Transcendental Generation

Members of the idealistic Transcendental Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1792 and 1821; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1901.¹ Their parents, nurturing them in a relaxing and indulging way, were either the last wave of the civic-minded, heroic Republican Generation or the first wave of the adaptive, romantic Compromise Generation.

The Transcendental Generation (of the Prophet archtype in the Civil War Saeculum, or Cycle), the proud offspring of a secure new nation, were the first American children to be portraited (and named at birth) as individuals. Coming of age as evangelists, reformers, and campus rioters, they triggered a spiritual paroxysm across the nation. As crusading young adults, their divergent inner visions exacerbated sectional divisions. Entering midlife, graying abolitionists and Southrons spurned compromise and led the nation into the Civil War, their zeal fired by the moral pronouncements of an aging clergy. The victors achieved emancipation but were blocked from imposing as punishing a peace as the old radicals wished. In elderhood, their feminists and poets (many with flowing beards) became unwielding expositors of truth and justice.²

Transcendentals were born in the wake of the American Revolution Crisis (1773-1789), ending with the ratification of the United States Constitution and the inauguration of President Washington. As post-crisis babies, they took first breath in a welcoming new era of peace and optimism. As indulged children, they were assured by midlife Republican hero-leaders that every conflict had been won, every obstacle surmounted. Thanks to Republican science, Transcendentals were the first American babies to be yanked into the world by forceps-wielding male doctors rather than by midwives. Thereafter, mothers insisted that these infants be regarded as unique individuals: They were the first whose names were chosen primarily by mothers instead of fathers; the first whose names were actually used in family conversations (no longer "it" or "the baby"); and the first not commonly named after parents. From the 1780s to the 1810s, the share of New England babies named after parents dropped from 60 to 12 percent. (It rose again for later generations.)³

Growing up as increasingly indulged youths after the Revolutionary secular crisis, the Transcendentals, attracted to spiritual self-discovery rather than the teamwork endorsed by their parents, came of age attacking elder-built institutions and inspiring a spiritual awakening (the "Second Great Awakening"). Then they fragmented as rising adults, retreating into self-absorbed, narcissistic remission. Later, though, they were to mature into principle-cultivating, uncompromising moralistic midlifers. They ultimately emerged as visionary elders, guiding the next secular crisis (the Civil War). The self-assured Transcendentals--quite troubling to the other generations, both elder and younger, who shared the planet with them--were certain that theirs was an authentic, unique generation with recognizable boundaries. From 1809 through 1821 were born most of the best-known reformers, abolitionists, feminists, self-proclaimed prophets, and commune founders of the Nineteenth Century-- and nearly two thirds of the Congress in session (plus the President and Vice President) at the outbreak of the Civil War.

Transcendentals were children of optimistic hope. "Our schools, our streets, and our houses are filled with straight, well-formed children," exulted David Ramsay in 1802, praising the offspring of midlife Republican nurture. Transcendentals missed the atmosphere of crisis that had smothered young Compromisers, their next elders. They grew up instead in the orderly yet brightening climate of Jeffersonian America. "The elements added after 1790" to childhood, notes historian Joseph Kett, "were increasingly on the side of freedom."⁴

Many parents used their rising affluence to give their children expensive toys (including pastel-painted children's furniture) and to seat them in individualized family portraits. Pestalozzian tutors encouraged positive emotion, and schoolbooks such as Alphabet Without Tears made learning more friendly. In 1818, a British visitor noted "the prominent boldness and forwardness of American children" who are "rarely forbidden or punished for wrong doing" and "only kindly solicited to do right."⁵

Transcendentals later felt nostalgia for their childhood, a friendly and preindustrial "Age of Homespun," as Horace Bushnell came to label it. Nevertheless, most recoiled at an early age from fathers whom they perceived as reserved and soldierly. While parents urged duty, activity, and society, these children preferred meditation, reading, and "solitude" (a word they would cherish throughout their lives).⁶

Cerebral and self-immersed, they avoided joining the adult world and turned their teenage years, notes Kett, into "a period of prolonged indecision." At work, they felt themselves "minds among the spindles" (as one visitor described the first Lowell factory girls). Attending college, they mixed a passion for God and nature with angry attacks on rotelike curricula. The worst riots (then known as "breaking-ups") in the history of American universities occurred from 1810 through the mid-1830s. At Harvard in 1823, two-thirds of the senior class were expelled shortly before commencement. At Oberlin, abolitionist clubs held "revivals" in which students recounted the "sins" of their slaveholding fathers.⁷

While Lyman Beecher, the Compromiser educator, reported effusively that the most radical youths had "the finest class of minds he ever knew," Transcendental Ralph Waldo Emerson's description of his young peers struck an ominous note: "They are lonely; the spirit of their writing is lonely; they repel influence; they shun general society. . . . They make us feel the strange disappointment which overcasts every youth."⁸

Throughout most of the Nineteenth Century, all Americans ridiculed, respected, or feared whatever age bracket the Transcendentals occupied as a moving repository of inner-driven passion and unbreakable principles. At every age in that century, Transcendentalists mingled images of nature, mother, love, redemption, and apocalypse. First-wave Transcendentals were just learning to talk when their dutiful Republican fathers were crushing the Whiskey Rebels, age 9 at Jefferson's first inauguration, and barely 30 when the initial clamor over revival and reform broke out during the twilight Monroe years. Last-wavers came of age just in time to join the furor before it receded in the late 1830s. First wave and last, they afterward embarked on self-immersed voyages--starting families and careers while founding communities, joining sects, dabbling in odd lifestyles, probing the soul with art. From Thaddeus Stevens to Abraham Lincoln, from Walt Whitman to Edgar Allan Poe, William Lloyd Garrison to the Blackwell sisters Elizabeth and Emily, Transcendentals grew up notoriously estranged from their fathers.⁹

Coming of age, these youngsters erupted in fury against the cultural sterility of a father-built world able to produce (charged Emerson in 1820) "not a book, not a speech, a conversation, or a thought worth noticing." They preached feeling over reason, community over society, inner perfection over outer conformity, moral transcendence over material improvement. The outburst defined the Transcendentals as a generation.¹⁰

Many Transcendentals warned, like Garrison, of "the terrible judgments of an incensed God" that "will complete the catastrophe of Republican America"; or proclaimed, like Emerson, that "men are what their mothers made them"; or condemned, like Henry David Thoreau (whose mother brought home-cooked meals to his Walden retreat), "the mouldering relics of our ancestors."¹¹

The revolt against fathers warmed up during the outwardly placid late 1810s, when coming-of-age Transcendentals began rejecting what 22-year-old James K. Polk described as "a tedious enumeration of noble ancestors." "'Our fathers did so,' says someone. 'What of that?' say we," wrote Theodore Parker, described by a friend as "a man of Nature who abominates the steam-engine and the factory."¹²

"The young men were born with knives in their brain," recalled Emerson of his youthful peers in the 1830s. He once described them as an assortment of "madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-Outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists"--utopians and sectarians of all stripe, whom the like-aged Southerner Edgar Allan Poe mockingly labeled "frogpondium."¹³

They looked the part, too. Fashions celebrating age (powder and queues, waistcoats, knee breeches) swiftly gave way to those celebrating youth (short hair, shouldered jackets, pantaloons). "Anti-corset" women wore mannish "Bloomers"; young men at Brook Farm (to quote a fellow communard) wore "their hair parted in the middle and falling upon their shoulders, and clad in garments such as no human being ever wore before." Nathaniel Hawthorn nostalgically looked back on Brook Farm as "our exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew" and on Emerson's Concord crowd as "a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves agents of the world's destiny."¹⁴

Early in life, Transcendentalists deemed themselves agents of the world's inner destiny. In his thirties, Emerson wrote: "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet."¹⁵

Youngsters drawn to upstate New York to help build the Erie Canal, a region soon known as the "Burnt-Over District," launched an evangelical surge of spiritual self-discovery led by young Charles Finney. This fledgling preacher and his adolescent followers made up the elder-attacking core of what historians call the Second Great Awakening (also called the Transcendental Awakening or the Era of Transcendental Idealism or the Era of Romantic Evangelism), a period of great cultural creativity and an emergence of new ideals. Teenagers of both sexes (including Joseph Smith, the future Mormon prophet) experienced radical conversions and attacked elders as "sinners" and "hypocrites." From the 1810s to 1830s, rising Transcendentals fueled the most rapid expansion of evangelical religion in American history. In the West, youthful settlers flocked to new Baptist and Methodist churches. In the South, young preachers buried forever the cool rationalism of Republican planter-statesmen. "By 1830," wrote historian Russel Nye, "had Jefferson been still alive, he would undoubtedly have found his religious principles highly unpopular in his native Virginia."¹⁶

By the late 1820s, as social and geographical mobility quickened with the first surge of industrialization, youths joined religion to a radical social agenda. Screaming "to wake up a nation slumbering in the lap of moral death," young William Lloyd Garrison proclaimed, "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice." He launched the riotous abolitionist movement in 1831--the same year 28-year-old Nat Turner led his bloody insurrection against slave masters.¹⁷

By the mid-1830s, young radicals were sparking labor and "Locofoco" activism in the cities, joining the Anti-Masonic Party in the countryside, and rallying to new cultural and religious standards in the college towns--from Emerson's "Idealism" to John Greenleaf Whittier's antislavery lyrics to Mary Lyon's bold new college (Mount Holyoke Seminary) for women. "The Seventy--an entourage of young lecturers who traveled the nation chastising their elders--featured women as well as men. "There is no purely masculine man, no purely feminine woman," observed Margaret Fuller.¹⁸

Coining the words spiritualism, medium, rapping, séance, clairvoyance, and holy roller, rising Transcendentals delighted in altered states of consciousness. From the 1840s on, a large share of this generation believed in psychic phenomena (séances with the dead, prophetic dreams)--including Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, reformers William Lloyd Garrison and Horace Greeley, and even many Transcendental feminists, from Lucy Stone to Elizabeth Blackwell. "Consistently," claims historian Ann Braude, "those who assumed the most radical positions on women's rights became Spiritualists."¹⁹

The Transcendentals were the first coming-of-age Americans to experiment with opium. By the time they ranged from their teens through their thirties (the early 1830s), U.S. alcohol consumption had climbed to its highest level ever--the equivalent of a quart of whiskey per week for every American over age 15.²⁰

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, deemed by Emerson "the universal poet of women and young people," urged his peers to "shake the vast pillars of this Commonweal,/ Till the vast Temple of our liberties/ A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies."²¹

Whitman called it "simmering," Emerson "metamorphosis," Thoreau the moment "when we have lost the world . . . and begin to find ourselves." For twentyish and thirtyish adults, it meant the transition from radical awakening to a mellower era that promised (declared Fuller's Dial magazine) "the unfolding of the individual man, into every form of perfection, without let or hindrance, according to the inward nature of each." This era of Transcendental remission was triggered by the Panic of 1837, an event that historian Sidney Ahlstrom says "darkened the dream" for young reformers and led them into "the Fabulous Forties."²²

Institutionally, Republican-built (and now Compromiser-managed) America stood intact--but, culturally, Transcendental rising adults were substituting an entirely new agenda. Pursuing separate paths, they mixed outward pessimism with inward confidence by secluding themselves (Thoreau at Walden, Davis on a Mississippi plantation), founding utopian communities (Brook Farm, Nauvoo, Fruitlands), establishing colleges as reform enclaves (Oberlin, Antioch), launching "spiritualist" fads (homeopathy, phrenology), and asserting women's rights (Seneca Falls). Oblivious to any peer group but their own, who filled the ranks of America's abolitionists, Southern expansionists, feminists, labor agitators, utopians, and reformers. In his History of American Socialisms, published in 1870, the aging Transcendental John Humphrey Noyes deemed seventy-four utopian communities worth mentioning and dating. Fifty-five were founded between 1825 and 1845. "All died young," Noyes observed, "and most of them before they were two years old."²³

The children of the Transcendentals were the reactive, nomadic Gilded Generation or the adaptive Progressive Generation.

Transcendentals turned the tide against substance abuse by advocating alcoholic temperance (leading a thundering campaign against "Demon Rum," which successfully reduced alcohol consumption to one-fourth its former level by 1850) and natural-food diets like Sylvester Graham's fermented crackers. They challenged neoclassical architecture with a "Gothic revival"--asymmetric houses with churchish gables and earth-tone colors. Their first political leaders displayed surprisingly sharp edges. President James K. Polk, an austere "born-again" Methodist, led a moralistic crusade against Mexico that shocked elders--and a 32-year-old congressman proposed a "Wilmot Proviso" that challenged the life work of the aging Compromiser Triumvirate.²⁴

Whether Abolitionists, "Southrons," Mormons, or Anti-Masons, the Transcendentals agreed that each person must act on an inner truth that transcends the sensory world--a credo immortalized by Emerson in 1842 as "Transcendentalism" and praised by Oliver Wendell Holmes as "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." Unlike their elders, Southern "fire eaters," such as Robert Barnwell Rhett and William Yancey, refused to apologize for slavery, but instead found virtue in an aggressive empire of chivalry and bondage. Meanwhile, Northerners such as Seward declared the abolition of slavery to be "a higher law" than their father-drafted Constitution, and Garrison condemned the half-slave Union as "a covenant with death, an agreement with hell."²⁵

Down South, Transcendental preachers found godliness in slavery as fortyish "ultimatumists" began demanding secession. Foreign visitors in the early 1840s remarked on the "seriousness" and "absence of reverence for authority" of the "busy generation of the present hour." "All that we do we overdo," remarked Theordore Parker. "We are so intent on our purpose that we have no time for amusement." Neither side questioned that God was on its side. While ax-wielding visionaries such as John Brown and Nat Turner sanctified what Herman Melville heralded as their "meteor of war," Harriet Beecher Stowe demanded that the "wrath of Almighty God" descend on America, a day that "shall burn like an oven."²⁶

Over one six-year span, fortyish Transcendental authors published the best-remembered literature of the nineteenth century--including The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorn, 1850); Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe, 1852); Walden (Thoreau, 1854); The Song of Hiawatha (Longfellow, 1855); Moby Dick (Melville, 1855); and Leaves of Grass (Whitman, 1855). Formerly regarded by Europeans as literary primitives, American authors suddenly acquired a vast European following. By the late 1850s, Longfellow outsold Tennyson in England.²⁷

With the coming of the Civil War, bearded fiftyish crusaders, with a growing pessimism about world affairs, despised both the caution of their elders and the opportunism of their juniors. The Transcendentals had entered their moralistic midlife. When Transcendentals had come of age, all Americans cherished the look and sagacity of youth; now that they were growing old, Americans respected the look and sagacity of age. The full beard--an enduring symbol of Transcendental wisdom--came into vogue among midlife men in the late 1850s (just about the time of John Brown's raid). Though the beard remained popular among elderly men in the 1880s, the next generation of midlifers, the Gilded, began adding a moustache or rejecting it altogether in favor of bushy "sideburns" (named after the Gilded Union General Ambrose Burnside).²⁸

Though young Transcendentals had often joined the Compromisers in sniping attacks on Republican social discipline, now they had reached midlife without their next-elders' instinctive caution. "Compromise-- Compromise!" wrote William Herndon on the eve of war. "Why I am sick at the very idea."²⁹

"The age is dull and mean. Men creep, not walk," complained John Greenleaf Whittier in the 1850s, a decade of stale Compromiser leadership that Stowe described as "an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed." The mood turned sour with the failure of the European revolutions, the unpopular Compromise of 1850, frontier violence, and spectacular fugitive slave chases. In the mid-1850s, with lawless mayhem breaking out in "Bleeding Kansas," midlife Americans feared that the rapacious younger Gilded were about to shatter their visions and rip America to pieces. Fiftyish preachers warned of Apocalypse from their pulpits. Like-aged legislators began shouting at each other over principle--one brutally caning another on the Senate floor.³⁰

The men and women of the Transcendental Generation projected their zeal onto the outer world and led America toward the Last Judgment. In his fifties, Emerson greeted the bombardment of Fort Sumter by confessing in his journal that he found purification in "war"--which "shatters everything flimsy and shifty, sets aside all false issues. . . . Let it search, let it grind, let it overturn."³¹

At the onset of the Civil War, the Transcendentals had again emerged into public life, this time as midlife champions on both sides of what William Seward called their "irrepressible conflict." Summoning juniors to battle, they presided as leaders over four years of total war, which only would ended when William Tecumseh Sherman vowed to punish the Confederacy to its "innermost recesses," and sixtyish Radicals like Thaddeus Stevens demanded a postwar "reconstruction" of the Southern soul.³²

In 1859, the "martyrdom" of John Brown after his raid on Harper's Ferry catalyzed the mood on both sides. "How vast the change in men's hearts!" cried Wendell Phillips. "The North is suddenly all Transcendentalist," exulted Thoreau. "Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me," mused Whitman of "this incredible rush and heat, this strange ecstatic fever of dreams." Once Lincoln's election answered Whitman's plea for a "Redeemer President," his peers grimly prepared for a Civil War that Lincoln insisted "no mortal could stay."³³

As the young marched off to bloody battle, midlife Transcendentals urged them on with appeals to justice and righteousness. Garrison spoke of the "trump of God," while Phillips warned that the Union was "dependent for success entirely on the religious sentiment of the people." Around the time Atlanta was in flames, the words "In God We Trust" first appeared on U.S. coinage. Late in the war, though the devastation grew catastrophic, both the Northern and Southern sets of Transcendental Presidents and Congresses refused to back down.³⁴

"Instruments of war are not selected on account of their harmlessness," insisted Thaddeus Stevens, beckoning Union armies to "lay waste to the whole South." And so the North did--finding redemption at Gettysburg, in Sherman's march, and in Emancipation. Afterward, Transcendentals felt spiritual fulfillment: a huge human price had been exacted from the young, but a new era was indeed dawning. Observed Melville:

The Generations pouring . . .
Fulfilled the end designed;
By a wondrous way and glorious
A passage Thou dost find. . . .³⁵

After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the surviving Transcendentals were visionary elder stewards, craggy patriarchs and matriarchs--some starting new causes (Wendell Phillips's socialism), others persisting in old movements (Elizabeth Cady Stanton's feminism), and all warning the young not to back down from truth and justice.³⁶

"Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending," wrote Longfellow, adding (in "Morituri Salutamus") how

. . . as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

The Gilded Generation had its doubts about the nobility of their Transcendental elders. After blunting the postwar vengeance of aging Radicals, 30- and 40-year-olds moved swiftly in the late 1860s to purge the nation of Transcendental leaders--in Congress, governors' mansions, and the White House. In three straight Presidential elections (1868, 1872, and 1876), older Transcendental candidates fell to less reform-minded juniors. Of the sixteen leading "Radical Republicans" in Congress who took the hardest line against the defeated Confederacy in 1867, fifteen were Transcendentals (average age, 57)--although Congress as a whole (average age, 49) was by now one-third Gilded. The Civil War years had begun with Transcendentals enjoying the greatest one-generation political hegemony in American history (a 90 percent share of governors and Congress in 1860) and ended with the largest generational rout in the election of 1868 (when the Transcendental share plunged from 63 to 44 percent). The period from 1865 to 1869 marked the steepest-ever decline in one generation's share of national leadership.³⁸

Meanwhile, old Confederates remained unrepentant (like Jefferson Davis), led younger white "Redeemers" (like Nathan Forrest, "Grand Wizard" of the postwar Ku Klux Klan), or aged into chivalric symbols of the "Lost Cause" (like Wade Hampton).³⁹

In scientific circles, the amoral Darwinism that so enamored the Gilded drew heated criticism from old Asa Gray. Few Transcendentalists had become great scientists; Isaac Singer and Cyrus McCormick were their only celebrated inventors. But as moral prophets, no generation ever paraded so many visions of godliness--whether Lincoln's Union, Davis's Confederacy, Brigham Young's "Kingdom of Zion," John O'Sullivan's "Manifest Destiny," John Humphrey Noyes's "perfectionism," Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, Albert Brisbane's utopian communes, Orestes Brownson's Catholic socialism, or Dorothea Dix's severe but redemptive penology. Transcendentals transformed themselves into elders much like those in the novels of Hawthorne and Melville--stern-valued patriarchs, revered but feared (like Thaddeus Stevens) for "something supernatural" that "inhabits his weary frame." While the aging minister Albert Barnes assured his friends they would die The Peaceful Death of the Righteous, aging spiritualists likewise heralded the end with stoic confidence. For Lydia Child, "The more the world diminished and grew dark, the less I felt the loss of it; for the dawn of the next world grew even clearer and clearer."⁴⁰

Versed Holmes to Whittier "On His Eightieth Birthday":

Look Forward! Brighter than earth's morning ray
. . . The unclouded dawn of life's immortal day!

From youth to old age, the Transcendentals had celebrated the subjective like no other generation before or since. While Garrison chastised his peers for their "thralldom of self," Emerson preached "whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," Thoreau insisted on the "majority of one," and Whitman (in his "Song of Myself") rhapsodized that "I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious."

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream

No matter. Transcendentalists cared only for what they thought of themselves. They valued inner serenity: "having a strong sphere" (Stowe); being a person who "is what he is from Nature and who never reminds us of others" (Emerson); or possessing a "perfect mental prism" (as a friend described Lincoln). Only later in life did their narcissism mutate into an irreconcilable schism between Northern and Southern peers, each side yearning for perfection no matter how the violence might blast the young. Like a generation of Captain Ahabs, Transcendentalists from Boston to Charleston turned personal truth into collective redemption. Crowding into churches while younger men died at Gettysburg, they sang the third verse of Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic with utter conviction:

I have read the fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace will deal;
Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.

The Transcendentals may have been America's most high-minded generation--but they also became, by any measure, its most destructive. Recalling Robert E. Lee, the younger Henry Adams bitterly remarked after the Civil War was over, "It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world." The Transcendentals slaughtered the younger Gilded, thereby triggering a massive reaction that vaunted pragmatism over principle. For decades after the Civil War, the old Transcendental causes lay dormant (temperance), repudiated (feminism), even reversed (Jim Crow) by Gilded Generation juniors who reached midlife despising the fruits of righteousness. Worse, the still younger generation of child Progressives, whom the Transcendental elders might have empowered to lock in their grand visions, instead came of age in a wrecked world of spent dreams.⁴⁴

The memory of Transcendentals would eventually grow warmer among a new generation of postwar babies, the idealistic Missionary Generation, who went to school staring up at portraits of what Booth Tarkington remembered as "great and good" old men--the likes of Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and Emerson. In 1881, a fresh crop of young college men heard the seventyish Phillips warn them to "sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, ever looking backward." In 1892, a fresh crop of young college women heard the 77-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton remind them of "The Solitude of Self." A quarter century later, these inner driven Missionaries would build a national monument to Lincoln, worship Susan B. Anthony, and celebrate the Transcendentals as a generation beloved for its principle and vision.⁴⁵

Yet among most important Transcendental endowments is a terrible lesson. The generation of Lincoln was also that of John Brown, a man who summoned "a whole generation" to "die a violent death" and was elevated to sainthood by his most eminent peers. It was also the generation of Mary Baker Eddy, who insisted that "God is Mind, and God is infinite; hence all is mind," and of William Lloyd Garrison, who urged war in order to bring mankind "under the dominion of God, the control of an inward spirit, the government of the law of love." The peers of Lincoln, Brown, Eddy, and Garrison--born to heroic parents, indulged as children, fiery as youths, narcissistic as rising adults, and values-fixated entering midlife--ultimately chose to join technology and passion to achieve the maximum apocalypse then conceivable.⁴⁶

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

• 1792:
  John Keble, Frederick Marryat, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rossini, Thaddeus Stevens
• 1793:
  John Clare, Ferdinand Waldmüller, N. I. Lobachevsky
• 1794:
  Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Levi Bean (G8)
• 1795:
  Friedrich Wilhelm IV, John Keats, Thomas Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Leopold von Ranke, Augustin Thierry, Charles Barry, Pedro Albéniz, Heinrich Marschner, Rowland Hill, Thomas Carlyle, James K. Polk, Dred Scott
• 1796:
  W. H. Prescott, Karl Immermann, August von Platen, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Karl Loewe, John Hinchcliff (G8)
• 1797:
  Kaiser Wilhelm I, Annette von Droste-Hüllshoff, Jeremias Gotthelf, Heinrich Heine, Adolphe Thiers, Gaetano Donizetti, Franz Schubert, Sojourner Truth
• 1798:
  Willibald Alexis, Giacomo Leopardi, Adam Mickiewicz, Jules Michelet
• 1799:
  Honoré de Balzac, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, Ferdinand Delacroix, Vesta V. W. Francis (G8)
• 1800:
  Helmuth von Moltke, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Millard Fillmore, John Brown, Nat Turner, Susan Fry (G8)
• 1801:
  C. D. Grabbe, Johann Nestroy, John Henry Cardinal Newman, Joseph Paxton, Vincenzo Bellini, Joseph Lanner, Albert Lortzing, Brigham Young
• 1802:
  Lajos Kossuth, Alexandre Dumas père, Wilhelm Hauff, Victor Hugo, Nikolaus Lenau, Ludwig von Schwanthaler, Mary Phelps (G8)
• 1803:
  Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, A. G. Decamps, Gottfried Semper, Adolphe Adam, Hector Berlioz
• 1804:
  Benjamin Disraeli, C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eduard Mörike, George Sand (Amantine Dupine-Dudevant), Ludwig Feuerbach, Moritz von Schwind, M. I. Glinka, Johann Strauss, Franklin Pierce
• 1805:
  Giuseppe Mazzini, Hans Christian Andersen, Adalbert Stifter, Alexis de Tocqueville, William Lloyd Garrison
• 1806:
  Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Heinrich Laube, John Stuart Mill
• 1807:
  Giuseppe Garibaldi, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, F. T. Vischer, Robert E. Lee
• 1808:
  Napoleon III, Karl Spitzweg, Andrew Johnson, Jefferson Davis
• 1809:
  William Gladstone, Abraham Lincoln, Edward Fitzgerald, Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Felix Mendelssohn, Louis Braille
• 1810:
  Camillo (Count Cavour), Charles de Montalembert, Alfred de Musset, Robert Schumann, Phineas T. Barnum
• 1811:
  Napoleon II, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Théophile Gautier, Karl Gutzkow, W. M. Thackaray, Franz Liszt, Robert Bunsen, Margaret M. Wilson (G7)
• 1812:
  Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, I. A. Goncharov, Samuel Smiles, Zygmunt Krasinski, Joseph Ignatius Kraszewski, F. A. Tischbein, Friedrich von Flotow, Alfred Krupp
• 1813:
  Georg Büchner, Friedrich Hebel, Otto Ludwig, Sören Kierkegaard, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, David Livingstone, John Frémont, Artemas Edmands (G7)
• 1814:
  Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov, John Lothrop Motley, Jean François Millet, Mikhail Bakunin
• 1815:
  Otto von Bismarck, Emanuel Geibel, Anthony Trollope, Adolf Menzel, Robert Franz, Robert Volkmann, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• 1816:
  Charlotte Brontë, Gustav Freytag, Count Gobineau, E. W. Siemens
• 1817:
  Theodor Storm, Henry David Thoreau, Theodor Mommsen, Charles Daubigny, John Leech, G. F. Watts, Frederick Douglass
• 1818:
  Ivan Turgenev, James Anthony Froude, Karl Marx, Jakob Burckhardt, F. W. Raiffeisen
• 1819:
  Queen Victoria, Prince Consort Albert, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Theodor Fontane, Julia Ward Howe, Gottfried Keller, James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman, Gustave Courbet, John Ruskin, Jacques Offenbach, Clara Wiek-Schumann
• 1820:
  Comte de Chambord, Friedrich Engels, Herbert Spencer, Sir John Tenniel, Henri Vieuxtemps, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Tubman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Susan B. Anthony
• 1821:
  Charles Baudelaire, Feodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Baker Eddy, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Virchow

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