Bottled Beacons — The Salad Bowl Microgeneration
As the youngest Lumineers and the oldest Enlightening Rods, this cusp of Americans was born into the Salem Witch Trials but faded away amidst the Revolutionary War
In the last decade or so, there’s been an unprecedented emphasis on the question of to which generation a person belongs. For some reason, this appears to be a uniquely-American phenomenon. While it can be somewhat interesting, it’s also — in many cases — quite vapid and frivolous.
After all, who honestly believes that an individual’s worth and value is tied to the arbitrary birthyear in which they happened to be born? At the risk of sounding clichéd: calendars don’t care about our feelings. “Good” and “evil,” as blandly as they can be defined, exist within every generation. This simple lesson forms the foundation for my “Jigsaw Gens” series — a historical anthology comparing and contrasting how various American generations have been socialized.
Beginning in the Summer of 2023, I began profiling 27 generational cohorts within the context of American history and our resulting sociology…
Parliamentarians | Concentrics | Inflectors
Kingdomites | Cavaliers | Magnas
Glory Warriors | Lumineers | Enlightening Rods
Septennials | Liberty Lords | Goodpublicans
Madisonians | Unimpressionists | Transcendentals
Redeemers | Golden Renegades | Stowegressives
Missionaries | Hemingrebels | GI-Gens
Traditionalists | Baby Boomers | GenXers
Millennials | Zoomers | Alphas
None of this is a hard science. But, in general, each generation is assigned a span of between 12–15 years (where that span begins or ends, on the other hand, is often up for intense debate amongst researchers). Since not all of these endpoint calendar years are iron-clad, it’s helpful to have an informal “buffer zone” that closes a gap between the very youngest members of one generation with the very oldest members of the subsequent generation.
Today, I’d like to introduce you to a microgenerational “cusp” of Americans who were born during the early-1690s. I’ve nicknamed them the Bottled Beacons.
Who They Are
Bottled Beacons were born approximately between 1691 to 1695 — give or take a couple of years on either end. They form a Venn diagram between the youngest Lumineers and the oldest Enlightening Rods. Much of their lives ran concurrent to the life of America’s first prominent botanist, John Bartram (leading me to the “salad bowl” analogy). They would be the “Witch Trial Babies” — with no active memories of the Salem Witch Trials themselves, but told about that horrid period by firsthand accounts from their older siblings, parents, and grandparents.
They were the only microgenerational cohort to see their entire lifetimes span the full length of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. They lived during “The First Great Awakening,” having fought in some of the battles between the British Crown and Indigenous Tribal Nations. For those who made it to middle age, they existed alongside of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the War of Austrian Succession, and the final phases of the French and Indian Wars.
I have labeled Bottled Beacons as “the Salad Bowl Microgeneration” because the intermingling of Black, White, Latine, and Indigenous cultures intensified in the future United States during their lifetimes. Their lives began as America was beginning to shed itself of overly-puritanical norms, and their eldest members died at the dawn of the American Revolutionary War. In-between, warfare and community organizing took shape in rather prophetic ways.
Hence, their lifetimes (during which the lightning rod was invented) served as a “beacon” for drastic changes to future centuries of American history. In this respect, the mashup of “Bottled Beacon” is quite apt.
Their Early Lives
Born smack in the middle of King William’s War, Bottled Beacons surfaced within our universe in the thick of the Salem Witch Trials. As youngsters, they were raised in a world where college education had become a greater aspiration…although still mostly accessible only to those with the most privilege. Yale, St. John’s, and William & Mary gained notable reputations at the turn of this century.
As the Bottled Beacons learned how to walk and talk, some major legislative changes were occurring. The British Parliament’s Triennial Act of 1694 mandated that it must convene at least once every three years. Two years later, an additional Navigation Act tightened British regulations over trade in the Colonies. Europe’s Nine Years’ War ended, with Spain and France reaching a territorial truce through the Treaty of Ryswick. As a consequence, England rose to be a greater maritime power.
Prior to the beginning of Queen Anne’s War, France established Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit along the future Lake Erie. Even as William Penn’s “Charter of Privileges” built a foundation for long-lasting religious liberty, England accelerated its efforts to sabotage France and Spain from achieving North American dominance. These brutal power moves included Virginian “slave codes” and 1704’s Apalachee Massacre.
As they ventured through childhood and into adolescence, Bottled Beacons also were the first cohort born into a world where the first American paper mill touched the lives of colonists. Wood pulp wouldn’t become the default until the mid-Nineteenth Century; but crude paper material made from the remnants of cloth rags was introduced during these kids’ early lives.
When They Came-of-Age
With life expectancy slowly improving in the American Colonies, your average Bottled Beacon would die sometime in their forties. The most significant events of their teenaged years were the Tuscarora and Yamasee Wars. While rearing young families of their own, this cusp beheld the upgrade of Yale Collegiate School as it transformed into Yale College.
Around the time Ben Franklin (of the Enlightening Rod generation) was born, adolescent Bottled Beacons saw Indigenous displacement become more frequent crimes committed by colonial governments. French slaughter of the Chitimacha Tribe was only the beginning. Tribal Nations such as the Creek, the Catawba, and the Cherokee surrendered their ancestral lands in exchange for the false promise of military protection and essential supplies.
In contrast to previous decades, Quakers were slowly gaining tolerance and respect amongst the general public. The Treaty of Utrecht signaled Spain’s downfall in terms of expansion throughout the Western Hemisphere; it refocused international tensions on the heightening competition between France and England. Ascending to the British throne, King George I steadily left the American Colonies to their own devices in many areas of daily life.
As the 1710s wound down, Antonio de Olivares proceeded to found San Antonio, which reignited Spanish colonization in the future American Southwest. Similarly, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville’s founding of New Orleans created the first major Caribbean port city. But these cities also furthered enslavement of Black and Brown people, specifically Tejanos and Afro-Creoles.
How They Shaped The World
Bottled Beacons spent their thirties seeing literacy and philosophy become more valued within American society. This occurred as British imperialists reevaluated their competition with the French in the time period between Queen Anne’s War and King George’s War. They erected Fort Dummer to fend off French and Indigenous rivals.
At the same time, British colonists learned of French soldiers seizing Pensacola from Spaniards in 1719. The colonization race on the European continent between Spain and England carried over to North American Colonies. A little bit of that warfare penetrated the Caribbean. Much of the brewing British/Spanish tension was based on prior cross-continental showdowns between France and England or between Spain and France.
While in their forties, Bottled Beacons formed opinions on libel law, accessed new compendiums of knowledge, and endured taxation of clothing and edibles. Indigenous Bottled Beacons found themselves and their families increasingly displaced from tribal lands. White Bottled Beacons who immigrated specifically from Ireland were escaping famine during the “Year of Slaughter” only to face ethnic segregation and economic squalor on the other side of the Atlantic.
In the mid-Eighteenth Century, Black enslaved people were viewed as nothing more than property. The Stono Rebellion of 1739 and New York City’s Slave Insurrection of 1741 cemented this reality; colonial provinces clamped down even more intensely on the behavior and free movement of slaves. Despite this lack of humanity, countless Black soldiers chose to fight on the side of the American Patriots during the upcoming Revolutionary War battles.
As fiftysomethings, the surviving Bottled Beacons became grandparents and, in some cases, great-grandparents. Some attained more efficient lifestyles through usage of the Franklin Stove, the Leyden Jar, and the lightning rod. Indigenous and White members of the Bottled Beacon cohort led additional land negotiations resulting in 1744’s Treaty of Lancaster. By mid-century, American Colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar.
But British dominance wasn’t destined to last. Additional regulations on manufacturing and banking gave colonists newfound thirsts for self-sufficiency. Yet, the threat from French troops led to British-aligned Americans forming 1754’s Albany Congress so they could construct new defense policy. That same year, Ben Franklin sketched the “Join, or Die” logo — which would soon be repurposed as a symbol of the Patriot cause.
Their Golden Years
During this cohort’s twilight years, Franklin bestowed many new innovations upon the Colonies: the phonetic alphabet, the three-wheel clock, the glass armonica (“rhythmic idiophone”), and the travel odometer. Around the same time, David Rittenhouse was making notable strides in the field of astronomy.
In the 1760s, Bottled Beacons took their place atop the mantle as society’s elders. They’d surpassed the Annus Mirabilis of 1759 — signifying the military successes of William Pitt, eventually winning the Seven Years’ War on behalf of the British Empire.
Rumblings for American independence grew. Samuel Adams, James Otis Jr., Pontiac, John Hancock, Paul Revere, James Burd, Crispus Attucks, Joseph Warren, Benjamin Edes, John Elder, Thomas Young, and James Smith became some of the earliest revolutionary figures during that decade leading up to the Boston Massacre. After the Proclamation Line of 1763 failed, Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Uprising was almost inevitable. The British added fuel to the fire by clamping down on debt resolution, molasses production, mail postage, and Westward Expansion.
Due to their age, Bottled Beacons were largely spectators or advisors in these conflicts. More and more of them perished from geriatric illness or natural causes as civil unrest continued to bubble — the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Acts, Massachusetts’s Convention of Towns, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the Intolerable Acts peppered their old age.
Everything came to a head as the First Continental Congress was created. By the time that the Second Continental Congress had ended, this Bottled Beacon microgeneration had completely died out.
Bottled Beacons spent their lifetimes bookending some of Colonial America’s most watershed events. They were conceived and introduced to this world as the Province of Massachusetts Bay arose in the midst of the Salem Witch Trials and the French and Indian War. The last of them faded from existence as the Declaration of Independence was signed and the American Revolution began to heat up.
Here are 10 prominent Americans from the Bottled Beacon cohort:
Members of the previous microgenerations were named…
Colonial Zygotes | Turnip Squeezers | Starving Timers
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