The Progressive Generation
1843–1859
“Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world—and never will.”
Mark Twain, 1887
The Progressive Generation were children and adolescents during the Civil War, young enough to be shaped by it as trauma and household atmosphere and who hence grew up cautious under the memory of national rupture. They supplied many of the sober reformers, administrators, educators, jurists, and institutional critics who sought to tame the violence, corruption, inequality, and industrial excesses of the late nineteenth century.