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A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 by Paul E. Johnson
4.0
Paul E. Johnson’s focused monograph, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York 1815-1837, tries to broadly outline some intensifiers of the Second Great Awakening in the United States—a religious revival movement that reached its apex during the 1820s and 1830s. Johnson uses Rochester as a case study to explore the success of Charles Finney’s 1831 revivals, not because it was representative of the United States but because it’s religious fervency was exceptional. Johnson uses the “New Social History” historiography that emphasizes bottom-up histories of the rank-and-file to detail large structural processes and explain change over time (xiii-xiv, 9). With his attention to social interaction, Johnson suggests that the Market Revolution collapsed certain social relationships as the middle-class created separate spaces for work and family life. “If religion is grounded in specific kinds of social relationships,” Johnson suggests, then precipitous religious change during the 1830s suggests underlying transformations in those specific relationships (14).
Johnson argues that the Rochester revivals catalyzed the formation of a middle-class culture and remedied its problem of legitimacy during a market revolution that introduced various social dislocations and tensions between entrepreneurs and wage earners. The middle-class in Rochester once exercised authority over apprentices and the working-class through close supervision that occurred in the master’s home, but during the Market Revolution the middle-class severed its spatial and social ties to the wage earners and found their authority waned over issues of morality, temperance, and productivity. Revival religion was a middle-class solution for the “problems of class, legitimacy, and order generated in the early stages of manufacturing” (138). The Market Revolution created significant social dislocations and because the market economy was driven by wage labor—and not skilled, independent artisans per se—the entrepreneurs needed an effective “social control” to discipline the workforce, increase production, and bridge the class divide. Hence, revivals stressed “work discipline and physical comportment” (138). Johnson carefully warns us not to interpret the Second Great Awakening in Rochester through the Marxist lens, as a conspiratorial religious design of the Victorian middle-class to produce a docile working-class. Rather Charles Finney’s revivals were an organic and authentic solution to problems besetting both the middle-class and wage earners in Rochester. Johnson details much genuine belief and faith and treats religious faith seriously.
Johnson organizes the work into three distinct parts: background to Finney’s revivals, the process of conversion in 1831, and the socio-political consequences of revival religion in Rochester. A primary claim (chapters 1-4) is that economic transformation made possible significant changes in Rochester’s community life and political order as the middle-class moved to village suburbs. These new middle-class community patterns created profound physical distance between merchants, entrepreneurs, and political elites in villages and the wage earner, artisan, stevedore, and shipper in urban Rochester. As the “sober and moral” elite severed its physical ties to the working-class they simultaneously rent the traditional political order—what had long been a “gentleman’s game” between the well-connected, founding families of Rochester became by the mid-1820s the soapbox of wage earners who cast ballots for politicians that protected, among other things, alcohol distribution and consumption.
The intersection of class and religion during the Second Great Awakening becomes especially clear during Finney’s revivals and the subsequent moral revolution in Rochester. Finney’s revival hit home with the entrepreneur class, by-and-large, but there existed more subtle gender relations at work in this mass conversion. When the middle-class vacated urban market centers after 1827, their households contained few workers and boarders. This thinning of the family gave rise to the middle-class nuclear family and elevated wives’ moral authority. “Hundreds of [male] conversions” occurred when men prayed with their wives—as women formed the nuclei of Finney’s movement—who presumably possessed greater affective capacity for religious and spiritual matters (108). The shopkeepers’ conversion made possible the widespread conversion of wage earners. Soon there was a sea change in Rochester’s moral politics as the working-class, middle-class and clergy rallied behind politicians that enforced temperance. Although some wage earners and bourgeoisie remained aloof of religion, many heeded revivalist ideology that stressed every man, woman, and child’s role in bringing about a Christian millennium through the eradication of vice. By the 1830s Protestant conversion and abstinence from drink symbolized the strong, capable worker—and many working-class men adhered to Christian precepts because it allowed upward mobility, employment, or spiritual fulfillment (125-127).
Given Johnson’s contention that women were crucial for the conversion of middle-class men during Finney’s revivals because of “their moral authority within families,” it’s unfortunate that women appear so scarcely in the narrative (108). The political debates between Sabattarians and Anti-Sabatarrians, Masons and Anti-Masons during the 1820s turned on the issue of using moral suasion or forceful prosecution to curb the moral excesses of the working-class. That suggests an effort on the part of elite entrepreneurs to discipline the working-class through extra-legal or legal means. Revival religion, of course, solved many of these moral problems and it was only first through the women, and not the male political elites, that Finney’s proscriptions affected the wage earners. Had Johnson plumbed women’s roles further it might suggest a deeper gender dynamic at play—maybe that middle-class (and perhaps working-class) women were at the fore of reforming the byproducts of the market revolution before their male counterparts.
A Shopkeeper’s Millennium is a cogently argued and historiographically innovative work on the social and religious consequences of the Market Revolution. Because individual converts and preachers composed the Second Great Awakening it makes a suitable topic for Johnson’s bottom-up, narrowly bounded case study that investigates individual conversion and motivations. Johnson’s social history is indispensable for understanding the larger structural processes that facilitated revival religion. Scholars and graduate students of religion, the Market Revolution, Jacksonian American, and the 19th century must read Paul Johnson’s little book to understand how the powerful social dislocations wrought by economic change can effect the religious and political change over time.
Johnson argues that the Rochester revivals catalyzed the formation of a middle-class culture and remedied its problem of legitimacy during a market revolution that introduced various social dislocations and tensions between entrepreneurs and wage earners. The middle-class in Rochester once exercised authority over apprentices and the working-class through close supervision that occurred in the master’s home, but during the Market Revolution the middle-class severed its spatial and social ties to the wage earners and found their authority waned over issues of morality, temperance, and productivity. Revival religion was a middle-class solution for the “problems of class, legitimacy, and order generated in the early stages of manufacturing” (138). The Market Revolution created significant social dislocations and because the market economy was driven by wage labor—and not skilled, independent artisans per se—the entrepreneurs needed an effective “social control” to discipline the workforce, increase production, and bridge the class divide. Hence, revivals stressed “work discipline and physical comportment” (138). Johnson carefully warns us not to interpret the Second Great Awakening in Rochester through the Marxist lens, as a conspiratorial religious design of the Victorian middle-class to produce a docile working-class. Rather Charles Finney’s revivals were an organic and authentic solution to problems besetting both the middle-class and wage earners in Rochester. Johnson details much genuine belief and faith and treats religious faith seriously.
Johnson organizes the work into three distinct parts: background to Finney’s revivals, the process of conversion in 1831, and the socio-political consequences of revival religion in Rochester. A primary claim (chapters 1-4) is that economic transformation made possible significant changes in Rochester’s community life and political order as the middle-class moved to village suburbs. These new middle-class community patterns created profound physical distance between merchants, entrepreneurs, and political elites in villages and the wage earner, artisan, stevedore, and shipper in urban Rochester. As the “sober and moral” elite severed its physical ties to the working-class they simultaneously rent the traditional political order—what had long been a “gentleman’s game” between the well-connected, founding families of Rochester became by the mid-1820s the soapbox of wage earners who cast ballots for politicians that protected, among other things, alcohol distribution and consumption.
The intersection of class and religion during the Second Great Awakening becomes especially clear during Finney’s revivals and the subsequent moral revolution in Rochester. Finney’s revival hit home with the entrepreneur class, by-and-large, but there existed more subtle gender relations at work in this mass conversion. When the middle-class vacated urban market centers after 1827, their households contained few workers and boarders. This thinning of the family gave rise to the middle-class nuclear family and elevated wives’ moral authority. “Hundreds of [male] conversions” occurred when men prayed with their wives—as women formed the nuclei of Finney’s movement—who presumably possessed greater affective capacity for religious and spiritual matters (108). The shopkeepers’ conversion made possible the widespread conversion of wage earners. Soon there was a sea change in Rochester’s moral politics as the working-class, middle-class and clergy rallied behind politicians that enforced temperance. Although some wage earners and bourgeoisie remained aloof of religion, many heeded revivalist ideology that stressed every man, woman, and child’s role in bringing about a Christian millennium through the eradication of vice. By the 1830s Protestant conversion and abstinence from drink symbolized the strong, capable worker—and many working-class men adhered to Christian precepts because it allowed upward mobility, employment, or spiritual fulfillment (125-127).
Given Johnson’s contention that women were crucial for the conversion of middle-class men during Finney’s revivals because of “their moral authority within families,” it’s unfortunate that women appear so scarcely in the narrative (108). The political debates between Sabattarians and Anti-Sabatarrians, Masons and Anti-Masons during the 1820s turned on the issue of using moral suasion or forceful prosecution to curb the moral excesses of the working-class. That suggests an effort on the part of elite entrepreneurs to discipline the working-class through extra-legal or legal means. Revival religion, of course, solved many of these moral problems and it was only first through the women, and not the male political elites, that Finney’s proscriptions affected the wage earners. Had Johnson plumbed women’s roles further it might suggest a deeper gender dynamic at play—maybe that middle-class (and perhaps working-class) women were at the fore of reforming the byproducts of the market revolution before their male counterparts.
A Shopkeeper’s Millennium is a cogently argued and historiographically innovative work on the social and religious consequences of the Market Revolution. Because individual converts and preachers composed the Second Great Awakening it makes a suitable topic for Johnson’s bottom-up, narrowly bounded case study that investigates individual conversion and motivations. Johnson’s social history is indispensable for understanding the larger structural processes that facilitated revival religion. Scholars and graduate students of religion, the Market Revolution, Jacksonian American, and the 19th century must read Paul Johnson’s little book to understand how the powerful social dislocations wrought by economic change can effect the religious and political change over time.