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 Liberty Generation sits between the Great Awakening and the Revolution. It includes George Washington and John Adams, along with a large share of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, but its members were generally not the young ideological children of independence so much as the hardened adults who bore the practical risks of rebellion. Its character is therefore martial, skeptical, property-minded, and liberty-minded: a generation trained by revival, empire, frontier conflict, and distrust of distant authority.