Righteous Generation

Members of the idealistic Righteous Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1588 to 1617.¹, during or soon after the perilous challenge of the Armada Crisis (1580-1588), when their parents and grandparents were seeing to it that the Spaniards were not able to install the Inquisition in England. (The youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1697.) At the end of the Armada Crisis, with the victory of the English fleet over the Spanish invasion "Armada," England was established as a growing naval and colonial power, a bright and confident nation bustling with trade, expressing itself with art and new construction.

The Righteous Generation (of the Prophet archtype in the New World Saeculum, or Cycle) basked as children in the post-Armada peace. Overcome by spiritual conversions, many came of age zealously denouncing the spiritual emptiness of their elders' Jacobean achievements. While some later led England through a civil war that culminated in the beheading of King Charles I, others were called by God to lead a Great Migration to America. These young-adult Puritans established church-centered towns from Long Island to Maine. In midlife, fearing the corrupting influence of the Old World on their unconverted children, they turned from the law of love to the love of law. Their moral authority remained unchallenged through old age, as they provided the elder diehards of the great Indian Wars and the Glorious Revolution.²

During the ensuing era of security and optimism, when every person and every planet "knew" his rank, adult members of the civic-minded Elizabethan Generation and the first wave of the adaptive Sentimental Generation indulged their children, nurturing them in a more relaxing way than the Sentimental Generation had been nurtured, and enrolling them into new schools.

Rather than settling happily into a bright future, where they might extend their elders' development of its potential for godliness on Earth, however, the Righteous Generation children became morbidly introspective as adolescents. They became morally alienated from their fathers' culture, which they regarded as lifeless and corrupt. Behind the new prosperity, these adolescents (stuck in an overly long, mother-oriented adolescence) saw moral drift.

According to historian David Leverenz, they expressed an extreme "ambivalence about the father's role," reflecting a "mixture of relatively good mothering and relatively anxious, distant, weak, or repressive fathers."³ The adjectives anxious and weak would apply to the Sentimental Generation, and repressive to the Elizabethan Generation; distant might apply to either.

To the chagrin of their fathers and insisting, like Luther, on "faith" over "works," the youngsters would come to celebrate a dependent and feminine relationship to God, as "brides of Christ."⁴

These touchy, strong-willed, and rather narcissistic youths of implacable moral conviction and spiritual ambition regarded London as a Sodom and Gomorrah. They were obsessed with the sinfulness of man apart from God. In his "Domesday," young George Herbert prayed:

Come away,
Help our Decay.
Man is out of order hurled,
Parcell'd out to all the world.
Lord, thy broken consort raise,
And the music shall be praise.⁵

Converts, feeling more kinship with peers than with parents, used generational code words to identify each other ("churches" for groups, "saints" for individuals--as in "we have many saints among us in this town"). Alone, they often meditated on their faith and sublimated sexuality. "Spread thy skirt over us, and cover our deformity," John Winthrop (actually part of the next-elder Sentimental Generation but identifying with the Righteous) wrote to God in his diary, "make us sick with they love: let us sleep in thine arms, and awake in thy kingdom."⁷

Now morally committed, the Righteous Generation inaugurated a spiritual upheaval: the Puritan Awakening (1621-1640),

a dramatic resurgence of radical Protestantism throughout Europe, [which] triggered the Thirty Years War on the continent and boiled over in England in 1621 when the House of Commons denounced the "unholy" war and tax policies of James I. The awakening gained popular momentum with the succession of Charles I to the throne in 1625 and reached a hysterical climax with demands for social, spiritual, and religious "Reform" in 1629. Charles tried suppressing these demands by refusing to convene any more Parliaments.⁸

In 1630, Winthrop, possessed of unique vision, trancendent principle, moral acuity more wondrous and extensive than any in history, pointing to "these so evil and declining times," led a "saving remnant" of the true believers to the New World, to establish there a government of Christ in exile, a new Jerusalem. Thus began the Great Migration to New England.¹¹

"We shall be as a city upon a Hill," Winthrop told his assembled passengers aboard their flagship Arabella.

We must love brotherly without dissimulation; we must love each other with a pure heart fervently. . . . The end is to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord  . . . that ourselves and our posterity may be the better preserved from the common corruptions of this evil world.¹²

[W]hen a man's calling and person are free and not tied by parents or magistrates, or other people that have an interest in him, God opens a door there and sets him loose here, inclines his heart that way, and outlooks all difficulties.¹³

There was nothing liberal about the Puritan utopian communities. All society had to be a church and all behavior had to reflect perfect fellow feeling. Of "toleration," declared Cotton proudly, "we are professed enemies." Thus, when two group leaders disagreed over God's truth, compromise was unthinkable. Ego clashes typically ended in banishment--the fate of Anne Hutchinson (who conversed personally with God), Roger Williams (who deemed no one holy enough to take communion with him), and Samuel Gorton (whose "Family of Love" worshipped him as Jesus Christ).¹⁵

Group intolerance, not frontier spirit, propelled the wide geographic scattering of Puritan towns in the 1630s. A single settlement just couldn't accommodate so many infallible prophets, each playing "spiritual chemist" (said John Wheelright) in search of the perfect life. Loathing narcissism and self-satisfaction in their peers, harboring unyielding opinions about all issues, the Puritans were quite willing to judge their peers as harshly as they judged other generations.¹⁶

The distinction between sex roles was quite narrow among members of the Righteous Generation. Women assumed roles of conspicuous activism and leadership. There were many popular female lay preachers in New England.¹⁷

For years after their conversion, Puritans struggled to master this inner ecstasy by inventing regimes of personal piety, what historians call "precisionism": prayer, work, reading, spiritual diaries, and sporadic bursts of abstinence and political activism.¹⁸

The excitement of the Puritan Awakening in New England subsided at the end of the 1630s, when immigration stopped, families settled, and moral orthodoxy stiffened. The outbreak of the English Civil War in 1641 put a sudden stop to new voyages and thrust the American colonies into temporary isolation. As the Righteous Generation moved into midlife, religious experimentation became religious intolerance, inward enthusiasm was transformed into outward righteousness. In both the Old World and the New, Puritans gravitated toward decisive action--laboring to reshape the world just as God had earlier reshaped their souls. Of the vast majority who never left England, many joined such activists as Cromwell in launching the Puritan Revolution against King Charles I, or such preachers as the Fifth Monarchists in advocating a dictatorship of God on earth, or such poets as John Milton in recreating a universe of chaos in which each soul struggles personally toward grace.¹⁹

During the 1640s and 1650s, Puritans abandoned fanciful dreams of world reform and labored to achieve a more realistic ideal: enforceable moral order at home. As geographic mobility declined and as customs congealed around the seasonal rhythms of agriculture, Puritans steered their institutions toward formalism. They replaced "loving" covenants with written compacts, enacted draconian punishments for religious apostasy, and insisted that all new church members offer public proof of their conversions.²⁰

The New England Puritans stopped at nothing short of perfection. Rather than be corrupted by the world, they pushed themselves into spiteful isolation from outsiders. Rather than tolerate weakness, they riveted every corner of their society to God's ideal template. [They became] America's first generation of patriarchs, uncompromising defenders of a perfect spiritual order. Maybe too perfect. In midlife, growing ever more pessimistic about world affairs, they closed ranks around their theocracy by punishing everyone who threatened it--especially the younger [members of the reactive, nomadic Cavalier Generation], whom they regarded as shallow and wasted, in every respect their moral inferiors.²¹

The children of the Righteous Generation were members of the last-wave Cavalier Generation, nurtured in an underprotective way, or the first-wave of the heroic, civic-minded Glorious Generation, nurtured in a tightening way.

As the Righteous Generation Puritans grew older, they forgot that grace could be experienced only by the moment. They tended to freeze their church of peer-love and isolate it from every external corruption.²²

Righteous Generation parents and leaders raged over the apathy of younger Cavaliers who seemed perversely reluctant to join their churches. "This was an alarming situation for a community which had been founded on religious purposes," observed historian Edmund Morgan. "It was one thing to create a church of saints; it was another to let those saints carry the church out of the world with them entirely when they died."²³

But like their radical peers back in England (and like Governor Berkeley in Virginia), advancing age made the Puritans less compromising toward any behavior that did not conform to the "pure heart." By 1645, Winthrop insisted that his fellow colonists had "a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest" and urged them all to "submit unto that authority which is set over you . . . for your own good." By the late 1650s the humorless Governor John Endecott (who hanged younger Cavalier Quakers who mocked the Puritan creed) completed his generation's midlife transition from the law of love to the love of law.²⁴

Entering elderhood (age 66 and older), the Righteous Generation was represented by visionary prophet types, preoccupied with moral principle. Intensely disappointed with their juniors, the nomadic Cavalier Generation, they prayed that a still younger generation, the Glorious Generation, might save their holy experiment. Their world was heading for a serious crisis. Half the New England Puritans lived to learn of the restoration of the throne to Charles II in 1660, which shoved the colonies back under the heel of Stuart "tyranny." A quarter lived to witness their grandchildren go off to fight (many to die) in a gruesome war against King Philip's Indians in 1675. A handful, like [Simon] Bradstreet, still presided in high office as late as 1689, when the colonies joined England in the Glorious Revolution against James II. Most of these ancients, looking down on the troubled souls of their grown children, feared the young would trade ideals for security and thereby destroy everything that mattered. Their last act, accordingly, was to set an unyielding example. The diehards included such patriarchs as Massachusetts Governor Richard Bellingham, who (at age 75) scornfully burned letters from the English crown; John Davenport, who (at age 70) left his Mosaic "Kingdom of God" in New Haven to fulminate in Boston against youth who "polluted" the church; Indian apostle John Eliot, who (at age 72) protested seeing his life's work torn apart by younger soldiers more interested in killing Indians than in saving their souls; and Virginia Governor Berkeley, who (at age 71) hanged twenty-three younger leaders of Bacon's Rebellion.²⁵

One afternoon in April 1689--as the American colonies boiled with rumors that King James II was about to shackle them into slavery--the King's hand-picked governor of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, marched his troops menacingly through Boston to let the locals know their place. The future of America looked grim. Yet just at that moment, seemingly from nowhere, there emerged on the streets "the figure of an ancient man," a "Gray Champion" with "the eye, the face, the attitude of command." The old man planted himself directly in front of the approaching British soldiers and demanded they stop. His dress, "combining the leader and the saint" and "the solemn, yet warlike peal of that voice, fit either to rule a host in the battlefield or to be raised to God in prayer, were irresistible. The old man's word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still." Inspired by that single act, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within the day, Andros was deposed and jailed, and the liberty of colonial America was saved. . . . Later that very evening, just before he disappeared, he was seen embracing the 85-year-old Simon Bradstreet, a kindred spirit and one of the very few original Puritans still alive.²⁶

The Glorious Revolution crisis continued until the Salem witch trials in 1692, with a few of the elder Righteous Generation still alive to give resolute moral guidance. New Englanders had lived through revolution, anarchy, war, and pestilence--all signs that their chosen community had broken its sacred "Covenant with God," that now God's "Chosen Remnant" was experiencing a culminating judgment. By purging the witches, the handful of Puritans still alive hoped that God would finally put an end to these tribulations--and raise up a younger generation to greatness and glory. So it happened. The hangings that day turned out to be the last judicial executions for witchcraft in America. By the end of the century, calm had returned to the colonies, and the ancient tail of the Puritan Generation passed on in peace.²⁷

The life span average of the Righteous Generation in America was in the late 60s--the longest before the Twentieth Century. The longevity might be attributed to good nutrition, scattered settlements (thwarting the spread of disease), little crime or substance abuse, and a regular pattern of work and leisure thanks to a strictly enforced Sabbath. They long held on to power as well as to life; for example, this generation held on to the governorship of Massachusetts for 53 years.²⁸

Confident that principle would triumph, most Puritans faced death with what historian Perry Miller has described as "cosmic optimism." Said a witness at John Eliot's deathbed: "His last breath smelt strong of Heaven." So often had the Puritans expected Christ's return that when death finally arrived they met it with composure--like travelers returning home after a pilgrimage.²⁹

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

• 1588:
  Thomas Hobbes, Marin Mersenne
• 1589:
  John Endecott
• 1590:
  William Bradford, William Pynchon, Frances Bowyer (G15), John Dane (G15)
• 1591:
  Robert Herrick, Jusepe de Ribera, Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), Anne Hutchinson
• 1592:
  Nicholas Ferrar, Johann Amos Comenius, Pierre Gassendi, Jacques Callot, Peter Stuyvesant, William Stickney (G14)
• 1593:
  George Herbert, Izaak Walton, Jacob Jordaëns, Nicolas Poussin, Paolo Agostini, Anthony van Diemen, Thomas Wentworth (Earl of Strafford)
• 1594:
  Gustavus Adolphus
• 1595:
  John Wilson, Pocahontas, William Chandler (G15), Edmund Ingals (G15)
• 1596:
  René Descartes, Jan van Goyen, Nicola Amati, Richard Mather, Robert Crosby (G15)
• 1597:
  Martin Opitz, John Davenport
• 1598:
  Thomas Carew, Vincent Voiture, Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, François Mansart, Johann Crüger, Francesco Cavalieri
• 1599:
  Oliver Cromwell, Octavio Piccolomini, Fabio Chigi (Pope Alexander VII), Anthony Van Dyck, Velázquez
• 1600:
  Charles I, Pedro Caldéron de la Barca, William Prynne
• 1601:
  Louis XIII, Johann Michael Moscherosch, Alonso Cano, Simon de Vlieger, Pierre de Fermat, John Frye (G14)
• 1602:
  Jules Mazarin, Philippe de Champaigne, Francesco Cavalli, William Lilly, Otto von Guericke, Robert Adams (G15), Constance Brigham (G15)
• 1603:
  Roger Williams, Aert van der Neer, Simon Bradstreet, Annis Bayford (G15), Ralph Farnum (G15)
• 1604:
  Friedrich von Logau, Heinrich Albert, John Eliot
• 1605:
  Thomas Randolph, Giacomo Carissimi, Eleanor Wilmot (G15)
• 1606:
  Pierre Corneille, William Davenant, Madeleine de Scudéry, Adriaen Brouwer, Jan Davids de Heem, Rembrandt van Rijn, Sir William Berkeley, John Winthrop Jr.
• 1607:
  Paul Gerhardt, John Harvard, Mrs. Alice Farnum, wife of Ralph Farnum (G15)
• 1608:
  Ferdinand III, John Milton, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Evangelista Torricelli
• 1609:
  Paul Fleming, Henry Dunster
• 1610:
  Paul Scarron, Adriaen van Ostade, David Teniers the Younger
• 1611:
  John Webb
• 1612:
  Samuel Butler, Louis le Vau, Pierre Mignard, Andreas Hammerschmidt, Anne Bradstreet
• 1613:
  Richard Crashaw, François de La Rochefoucauld
• 1614:
  Jean de Gondi, Henry More, John Aslett (G14)
• 1615:
  John Denham, Salvator Rosa, Ninon de Lenclos, George Abbott (G14), Francis Dane I (G14)
• 1616:
  Andreas Gryphius, Johann Jakob Froberger, Mary Dyer
• 1617:
  Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau, Bartolomé Estéban Murillo, Gerard Terborch, Peter Lely, Richard Longhorne (G14)

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