The Awakening Generation
1701–1723
“Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.”
Horace Walpole
The Awakening Generation was the first colonial generation consisting mostly of children of native-born colonial parents rather than immigrants. Its great formative event was the religious revivalism of the Great Awakening, mainly between about the 1720s and 1740s in the British American colonies. Its members, including Benjamin Franklin, inherited a more settled colonial world but attacked what they saw as the moral complacency of their elders, making this cohort restless, disputatious, evangelical, and philosophically self-conscious.