The Liberty Generation
1724–1741
“Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.”
Thomas Paine, 1776
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.