-1760)--primarily with Liberty muscle and guts. At first, nothing so thrilled these plucky teenagers as news that armies were marching. War meant freedom from moralizing elders and penny-pinching masters, boom wages in the ports, and the glittering prospects of soldier's bounties, pirate shares, and enemy booty.
He became a daredevil colonel of the Virginia militia at age 22, and when he heard "bullets whistle," he found "something charming in the sound." He read little, never prayed to God, and meted out brutal discipline to his own like-aged soldiers. George Washington was not alone. In 1758, while this young Virginian begged his superiors to rank him above "the common run of provincial officers," most of his Liberty Generation peers were coming of age with similar pluck and ambition. Daniel Boone (age 24) was checking out land bargains along the Alleghenies, John Adams (age 23) was studying hard in Boston while daydreaming about "fame, fortune, and personal pleasure." Isaac Sears (age 28) was captaining an eighteen-gun privateer in search of French merchant prey. Robert Morris (age 24) was angling to make a fortune selling war supplies.9
The Liberty were by far the most war-ravaged generation of the colonial era. Describing the casualties, historian Gary Nash estimates that by 1760, "Boston had experienced the equivalent of two twentieth-century world wars in one generation." One third of all Liberty men in Massachusetts enlisted for at least one season between 1754 and 1759. Stockade and ship records indicate that disease and bad nutrition killed an estimated 5 to 10 percent of all recruits during each year of service.10
As the campaigns wore on, the dreams turned into nightmares. Smitten by "privateering fever" ("almost a kind of madness," remarked New York Awakener James DeLancey), thousands enlisted into French-hunting gunboats. Only a handful made fortunes; nearly half ended up killed, crippled, or captured. Royal Navy impressment gangs dragged away many of the young port workers, who responded with the most violent town riots in colonial history. Young militiamen heard themselves called wild "dogs" and selfish "riffraff" by British officers, who used martial-law punishment (including 500-lash whippings) to cow them into compliance.11
The Liberty yearned to join the worthy causes led by their elders, holy reform and the war for empire. But they soon learned that their elders did not like them. Not the British officers: General James Wolfe blasted them as "the dirtiest, most contemptible, cowardly dogs that you can conceive." Nor the Awakeners: God bless "the small number of saints that appear among us," prayed an older chaplain who accompanied them into battle. So, instead, the Liberty punched and tricked their way into adulthood--resenting their elders, hating themselves for their own wickedness, and doing everything by extremes.12
The continual war with France brought horrible youth suffering. While sixtyish Enlighteners sipped tea with the visiting officialdom and while fortyish Awakeners preached and prayed, the twentyish Liberty paid the physical price. They were the "young people with nothing to do and nowhere to go," writes historian William Pencak, and "war took care of them--in both the literal and colloquial senses--during the [1740s and 1750s]."13
The Liberty accounted for the largest wave of colonial immigration--most notably the poor, fierce (and anti-English) Scots-Irish, who typically disembarked in Philadelphia and then sped south, west, and north to the frontier.14
The Liberty, perceived by other generations as dumb, greedy, and soulless, knew they were black sheep. They probably didn't mind striking others as "bad"--playing low expectations to their advantage. When young, they felt the horrified dismay of elders who saw in them so few principles and so much cynicism. "That such a monster should come from my loins!" declared Landon Carter of his profligate gambler son Robert ("Wild Bob") Wormeley. "Nothing has ever hurt me so much," cried Benjamin Franklin of his Tory son William, "a man of deep deceit and light vanity" whom he later disinherited.15
In the eyes of older and younger Americans who knew them, the Liberty were a generation of kinetic physicality. They played hard, spent wildly, wagered on cockfights and boat races, and danced the furious and competitive jig. They chose peer leaders of legendary size (including Patrick Henry, Benedict Arnold, Ethan Allen, Daniel Morgan, Daniel Boone, Benjamin Harrison--and above all, George Washington, whose six-foot-three-inch physical presence towered above his peers).16
The Liberty were not looking for testimonials or any grand collective mission. Actually, a sense of inner worthlessness haunted them. "We are a crooked and perverse generation," lamented Josiah Bartlett to the Continental Congress, "longing for the fineries and follies of those Egyptian task masters from whom we have so lately freed ourselves."17
Having grown up during an era of falling rum prices and rising public disorder, the Liberty matured into a notorious generation of drinkers, thieves, and rioters--to the dismay of elder Awakener moralists. The Liberty consumed more alcohol per capita than any other colonial generation. Between 1760 and 1775, they led more violent mobs than the cumulative total for all prior generations. They coined both the words regulator (for vigilante) and lynch (after the Liberty Virginian Colonel Charles Lynch).18
From 1750 on, the colonies registered the onset of Liberty adulthood with a seismic jump in every measure of social pathology--from drinking, gambling, and crime to begging, poverty, and bankruptcy. After the wars, during the wild and depressed 1760s, it only got worse. Debtor prisons bulged with young spendthrifts. Veterans and immigrants raised havoc on the frontier, especially against Indians (some of whom, under the elder Pontiac, punished the white settlers with violent fury). Young planters partied far beyond their means, doubling the colonial debt to Britain between 1760 and 1775. Elders were aghast, and towns cut relief payments to the burgeoning numbers of young poor. "The only principle of life propagated among the young people is to get money," complained the old Enlightener Cadwallader Colden. "They play away, and play it all away," lamented Awakener Landon Carter of younger Virginians who preferred "bewitching diversions" to "solid improvements of the mind."19
Until their mid-forties, Liberty Generation members cut an unparalleled swath of crime, riot, and violence through American history. Whatever the mob--Vermont's "Green Mountain Boys" or Pennsylvania's "Paxton Boys" or New York's "Liberty Boys"--the Liberty "acted where others talked" (as one historian says of Isaac Sears).20
With the Stamp Act riots of 1765, the Liberty's anti-British agitation increased--but everyone knew their mob leaders mixed self-interest with patriotism. Many of the leading Liberty Patriots were smugglers (John Hancock), hopeless debtors (Thomas Nelson), renegade settlers (Ethan Allen), or disgruntled office-seekers (Richard Henry Lee). Fiftyish Awakeners thundered against the thirtyish Liberty for their greed and selfishness--for being a generation of "white savages," as Benjamin Franklin called the Paxton Boys. Samuel Adams's remarks, said a contemporary, "were never favorable to the rising generation."21
But the Liberty took a nihilistic pleasure in their elders' discomfort. "Virginians are of genuine blood--they will dance or die," they laughed back. Reflecting his peers' implacable hostility to Awakener holiness, Daniel Boone declared his secret of happiness to be "a good wife, a good gun, and a good horse."22
The Liberty Generation reduced schooling, career choice, courtship, and marriage to practical, matter-of-fact essentials. Their children were either the last-wave heroic, civic-minded Republican Generation or the first-wave adaptive Compromise Generation. The Liberty tended to nurture their children in an overprotective way, reacting to their own upbringing.
"Give me liberty or give me death!" roared 39-year-old Patrick Henry in 1775, invoking in one word that always intoxicated his generation, from a castaway childhood to a leave-me-alone old age. When Henry's peers sang, they sang the name: The American Liberty Song by John Dickinson The Massachusetts Song of Liberty by Mercy Warren, and My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free by Francis Hopkinson. When they acted, they acted in the name, organizing as "Sons of Liberty," planting Liberty trees, and parading around Liberty poles.23
Where Awakener elders preached "Unite or Die!" this generation had a more anarchic battle cry: "Don't Tread on Me!" or simply "Liberty or Die!"--the motto emblazoned on the shirts of Daniel Morgan's riflemen. They came to be known (and remembered) as "Yankees," a derisive nickname for young Americans that first became popular in the 1760s. A "Yankee" was a hick or fop, and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" a scornful British song about idiotic provincials. True to form, the Liberty adopted both the name and song as their own--sticking "a feather in their caps" (or a twig or piece of cloth) to identify themselves in battle and announce to the world that, yes, we are bastards and scoundrels. Leave martyrdom for the Awakeners. For the Liberty, there was no transcendence. It was victory or suicide. Either way, they heaped upon themselves the guilt of rebellion and left their own children to start fresh.24
John Adams confessed on the eve of the American Revolution: "We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, in education, in travel, in fortune--in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety."25
The Revolution coincided with the Liberty Generation's pragmatic midlife (ages 44-65), and the generation responded with savvy through this secular crisis. They understood how the real world functions, and they acted and led accordingly. No one expected this generation to sacrifice itself in America's hour of crisis. But that they did--with visceral (if corruptible) motives only they could understand: fury at the British "lobsterbacks" who had once tortured them, and hope that they might achieve some measure of security for their children.26
In midlife, most Liberty deferred thanklessly to their gifted and confident juniors. General Washington trusted his youthful Republican aides far more than his own peers. "I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular," admitted John Adams to Thomas Jefferson before agreeing to let this younger man draft the Declaration of Independence because "you write ten times better than I do."27
When the Continental Congress crowded up to sign the Declaration, the fiftyish (and very corpulent) Benjamin Harrison elbowed a (thin) younger delegate. When the signers are all hanged, Harrison wickedly quipped, "I shall have all the advantage over you. For me it will be all over in a minute, but you will be kicking in the air half an hour after I am gone!"28
For the Liberty, the Revolution was a moment of truth. Unlike their elders, they expected no miracles ("I think the game is pretty near up," wrote Washington during his retreat across New Jersey). Unlike their juniors, they had families and reputations at stake and less future to look forward to. But they never lost their practical and defensive goal: to prevent "tyranny" and to protect individual "liberties," as George Mason put it in his Virginia Bil of Rights. Nor did they lose their cunning and ferocity. These fifty-year-olds excelled at the dirty work: privateering (Sears again, this time owning shares in fifteen ships), requisitioning supplies ("Sumter's Law"), raising money (Morris, the "Financier of the American Revolution"), and guerilla tactics ("this damned old fox" Francis Marion, whom the British charged "would not fight like a Christian or a gentleman").29
Whatever their army--whether led by "Swamp Fox" Francis Marion or "Game Cock" Robert Sumter or "Rifleman" Daniel Morgan--they always performed best as plucky warrior bands. Hit by the Revolution just as they were entering midlife, the Liberty responded with characteristic frenzy. They mixed heroism with treachery, scrapped with each other, and ended up distrusted by everybody. No other generation so eagerly risked their lives for the Declaration of Independence. Nor did any other "turn Tory" in such massive numbers.30
The Liberty accounted for most of the war-era treachery--confirming elder judgments that they were not to be trusted. Though comprising only half of all members to the Continental Congress, the Liberty accounted for all six delegates accused of complicity with the British; the two most famous military traitors (Benedict Arnold and Benjamin Church); the most famous near-traitors (including Ethan Allen, who secretly considered selling Vermont to the British); and the most notorious Tory writers (from Hugh Gaine to Samuel Seabury).31
When the struggle was over, most of the Liberty fell into exhaustion, and a suspicious realism replaced their once-wild ardor. During the 1780s, midlife Liberty leaders were statistically more likely to be what historian Jackson Turner Main defines as political "localists" (less educated and more suspicious of ideas and large institutions) than either their Republican juniors or their Awakener elders. In 1788 they provided the leading opponents to the ambitious new Constitution concocted by younger Republicans. "All checks founded on anything but self-love will not avail," warned 52-year-old Patrick Henry, now a self-confessed "old-fashioned fellow," skeptical of the work of "young visionaries."32
Although the Liberty had included nearly two-thirds (thirty-five of fifty-six) of the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, eleven years later, they included only one-third of the signers of the U.S. Constitution. In fact, a list of leading "Anti-Federalist" opponents of the Constitution in 1788 reads like a Liberty Who's Who: Patrick Henry, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, George Clinton, Mercy Warren, John Lamb, David Rittenhouse, and Herman Husbands (average age, 57). In the end, the fast-aging Liberty barked without biting. They were not about to stand in the way of the energy of their juniors--or the dreams of their elders. Their opposition relented, and by the fall of 1789 nearly all the states had ratified the Constitution.33
Still suffering the early scars of alienation, the Liberty aged into pessimistic "fogies" and "codgers"--epithets that gained their scornful meaning just when this generation was entering elderhood. Later in life, Washington wondered if the republic would outlive him; Adams suspected an American monarchy might better suit the "self-seeking" darkness of the human heart. The Liberty were finally risk-averse elders who were able to congratulate Republican heroism while also checking the naive ambitions of young "Hamiltonians." Having gambled and suffered quite enough for one lifetime, the Liberty reached old age with no illusions about human nature.34
"Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence," the younger Jefferson wrote of President Washington. With gruff words and tender manner, Washington protected the infant nation during its first eight years. He dealt mildly with the Indians and Tories who had once been his enemies, and (perhaps recalling how his own peers had once been treated) resisted younger calls for harsh action against the Whiskey Rebels. To avoid the risk of war, he avoided alliances abroad and warned against "interweaving our destiny with any part of Europe." Ralph Waldo Emerson later described a portrait of the sixtyish President Washington: "The heavy, leaden eyes turn on you, as the eyes of an ox in a pasture . . . as if this MAN had absorbed all the serenity of America, and left none for his restless, rickety, hysterical countrymen."35
Prudent, realistic, and self-effacing, the Liberty entered elderhood just when Americans were shifting from the veneration of age toward the celebration of youth. "The language of abuse for old men dates only to about 1800," writes historian David Hackett Fischer, noting that this was "the generation whose unhappy fate it was to be young in an era when age was respected, and old in a time when youth took the palm." In the 1790s, for example, New England churches eliminated age-ranked seating and a majority of states imposed mandatory retirement ages for judges.36
Many Liberty elders met with sad fates. Robert Rogers, their greatest war hero of the 1750s, was arrested for counterfeiting, turned Tory during the Revolution, and died an alcoholic in England. Thomas Paine died a lonely outcast on Long Island. Robert Morris died penniless. Daniel Boone landless. When old, John Adams despaired that the only "great men" were "aged men, who had been tossed and buffeted in the vicissitudes of life" and taught "by grief and disappointment . . . to command their passions and prejudices." Few of the Liberty expected to be thanked--so certain were they, like the eightyish Adams, that "mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me."37
Birthyears for the Liberty 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. Strauss and Howe (1991), p. 98; 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. 12, 168, citing Samuel Johnson, Elementa Philosophica (1752); Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743). [Back to your place on this page.]
4. Ibid., pp. 168, 171, citing Ezra Stiles, in Edwin Gaustad, "Society and the Great Awakening in New England," William and Mary Quarterly (October 1954); Jonathan Edwards, Conversions and Revival in New England (1740), whose aggressive campaign against "immoral books" in the hands of youth led directly to his resignation from Northampton's church in 1750; Andrew Eliot, An Evil and Adulturous Generation (1753), which dealt mostly with youth vices. [Back to your place on this page.]
5. Ibid., p. 167, citing Philip Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (1970), ch. 7; James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (1974), pp. 73-75; Maris A. Vinovskis, "Angels Heads and Weeping Willows: Death in Early America," in Maris A. Vinovskis (ed.), Studies in American Historical Demography (1979); and John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (1953). [Back to your place on this page.]
6. Ibid., pp. 12, 39, 74, 94. [Back to your place on this page.]
7. Ibid., p. 168, citing Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac (1733-58). See Douglas Lamar Jones, "The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," Journal of Social History (Spring 1975). For the unprecedented erosion of family authority over children during this period, see "A Note on the Historical Family," in Edwin G. Burroughs and Michael Wallace, "The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation," Perspectives in American History (1972), Gerald F. Moran and Maris A. Vinovskis, "The Puritan Family and Religion: A Critical Reappraisal," William and Mary Quarterly (January 1982), Rhys Isaac, "Order and Growth, Authority and Meaning in Colonial New England," American Historical Review (February-June 1971), Greven (1970), Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (1970), Kenneth A. Lockridge, New England Town, The First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (1970), and Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (1980). [Back to your place on this page.]
8. Ibid., pp. 164, 171, citing Darlene Shapiro, "Ethan Allen: Philosopher-Theologian to a Generation of American Revolutionaries," William and Mary Quarterly (April 1964). [Back to your place on this page.]
9. Ibid., p. 164, citing John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (1988), pp. 26, 54; Adams's diary, in Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (1977), p. 251. [Back to your place on this page.]
10. Ibid., pp. 167-69, citing Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979), p. 245; Fred Anderson, A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War (1984); and James G. Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits (1970), ch. 9. [Back to your place on this page.]
11. Ibid., p. 169, citing DeLancey, in Nash (1979), p. 237; British officers, in Anderson (1984) and John E. Ferling, "Soldiers for Virginia: Who Served in the French and Indian War," Virginia Magazine (July 1986). [Back to your place on this page.]
12. Ibid., p. 164, citing Wolfe to Lord George Sackville (1759), in Robert M. Weir, "Who Shall Rule at Home: The American Revolution as a Crisis of Legitimacy for the Colonial Elite," Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Spring 1976); Awakener chaplain was John Cleaveland, cited in Anderson (1984), p. 217. [Back to your place on this page.]
13. Ibid., p. 169, citing William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (1981), p. 122. [Back to your place on this page.]
14. Ibid., p. 167. [Back to your place on this page.]
15. Ibid., pp. 12, 165, citing Landon Carter, in Jack P. Greene (ed.), The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter (1965); Benjamin Franklin, in Sheila L. Skemp, "William Franklin: His Father's Son," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (April 1985). [Back to your place on this page.]
16. Ibid., p. 171. [Back to your place on this page.]
17. Ibid., pp. 12, 165, citing Bartlett, in Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War (1979), p. 272. [Back to your place on this page.]
18. Ibid., p. 167, citing Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (1955) and Cities in the Wilderness (1968); W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic (1979); Brown (1973); and Pauline Maier, "Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America," William and Mary Quarterly (January 1970). [Back to your place on this page.]
19. Ibid., p. 169, citing Colden, in Arthur M. Schlesinger, "The Aristocracy in Colonial America," in Paul Goodman (ed.), Essays in American Colonial History (1967); Carter, in Greene (1965). [Back to your place on this page.]
20. Ibid., pp. 164-65, citing Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries (1980), p. 64. [Back to your place on this page.]
21. Ibid., p. 169, citing Franklin, in Nash (1979), p. 283; John Eliot on Samuel Adams, in Maier (1980), p. 6. See Emory G. Evans, "Planter Indebtedness and the Coming of the Revolution in Virginia," William and Mary Quarterly (October 1962). [Back to your place on this page.]
22. Ibid., citing Rhys Isaac, "Preachers and Patriots: Popular Culture and the Revolution in Virginia," in Alfred F. Young (ed.), The American Revolution (1976); Boone, in Appendix to John Filson, Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky (1784). [Back to your place on this page.]
23. Ibid., p. 165, citing Henry, in Robert Douthat Meade, Patrick Henry, Patriot in the Making (1969), vol. 2, p. 35; Dickinson, The American Liberty Song (1768); Warren, The Massachusetts Song of Liberty (1770); Hopkinson, My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free (1759). [Back to your place on this page.]
24. Ibid., citing Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (1981). [Back to your place on this page.]
25. Ibid., citing Adams's diary, in Weir (1976). [Back to your place on this page.]
26. Ibid., pp. 12, 90, 171. [Back to your place on this page.]
27. Ibid., p. 165, citing Adams to Jefferson, in Donald E. Cooke, Fathers of America's Freedom (1969), p. 15. [Back to your place on this page.]
28. Ibid., p. 170, citing Harrison, in Cooke (1969), p. 54. [Back to your place on this page.]
29. Ibid., citing Washington to Lund Washington (December 17, 1776), in Ferling (1988), p. 181; Mason, Virginia "Declariation of Rights" (1776); Banastre Tarleton on Francis Marion ("as for this damned old fox, the Devil himself could not catch him"), cited in Hugh F. Rankin, Francis Marion: The Swamp Fox (1973), p. 113; " . . . like a Christian or a gentleman" appears in David C. Whitney, The American Spirtit of '76 (1974), p. 296. [Back to your place on this page.]
30. Ibid., p. 165. [Back to your place on this page.]
31. Ibid., p. 167. The six Continental Congress delegates accused of treason were Robert Alexander, Andrew Allen, Isaac Low, John Joachim Zubly, William Samuel Johnson, and Silas Deane; the last two were later acquitted (Johnson soon enough to become a Constitution signer, Deane over fifty years after his death). [Back to your place on this page.]
32. Ibid., pp. 168, 170, citing Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties before the Constitution (1973), esp. Appendix; Henry, in Maier (1980), p. 289; see also Cecilia M. Kenyon, "Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government, William and Mary Quartery (1955) and Main (1973). [Back to your place on this page.]
33. Ibid. [Back to your place on this page.]
34. Ibid., pp. 165, 171, citing (on the new words for the elderly) David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978), ch. 2. [Back to your place on this page.]
35. Ibid., pp. 160, 171, citing Jefferson on Washington, in David C. Whitney, The American Presidents (1967), p. 3; Washington, Farewell Address (1796)--Washington's successor, President Adams, ruined his own chances for reelection by steering a similar course of caution and vigilance--Emerson, in Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (1978), p. 104. [Back to your place on this page.]
36. Ibid., pp. 170-71, citing Fischer, Growing Old in America (1977), pp. 93, 88. [Back to your place on this page.]
37. Ibid., p. 171, citing Adams on "great men," in Andrew Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience since 1790 (1978), p. 32. [Back to your place on this page.]
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