JIGSAW GENS
Royal Raiders — The Combatant Microgeneration
As the youngest Magnas and the oldest Glory Warriors, this cusp of Americans was swept onto escalating continental battlefields
Most people would agree that ageism harms society. It’s dangerous to discount someone’s perspective based on the arbitrary measurement of numerical age per se. More often, life experience and good judgment are what fuel the wisdom of elders — but, likewise, these factors can also drive innovation amongst younger folks. And then there are middle-aged individuals who can espouse a combination of these attributes.
This aspiration for mutual respect and understanding serves as the foundation for intergenerational literacy. We can be compassionate without being overly-deferential. People can study history to put the anachronisms of past eras into proper context — yet, still propose alternate paths our ancestors could have taken, when looking at what present-day solutions for the future should be. Such a delicate balancing act constructs the foundation for “Jigsaw Gens” — my multi-part anthology series that examines how life has evolved for different age groups across time.
The following 27 generations comprise a framework for America’s historical evolution that has spanned close to four centuries…
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
But generations aren’t a hard science. There are grey areas — or “buffer zones” — that massage the cracks between where one generation ends and the next generation begins. Such is the concept of “microgenerations.” Approximately five years in length, these are the cusps that connect the generational spectrum as a sort of “sliding scale.”
Lost to popular culture is one microgenerational “cusp” born as the late-1650s became the early-1660s. They are known, within my “Jigsaw Gens” lexicon, as the Royal Raiders.
Who They Are
Royal Raiders were born approximately between 1657 to 1661 — give or take a couple of years on either end. This timeframe for their birthyears covers a range where the youngest Magnas grew into the oldest Glory Warriors. During their salad years, anti-Catholic sentiments persisted as the British colonized the Carolinas. They watched their elders fight in the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars. Upon hitting puberty, Royal Raiders saw trade policy get rocked by the Navigation Acts, French colonization of La Louisiane, and the Iroquois turning against the French. Their teens, twenties, and thirties were punctuated by some of the bloodiest conflicts to date — including King Philip’s War, King William’s War, and the Salem Witch Trials.
I call them Royal Raiders because they were in the prime of their lives during the Nine Years’ War, when “Yeoman” became a significant rank in England’s Royal Navy. They’d been exposed to the Beaver Wars throughout the first four decades of their lives. The Royal Raiders’ Kingdomite and Cavalier parents had taught them to be prepared for unexpected pillaging or massacres from whoever happened to be their enemies at a given point in time. When this cohort inched closer to middle age themselves, nearly a decade’s worth of Queen Anne’s War reinforced this paradigm.
Nearing the twilight of their lives, Royal Raiders watched additional battles unfold: the Tuscarora War, the late-1720s Anglo-Spanish War, the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the War of Austrian Succession, and King George’s War. Some of them lived long enough to experience the first decade or two of The First Great Awakening. But they were mostly deceased by the time George II and George III attempted to prohibit paper money in the Colonies.
I’ve identified Royal Raiders as “the Combatant Microgeneration” because they were plunked down into a chain of wars instigated by monarchial greed. During the second half of the Seventeenth Century, troops dispatched by England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands faced off in various combinations. Indigenous Tribes fought off European encroachment, either offensively or defensively. Some Tribal Nations aligned with specific European factions to gain leverage or strategic positioning.
It was an era when kings and chiefs sent their warriors to be slaughtered — using tenets such as national pride, self-preservation, or moral authority as a pretense.
Their Early Lives
Prior to the births of Royal Raiders, Peter Stuyvesant and Josias Fendall had risen to power in the aftermath of Charles I’s decapitation. Oppression was normalized against Catholics, Quakers, Swedes, kidnapped Indigenous persons, and enslaved Africans. This cusp would be raised in a world where authority figures killed Mary Dyer along with other Boston Martyrs for nothing more than free exercise of belief.
Consequently, Royal Raider kids formed early convictions as to where their morals stood. Did they support the Half-Way Covenant’s openminded path? Were they supportive of, or opposed to, attempts at christianizing Indigenous tribes? Would they view partus sequitur ventrem as racist…or the Anglo-Dutch Wars as nationalist?
Their Kingdomite and Cavalier parents hoped for some semblance of “normalcy” following the conclusion of the Anglo-Dutch Wars. But it was not to be. Charles II’s rise following Oliver Cromwell’s death — as well as John Locke planting the cerebral seeds for natural rights — guaranteed that colonial peace would be short-lived.
When They Came-of-Age
Compared to the previous cusp (Emerald Knights), life expectancy creeped upward for the Royal Raider cohort. It became somewhat more common for Royal Raiders to survive at least into their mid-thirties. For those who made it to their forties and beyond, there was some potential for living long lives.
As teenagers, they were onlookers as William Berkeley solidified the standard for voting rights to be exclusively granted to people who were White and male and landowning. The English settled Charles Town (in present-day South Carolina), while the French sent Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet to explore the Mississippi River Valley. Colonization would only sharpen following the surrender and assassination of Wampanoag chief Metacomet. John Usher was instrumental as far as introducing printing privileges into the Colonies.
American colonists of British descent saw how the Crown had driven back the Dutch. They knew it was only a matter of time before they were next. Massachusetts Bay Colony rejected the notion of giving Charles II carte blanche over their daily lives. The Battle of Bloody Brook sent English troops a dire warning, followed up by armed clashes over classism as symbolized via Bacon’s Rebellion. Popular discontent with taxation manifested through Culpeper’s Rebellion.
Throughout the rest of the 1670s and into the 1680s, power players modeled behavior for Royal Raiders in terms of increased land expansion or migration. The French scouted out Niagara Falls, whereas the English chartered the Province of New Hampshire. Louis XIV of France drove French Huguenots to North America. 1678’s Treaty of Casco attempted to balance tensions between Great Britain and Indigenous Tribal Nations; a quarter-century later, the treaty’s second iteration reawakened those conflicts by dragging France into them.
In the years leading up to the first French and Indian Wars, Royal Raiders prepared for young adulthood. The French claimed La Louisiane. Gove’s Rebellion gave the British an excuse to make examples out of rebels while pressuring the Six Nations into surrendering more land. As King James II & VII took the throne, William Penn preached equilibrium between obedience and liberty.
How They Shaped The World
1688 was a significant year for the then-thirtysomething Royal Raiders. Along with “The Glorious Revolution” beginning, it was when the Dominion of New England’s Edmund Andros initiated King William’s War. Quakers petitioned monarchs to end slavery. Wheels began turning to carry out The Toleration Act. Unpopular sentiments against Andros triggered 1689’s Boston Revolt. Leisler’s Rebellion further highlighted fury toward the ruling elite.
By 1692, the Salem Witch Trials had begun. John Willard — himself of the Royal Raider microgeneration — was accused of witchcraft and hanged. As colonists realized what a dire mistake such paranoia was, the Cambridge Association and the College of William & Mary were founded. Institutions such as these marked a shift away from knee-jerk hysteria amongst royalists.
Royal Raiders had aged into their forties when King William’s War ended. At the turn of the century, they juggled enlightenment with subjugation. James Pierpont and his followers founded Yale Collegiate School in 1701; that same year, William Penn advanced tenets for democracy and individualism through his “Charter of Privileges.”
Yet, around this same time, anti-Black “slave codes” were enshrined to bolster enslavement of African-descended people. Fort Detroit gave the French a new gateway into North American fur-trading. Through its occupation of La Louisiane, France enslaved members of the Chitimacha tribe.
In his fifties, Josiah Franklin Sr. (of the Royal Raider microgeneration) alongside of wife Abiah Folger Franklin (of the Glory Warrior generation) saw the birth of their son, Benjamin. Unbeknownst to most people of this time, Ben Franklin would become a key leader for a new American chapter of diplomacy, science, and civics. Quakers slowly gained respect and tolerance. George I’s reign signaled a weakening of the British monarchy. The Yamasee War expanded British colonization of the Carolinas while pushing Indigenous tribes westward.
Even as the French populated New Orleans, Spaniards erected the Alamo in San Antonio. Spain’s surrender of Pensacola to France portended upcoming clashes between England, France, and Spain.
Their Golden Years
By the mid-to-late 1720s, Royal Raiders were dying in much larger numbers. The British used Fort Dummer as a buffer from Indigenous tribes and the French. Alumni of Princeton’s “Log College” created a cerebral nexus that would spur The First Great Awakening. Warfare between the years of 1727 and 1729 enflamed Anglo/Hispanic rivalries.
There was a small segment of Royal Raiders who lived into the 1730s. They saw the rise of Methodist and Catholic leadership, philosophy, libraries — and a few of them even wore rudimentary bifocals that may have served as models for the more advanced eyewear popularized by Ben Franklin himself in the 1780s.
The Royal Raiders’ longest-living members watched Franklin’s rise in the heyday of his publishing career (e.g. Poor Richard’s Almanac) and legacy of inventions (e.g. the Franklin Stove). This was juxtaposed against restrictive trade and manufacturing policies on goods such as headwear, molasses, and iron.
At the same time, Lenape and Iroquois tribes lost significant amounts of land to deceptive colonial authority figures. Irish refugees fled from European famine. The Stono Rebellion put enslavers on notice that Black people were done sacrificing their own humanity. John Peter Zenger helped freedom of the press become a mainstream American value.
Royal Raiders didn’t live long enough to witness the adoption of the Gregorian calendar — although many members of the Glory Warrior generation would. As they faded from Earth, Royal Raiders must have wondered how long the stark economic divides between colonists and royalists could be drawn out before the Colonies tore themselves apart.
Here are 10 prominent Americans from the Royal Raider cohort:
Members of the previous microgenerations were named…
Colonial Zygotes | Turnip Squeezers | Starving Timers
Long Climbers | Rumpus Rebels | Emerald Knights
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