The Compromise Generation
1767–1791
“Lay down true principles and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendency of the people.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1816
The Compromise Generation is the cohort “rocked in the cradle of the Revolution”: too young to be the main authors of independence, but old enough to inherit its consequences. Their political temperament is imagined as more cautious, managerial, and stabilizing than visionary. Their world was the early republic of constitutional settlement, party formation, westward expansion, and recurrent attempts to hold together forces that the Revolution had unleashed but not resolved.