Transcendental Generation

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Western Generations This box: view • talk • edit
Term	Period
Awakening Generation	1701–1723
First Great Awakening	1727–1746
Liberty Generation Republican Generation Compromise Generation	1724–1741 1742–1766 1767–1791
Second Great Awakening	1790–1844
Transcendentalist Generation Transcendental Generation Abolitionist Generation Gilded Generation Progressive Generation	1789–1819 1792–1821 1819–1842 1822–1842 1843–1859
Third Great Awakening	1886–1908
Missionary Generation Lost Generation Interbellum Generation G.I. Generation Greatest Generation	1860–1882 1883–1900 1900–1910 1900–1924 1911–1924
Jazz Age	1929–1956
Silent Generation Baby Boomers Beat Generation Generation Jones	1925–1945 1946–1964 1948–1962 1954–1962
Consciousness Revolution	1964–1984
Baby Busters Generation X MTV Generation	1958–1968 1963–1978 1975–1985
Culture Wars	1980s–present
Boomerang Generation Generation Y Internet Generation New Silent Generation	1977–1986 1979–1999 1988–1999 2000–2020

The Transcendental Generation is the name given by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book Generations for that generation of Americans born between 1792 and 1821. The proud offspring of a secular new nation, this generation included the first children to be portraited (and named at birth) as individuals. Coming of age as evangelists, reformers, and campus rioters, they triggered the Second Great Awakening, a spiritual paroxysm across the nation. As crusading young adults, their divergent inner visions exacerbated sectional divisions. Entering midlife, graying abolitionists and Southerners spurned compromise and led the nation into the American Civil War, their zeal fired by the moral pronouncements of an aging clergy. The victors achieved emancipation but were blocked from imposing a peace as punishing as the old radicals would like to have wished. In elderhood, their feminists and poets (many with flowing beards) became unyielding expositors of truth and justice.

The Transcendentals' typical grandparents were of the Liberty Generation. Their parents were of the Republican Generation and Compromise Generation. Their children were of the Gilded Generation and Progressive Generation and their typical grandchildren were of the Missionary Generation.

Altogether, there were about 11 million Americans born from 1792 to 1821. 20 percent were immigrants and 13 percent were slaves at any point in their lives.

[edit] Members

Sample Transcendentals with birth and death dates as this generation is fully ancestral include the following:

1792 Thaddeus Stevens (1868)
1793 Sam Houston (1863)
1795 Dred Scott (1858)
1797 Sojourner Truth (1883)
1800 John Brown (1859)
1800 Nat Turner (1831)
1801 Brigham Young (1877)
1803 Ralph Waldo Emerson (1882)
1805 Joseph Smith, Jr. (1844)
1805 William Lloyd Garrison (1879)
1807 Robert E. Lee (1870)
1807 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1882)
1807 Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1890)
1808 Jefferson Davis (1889)
1809 Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
1810 P.T. Barnum (1891)
1811 Harriet Beecher Stowe (1896)
1813 John C. Frémont (1890)
1815 Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1902)
1817 Frederick Douglass (1895)
1817 Henry David Thoreau (1862)
1819 Walt Whitman (1892)
c. 1820 Harriet Tubman (1913)
1820 William Tecumseh Sherman (1891)
1820 Susan B. Anthony (1906)
1821 Mary Baker Eddy (1910)

The Transcendentals had five U.S. Presidents:

1795 James K. Polk, 1845-1849 (1849)
1800 Millard Fillmore, 1850-1853 (1874)
1804 Franklin Pierce, 1853-1857 (1869)
1808 Andrew Johnson, 1865-1869 (1875)
1809 Abraham Lincoln, 1861-1865 (1865)

The Transcendentals held a plurality in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1835 to 1869, a plurality in the U.S. Senate from 1841 to 1873, and the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1861 to 1889.

Sample cultural endowments of the Transcendentals include the following: