The Gilded Generation
1822–1842
“It is something great and greatening to cherish an ideal; to act in the light of truth that is far-away and far above; to set aside the near advantage, the momentary pleasure; the snatching of seeming good to self; and to act for remoter ends, for higher good, and for interests other than our own.”
Joshua Chamberlain, 1889
The Gilded Generation grew up during the great antebellum surge of expansion, reform, revival, slavery conflict, market development, and territorial ambition, then reached full adulthood in the shadow of the Civil War. Many Civil War soldiers came from this birth range, so the cohort’s experience is less that of the postwar “Gilded Age” elite than of men and women whose young adulthood was consumed by sectional crisis, military service, death, and disillusion.