A good way to understand the men and women who created America’s reform tradition and carried it across the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War is to look at the political heritage their parents and grandparents left to them. The very idea of generations resonated with new meaning after independence. The conveyance of social responsibility from one generation to another is always a fascinating interplay of the inherited and the novel, but the American Revolution was a social and political rupture that clouded the future for young Americans. Together they faced a new way of life in a new nation.
While this attachment within the generation that inherited the Revolution weakened traditional loyalties, it also held out the promise of creating a new political will that would extend across the continent. The Revolutionary leader Gouverneur Morris expressed this hope when he wrote that a “national spirit is the natural result of national existence; and although some of the present generation may feel colonial oppositions of opinion, that generation will die away, and give place to a race of Americans.”[1]