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A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 by Paul E. Johnson
A quarter-century after its first publication, A Shopkeeper's Millennium remains a landmark work--brilliant both as a new interpretation of the intimate connections among politics, economy, and religion during the Second Great Awakening, and as a surprising portrait of a rapidly growing frontier city. The religious revival that transformed America in the 1820s, making it the most militantly Protestant nation on earth and spawning reform movements dedicated to temperance and to the abolition of slavery, had an especially powerful effect in Rochester, New York. Paul E. Johnson explores the reasons for the revival's spectacular success there, suggesting important links between its moral accounting and the city's new industrial world. In a new preface, he reassesses his evidence and his conclusions in this major work.
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First published January 1, 1978
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July 16, 2009
A fascinating, subtle, and immensely valuable study, but I have some important reservations from the author's conclusions. To explain, I shall have to write at length.
In A Shopkeeper's Millennium, Paul Johnson argues that American revivalism in the early nineteenth century was a product of class conflict, not (as often assumed) individual social insecurity. Evangelicalism, according to Johnson, was not primarily a means for the mobile economic individualist to find meaning in life; it was instead a way for a dominant class of manufacturing proprietors to restore order to a community full of unpoliced and politically restive workingmen. Johnson uses the town of Rochester, New York, as a case study to prove his claim -- not because Rochester was representative, Johnson explains, but because it was an extraordinary case. (This raises questions, but I do not object in principle.) Rochester was unusual in the rapid pace of its growth -- it mushroomed from virtual emptiness in 1815 to a population of 18,000 by 1840 -- and in its status as the focal point of upstate New York revivalism in 1831. It thus provides Johnson with a particularly well-defined example of economic change and evangelistic fervor.
Johnson begins by tracing changes in the Rochester economy and in local society and politics in the 1820s. From the beginning, he explains, Rochester was a mill town; its importance stemmed from its excellent falls as much as its position along the Erie Canal. Although it was a commercial depot and manufacturing center, therefore, the village's economy depended on local agriculture and on the relationships among local landed proprietors, who relied on mutual trust to govern their business dealings. Among these owners, Johnson argues, kinship ties remained strong throughout the period. Relatively few upstarts or migrants gained entrance to the ranks of the wealthy, and these relied on patronage and on the forging of new family ties. Even in 1837, Johnson observes, more than two-thirds of the members of the Rochester elite were "tied by blood, marriage, or business association" to the elite of 1827, even though this was an economically tumultuous decade. The entrepreneurs of the city, the merchants, millers, and master craftsmen, had firm ties with the landowners of the region, and they were the social class who responded most readily to Charles Finney's conversion call in 1831. In other words, the men who made the revival were not lone "normless men on the make"; they were respectable and secure men of the community.
However, Johnson notes that the modes of work were changing in the 1820s. With this change came an erosion of elite power to supervise the workingmen's lives. At the beginning of the decade, Rochester manufacturing was conducted largely on a household craft model. Laborers typically lived with their employers and worked in the same physical space, with little division between the activities of fabrication and merchandising. Masters often considered their employees as members of their families, and they socialized freely with them, sharing liquor with them as a matter of daily routine and providing a certain amount of family discipline. During the economic boom, however, as Rochester shops began selling products (most notably shoes) to a wider region, employers began sending work out to other houses. And within their own shops, they withdrew to a separate space from the one occupied by their employees -- who became the vast majority of the city population, a transient and often unskilled pool of labor. The owner or foreman became a member of a distinct class. At home, furthermore, the middle class lived in increasingly exclusive neighborhoods -- albeit neighborhoods abutting all the noise and filth of the working-class sections of town, causing growing unease in respectable society. In 1828, the Rochester middle class hit upon a solution to their inability to police the lives of the autonomous working class: they introduced a strenuous campaign to restrict the sale and consumption of liquor, and they began by trying to set an example of temperance in their own lives. Alcohol, which had been a general feature of sociability among all classes of men, became a symbol of working-class intractability. However, the local government proved almost powerless to enforce restrictions on spirits; in 1827, the state of New York had adopted white manhood suffrage, and the unpropertied voters of Rochester were not exactly eager to have their drinking habits controlled by their employers. The same was the fate of a "Sabbatarian" campaign by some devout merchants who wished to stop business on Sundays and who offended others by trying to boycott firms that operated on the Lord's day.
Politics stymied the Rochester wealthy in another way as well. In the early 1820s, Rochester's government had been dominated by the great proprietors of land -- in particular, the family "connection" of Colonel Nathaniel Rochester and that of Matthew Brown. These rival factions affiliated with factions in the New York legislature, the Bucktails and the Clintonians respectively, in competing bids for state patronage. (Nathaniel Rochester had begun the struggle by securing from the Bucktails the naming of his town as county seat, whose county buildings would be surrounded by his own property, and then a bank controlled by his family and friends, which Clintonians took over a year later.) But this genteel rivalry lost its appeal to Colonel Rochester later in the decade. The reason was a public campaign by the Antimasonic Party, which accused the town elite of orchestrating and covering up the murder of William Morgan, a Rochester stonemason who had planned to expose the secrets of the Freemasons. As it turned out, the Rochester/Bucktail faction was full of Masons, and the public battles that ensued brought a new breed of middle-class politicians to office in opposition. Meanwhile, on the side of the working class, the Democratic Party was organizing to resist the efforts of the temperance and Sabbatarian busybodies, with a great deal of success. "To put it simply," Johnson writes, "politics was no longer a gentleman's game."
Facing Democrats with a powerful popular appeal on the one hand, and demoralized by the Antimasons on the other, the respectable citizens of Rochester seemed to have lost political control of their city. Furthermore, they were furious with each other. Culturally, the city elite now had a loose Antimasonic/temperance/Sabbatarian coalition trading invective with a loose Democratic/Masonic/anti-Sabbatarian coalition. Members of these factions often shared church pews and kinship. They glared at each other in public places, and as a result, according to Johnson, "the life went out of Rochester Protestantism." Between 1828 and 1830, church membership stagnated and Christian zeal hardened into resentment.
Into this fractious city came the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney in September 1830, invited by a disappointed Sabbatarian merchant, Josiah Bissell. (Bissell explained that Rochesterians had a "large budget of evils rolling through our land & among us" along the canal, and that the citizens "know not the power of the Gospel of Jesus" to stop the corruption. One is amused to note that Finney himself also arrived on the canal.) The revival instigated by Finney, a powerful rhetorician trained in law, healed the riven elite of Rochester. It was, Johnson stresses, a communal movement. Finney did not appeal to isolated individuals. Instead, he sent church members door to door and into neighbors' homes to talk with their wives; he called people to public prayer meetings that lasted to dawn; he encouraged householders to lead family devotions. These methods were wildly successful. Citizens packed church buildings to the point of damaging them; different denominations cooperated with each other to evangelize the city; Rochesterians who recently had not been speaking to each other gathered for prayer and testimony. The city, Johnson writes, was witnessing "the collective regeneration of a fragmented churchgoing community." However, the churchgoers came overwhelmingly from the middle class.
Two key pieces of evidence come into play at this point in Johnson's story. This first wave of revival was not only middle-class. It was also most successful among middle-class men in certain lines of work. Among the converted bourgeois, the least commonly represented men were hotelkeepers, merchants, doctors, small shopkeepers, and lawyers. These were the men least involved in the canal trade or in work that required numerous employees; they were carrying on their business in town as usual. The most commonly converted men, on the other hand, were grocers (the most important sellers of spirits), forwarding merchants, master builders, and master shoemakers. These latter occupations, Johnson argues, were the ones most affected by changes in the Rochester class structure. These men were the manufacturers who no could longer supervise their workingmen, or they were the men responsible for bringing uncouth canal workers into Rochester and supporting their drinking habits. The converted also, interestingly enough, tended to have smaller households. Fewer of the revival converts were living with extended family, boarders, or employees. They had embraced, Johnson suggests, an idea of bourgeois "domestic privacy."
Johnson argues that evangelical theology provided these men and their families with a way to come to terms with their loss of authority, but also with a new strategy for maintaining social control. By emphasizing individual responsibility before God, he writes, revivalism freed the middle class of guilt for their inability to keep order among the workingmen. They learned that only a changed heart, not submission to external control, could be expected to keep a man in line. At the same time, a changing of individual hearts looked like a very powerful way to regenerate society. The converts of the 1831 revival expected their experience to help usher in the millennium as they brought the good news to their fellow citizens and exhorted them to join in the project of spiritual reform. They lost none of their zeal for banning alcohol or gambling, but now, they could call upon the convert's enthusiasm and his desire to be a good witness of the gospel to prevent him from countenancing vice. Thus, they turned to the business of reaching other classes of society with the good news.
As Johnson acknowledges, they achieved considerable success in this. Although the 1831 revival affected the middle class almost exclusively, the next few years saw the revival spread to the workingmen as a result of a deliberate effort by the richer evangelicals. Between 1832 and 1837, 42 percent of new church members were journeymen craftsmen, and a working-class Methodist church was the largest congregation in the city by 1834. The middle-class churches helped struggling working-class counterparts (including a black church) with financial problems, and they also established schools and a savings bank to teach workers how to live responsibly. These efforts, Johnson believes, were motivated by a genuine sense of Christian mission; the converts were "build(ing) up the Kingdom of Christ in Rochester." But there was something misleading about the workingmen's turn to religion. Without disregarding the spiritual satisfaction it could provide, Johnson suspects that "the most powerful source of the workingmen's revival was the simple, coercive fact that wage earners worked for men who insisted on seeing them in church." To be a good Christian was worth good money; for the subordinate, it was a way to retain an employer's good opinion, and for the ambitious, it was one's certification of respectability. As evidence, Johnson adduces his finding that churchgoing wage earners were as much as three-and-a-half times as likely to settle in town as the unchurched. Churchgoing journeymen were nearly three times as likely to become master craftsmen (owning their own shops) as non-churchgoers were. And some employers simply advertised their unwillingness to hire heathens. In Rochester, the vast majority of journeymen and laborers lived unsettled lives and moved through the city quickly looking for work, but conversion allowed some of them to fix a job and a home there. Religion was a way either to claim the patronage of the middle class or, in same cases, to join it. Without Christian piety, the workingman now hardly stood a chance economically.
Finally, Johnson explains, the revivals allowed the wealthy of Rochester to come back together politically in the 1830s. In the spring of 1834, a group of leading citizens -- including Episcopalians, a Baptist, and a Presbyterian, and including both Masons and Antimasons -- met in the offices of the Anti-Masonic Enquirer to organize the Whig Party. This new party, Johnson observes, "embodied a startling reconciliation of differences among the churchgoing elite" -- and it embodied their Protestant Christian zeal for reform. This party would challenge the Democratic Party, which was hostile to all kinds of moral regulations and which embraced populist rhetoric. Johnson reduces the difference between these parties to an "argument over means"; the Whigs were willing to use the state to enforce sobriety and economic discipline on the American people, and the Democrats were not. Unlike in the 1820s, when it divided against itself on this question, the Rochester elite was now animated by singleminded religious zeal. The revivals had renewed the political coherence of the middle class.
In his afterword, Johnson briefly looks beyond Rochester to other cities in western New York and in the middle west. He notes that other studies have found evidence of a similar pattern in the revivals of the Second Great Awakening elsewhere: they were strongest in mill and manufacturing towns, not in commercial centers, and they were most persuasive among masters and employees in manufacturing.
Johnson tells this complicated story well. This is an admirable book. But as I said at the beginning of this review, I have some reservations. I'm going to try to explain where I disagree.
I suspect the most important flaw in A Shopkeeper's Millennium is Johnson's focus on functional economic class rather than on a more fluid concept of community life, one more faithful to Americans' own experiences. I do not object to a social interpretation of the Second Great Awakening, but I do think that Johnson assumes too much basic unity and security in the middle class.
In Johnson's account, the landowners, merchants, and manufacturers are all part of a continuous interrelated "elite" from the time of the town's creation. From this elite, which becomes fractious and which loses control over workingmen's lives in the 1820s, emerges a spiritually unified "middle class" in the 1830s, complete with new tools of social domination. In this account, the elite always exists, it is always a distinct class of society, it always has a coherent set of values, and it always seeks control over an other.
But let's try to step inside the minds of the "elite." In the first place, even the landowners hadn't been in Rochester long. They had come quite recently from New England and Maryland; even at the end of Johnson's story, most adults who have settled down in town could remember when the town did not exist. These landowners built a home for themselves and their extended families -- very successfully -- yet within ten years, they were clearly losing control over it both politically and culturally, and perhaps economically as well. They were not "normless" or individually "self-made," as Johnson says, but then, who ever is? Instead, they were people who together took a risk and saw it pay off, only to sense unexpected forms of defeat.
As for the manufacturers, they were indeed generally related to, or at least patronized by, the great landholders. But this does not mean that they had the economic security of the great landholders. Most of them remained, in some sense, dependent despite their best efforts. And they too were watching the town they built turn into something they didn't exactly have in mind when they settled there. Yes, they were being surrounded by an increasingly alien and disturbing class of workingmen. But I'm not so sure that they saw the class line we see. What I suspect they saw was a new and rootless element in "their" community. That is, the employers didn't think of themselves as an elite class in town; they thought of themselves as the town. Originally, even their workers were not so very different from the employers; the workers were household dependents being trained in the same occupation, something like adolescent children. But now (thanks to the employers' own ambitions and methods, to be sure), the workingmen were becoming a "class" for the first time, and a very large one at that. The master craftsmen and shop owners, like the landowners, were not sure they recognized the town they built a few years ago.
The merchants and professionals, on the other hand, were perhaps another matter. Most of them were accustomed to flux, even thriving on it. Unlike landowners and manufacturers, they had little invested, either financially or emotionally, in the concrete and established. They probably owned less real property, and in any case, the property they owned was often secondary to their occupation rather than essential; they were not tied to the falls or to a farm. So they generally found the evolution of Rochester less alarming. In a way, change was traditional for them.
(Continued in the comments because I've run out of room. Apparently they limit you to 20,000 characters.)
In A Shopkeeper's Millennium, Paul Johnson argues that American revivalism in the early nineteenth century was a product of class conflict, not (as often assumed) individual social insecurity. Evangelicalism, according to Johnson, was not primarily a means for the mobile economic individualist to find meaning in life; it was instead a way for a dominant class of manufacturing proprietors to restore order to a community full of unpoliced and politically restive workingmen. Johnson uses the town of Rochester, New York, as a case study to prove his claim -- not because Rochester was representative, Johnson explains, but because it was an extraordinary case. (This raises questions, but I do not object in principle.) Rochester was unusual in the rapid pace of its growth -- it mushroomed from virtual emptiness in 1815 to a population of 18,000 by 1840 -- and in its status as the focal point of upstate New York revivalism in 1831. It thus provides Johnson with a particularly well-defined example of economic change and evangelistic fervor.
Johnson begins by tracing changes in the Rochester economy and in local society and politics in the 1820s. From the beginning, he explains, Rochester was a mill town; its importance stemmed from its excellent falls as much as its position along the Erie Canal. Although it was a commercial depot and manufacturing center, therefore, the village's economy depended on local agriculture and on the relationships among local landed proprietors, who relied on mutual trust to govern their business dealings. Among these owners, Johnson argues, kinship ties remained strong throughout the period. Relatively few upstarts or migrants gained entrance to the ranks of the wealthy, and these relied on patronage and on the forging of new family ties. Even in 1837, Johnson observes, more than two-thirds of the members of the Rochester elite were "tied by blood, marriage, or business association" to the elite of 1827, even though this was an economically tumultuous decade. The entrepreneurs of the city, the merchants, millers, and master craftsmen, had firm ties with the landowners of the region, and they were the social class who responded most readily to Charles Finney's conversion call in 1831. In other words, the men who made the revival were not lone "normless men on the make"; they were respectable and secure men of the community.
However, Johnson notes that the modes of work were changing in the 1820s. With this change came an erosion of elite power to supervise the workingmen's lives. At the beginning of the decade, Rochester manufacturing was conducted largely on a household craft model. Laborers typically lived with their employers and worked in the same physical space, with little division between the activities of fabrication and merchandising. Masters often considered their employees as members of their families, and they socialized freely with them, sharing liquor with them as a matter of daily routine and providing a certain amount of family discipline. During the economic boom, however, as Rochester shops began selling products (most notably shoes) to a wider region, employers began sending work out to other houses. And within their own shops, they withdrew to a separate space from the one occupied by their employees -- who became the vast majority of the city population, a transient and often unskilled pool of labor. The owner or foreman became a member of a distinct class. At home, furthermore, the middle class lived in increasingly exclusive neighborhoods -- albeit neighborhoods abutting all the noise and filth of the working-class sections of town, causing growing unease in respectable society. In 1828, the Rochester middle class hit upon a solution to their inability to police the lives of the autonomous working class: they introduced a strenuous campaign to restrict the sale and consumption of liquor, and they began by trying to set an example of temperance in their own lives. Alcohol, which had been a general feature of sociability among all classes of men, became a symbol of working-class intractability. However, the local government proved almost powerless to enforce restrictions on spirits; in 1827, the state of New York had adopted white manhood suffrage, and the unpropertied voters of Rochester were not exactly eager to have their drinking habits controlled by their employers. The same was the fate of a "Sabbatarian" campaign by some devout merchants who wished to stop business on Sundays and who offended others by trying to boycott firms that operated on the Lord's day.
Politics stymied the Rochester wealthy in another way as well. In the early 1820s, Rochester's government had been dominated by the great proprietors of land -- in particular, the family "connection" of Colonel Nathaniel Rochester and that of Matthew Brown. These rival factions affiliated with factions in the New York legislature, the Bucktails and the Clintonians respectively, in competing bids for state patronage. (Nathaniel Rochester had begun the struggle by securing from the Bucktails the naming of his town as county seat, whose county buildings would be surrounded by his own property, and then a bank controlled by his family and friends, which Clintonians took over a year later.) But this genteel rivalry lost its appeal to Colonel Rochester later in the decade. The reason was a public campaign by the Antimasonic Party, which accused the town elite of orchestrating and covering up the murder of William Morgan, a Rochester stonemason who had planned to expose the secrets of the Freemasons. As it turned out, the Rochester/Bucktail faction was full of Masons, and the public battles that ensued brought a new breed of middle-class politicians to office in opposition. Meanwhile, on the side of the working class, the Democratic Party was organizing to resist the efforts of the temperance and Sabbatarian busybodies, with a great deal of success. "To put it simply," Johnson writes, "politics was no longer a gentleman's game."
Facing Democrats with a powerful popular appeal on the one hand, and demoralized by the Antimasons on the other, the respectable citizens of Rochester seemed to have lost political control of their city. Furthermore, they were furious with each other. Culturally, the city elite now had a loose Antimasonic/temperance/Sabbatarian coalition trading invective with a loose Democratic/Masonic/anti-Sabbatarian coalition. Members of these factions often shared church pews and kinship. They glared at each other in public places, and as a result, according to Johnson, "the life went out of Rochester Protestantism." Between 1828 and 1830, church membership stagnated and Christian zeal hardened into resentment.
Into this fractious city came the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney in September 1830, invited by a disappointed Sabbatarian merchant, Josiah Bissell. (Bissell explained that Rochesterians had a "large budget of evils rolling through our land & among us" along the canal, and that the citizens "know not the power of the Gospel of Jesus" to stop the corruption. One is amused to note that Finney himself also arrived on the canal.) The revival instigated by Finney, a powerful rhetorician trained in law, healed the riven elite of Rochester. It was, Johnson stresses, a communal movement. Finney did not appeal to isolated individuals. Instead, he sent church members door to door and into neighbors' homes to talk with their wives; he called people to public prayer meetings that lasted to dawn; he encouraged householders to lead family devotions. These methods were wildly successful. Citizens packed church buildings to the point of damaging them; different denominations cooperated with each other to evangelize the city; Rochesterians who recently had not been speaking to each other gathered for prayer and testimony. The city, Johnson writes, was witnessing "the collective regeneration of a fragmented churchgoing community." However, the churchgoers came overwhelmingly from the middle class.
Two key pieces of evidence come into play at this point in Johnson's story. This first wave of revival was not only middle-class. It was also most successful among middle-class men in certain lines of work. Among the converted bourgeois, the least commonly represented men were hotelkeepers, merchants, doctors, small shopkeepers, and lawyers. These were the men least involved in the canal trade or in work that required numerous employees; they were carrying on their business in town as usual. The most commonly converted men, on the other hand, were grocers (the most important sellers of spirits), forwarding merchants, master builders, and master shoemakers. These latter occupations, Johnson argues, were the ones most affected by changes in the Rochester class structure. These men were the manufacturers who no could longer supervise their workingmen, or they were the men responsible for bringing uncouth canal workers into Rochester and supporting their drinking habits. The converted also, interestingly enough, tended to have smaller households. Fewer of the revival converts were living with extended family, boarders, or employees. They had embraced, Johnson suggests, an idea of bourgeois "domestic privacy."
Johnson argues that evangelical theology provided these men and their families with a way to come to terms with their loss of authority, but also with a new strategy for maintaining social control. By emphasizing individual responsibility before God, he writes, revivalism freed the middle class of guilt for their inability to keep order among the workingmen. They learned that only a changed heart, not submission to external control, could be expected to keep a man in line. At the same time, a changing of individual hearts looked like a very powerful way to regenerate society. The converts of the 1831 revival expected their experience to help usher in the millennium as they brought the good news to their fellow citizens and exhorted them to join in the project of spiritual reform. They lost none of their zeal for banning alcohol or gambling, but now, they could call upon the convert's enthusiasm and his desire to be a good witness of the gospel to prevent him from countenancing vice. Thus, they turned to the business of reaching other classes of society with the good news.
As Johnson acknowledges, they achieved considerable success in this. Although the 1831 revival affected the middle class almost exclusively, the next few years saw the revival spread to the workingmen as a result of a deliberate effort by the richer evangelicals. Between 1832 and 1837, 42 percent of new church members were journeymen craftsmen, and a working-class Methodist church was the largest congregation in the city by 1834. The middle-class churches helped struggling working-class counterparts (including a black church) with financial problems, and they also established schools and a savings bank to teach workers how to live responsibly. These efforts, Johnson believes, were motivated by a genuine sense of Christian mission; the converts were "build(ing) up the Kingdom of Christ in Rochester." But there was something misleading about the workingmen's turn to religion. Without disregarding the spiritual satisfaction it could provide, Johnson suspects that "the most powerful source of the workingmen's revival was the simple, coercive fact that wage earners worked for men who insisted on seeing them in church." To be a good Christian was worth good money; for the subordinate, it was a way to retain an employer's good opinion, and for the ambitious, it was one's certification of respectability. As evidence, Johnson adduces his finding that churchgoing wage earners were as much as three-and-a-half times as likely to settle in town as the unchurched. Churchgoing journeymen were nearly three times as likely to become master craftsmen (owning their own shops) as non-churchgoers were. And some employers simply advertised their unwillingness to hire heathens. In Rochester, the vast majority of journeymen and laborers lived unsettled lives and moved through the city quickly looking for work, but conversion allowed some of them to fix a job and a home there. Religion was a way either to claim the patronage of the middle class or, in same cases, to join it. Without Christian piety, the workingman now hardly stood a chance economically.
Finally, Johnson explains, the revivals allowed the wealthy of Rochester to come back together politically in the 1830s. In the spring of 1834, a group of leading citizens -- including Episcopalians, a Baptist, and a Presbyterian, and including both Masons and Antimasons -- met in the offices of the Anti-Masonic Enquirer to organize the Whig Party. This new party, Johnson observes, "embodied a startling reconciliation of differences among the churchgoing elite" -- and it embodied their Protestant Christian zeal for reform. This party would challenge the Democratic Party, which was hostile to all kinds of moral regulations and which embraced populist rhetoric. Johnson reduces the difference between these parties to an "argument over means"; the Whigs were willing to use the state to enforce sobriety and economic discipline on the American people, and the Democrats were not. Unlike in the 1820s, when it divided against itself on this question, the Rochester elite was now animated by singleminded religious zeal. The revivals had renewed the political coherence of the middle class.
In his afterword, Johnson briefly looks beyond Rochester to other cities in western New York and in the middle west. He notes that other studies have found evidence of a similar pattern in the revivals of the Second Great Awakening elsewhere: they were strongest in mill and manufacturing towns, not in commercial centers, and they were most persuasive among masters and employees in manufacturing.
Johnson tells this complicated story well. This is an admirable book. But as I said at the beginning of this review, I have some reservations. I'm going to try to explain where I disagree.
I suspect the most important flaw in A Shopkeeper's Millennium is Johnson's focus on functional economic class rather than on a more fluid concept of community life, one more faithful to Americans' own experiences. I do not object to a social interpretation of the Second Great Awakening, but I do think that Johnson assumes too much basic unity and security in the middle class.
In Johnson's account, the landowners, merchants, and manufacturers are all part of a continuous interrelated "elite" from the time of the town's creation. From this elite, which becomes fractious and which loses control over workingmen's lives in the 1820s, emerges a spiritually unified "middle class" in the 1830s, complete with new tools of social domination. In this account, the elite always exists, it is always a distinct class of society, it always has a coherent set of values, and it always seeks control over an other.
But let's try to step inside the minds of the "elite." In the first place, even the landowners hadn't been in Rochester long. They had come quite recently from New England and Maryland; even at the end of Johnson's story, most adults who have settled down in town could remember when the town did not exist. These landowners built a home for themselves and their extended families -- very successfully -- yet within ten years, they were clearly losing control over it both politically and culturally, and perhaps economically as well. They were not "normless" or individually "self-made," as Johnson says, but then, who ever is? Instead, they were people who together took a risk and saw it pay off, only to sense unexpected forms of defeat.
As for the manufacturers, they were indeed generally related to, or at least patronized by, the great landholders. But this does not mean that they had the economic security of the great landholders. Most of them remained, in some sense, dependent despite their best efforts. And they too were watching the town they built turn into something they didn't exactly have in mind when they settled there. Yes, they were being surrounded by an increasingly alien and disturbing class of workingmen. But I'm not so sure that they saw the class line we see. What I suspect they saw was a new and rootless element in "their" community. That is, the employers didn't think of themselves as an elite class in town; they thought of themselves as the town. Originally, even their workers were not so very different from the employers; the workers were household dependents being trained in the same occupation, something like adolescent children. But now (thanks to the employers' own ambitions and methods, to be sure), the workingmen were becoming a "class" for the first time, and a very large one at that. The master craftsmen and shop owners, like the landowners, were not sure they recognized the town they built a few years ago.
The merchants and professionals, on the other hand, were perhaps another matter. Most of them were accustomed to flux, even thriving on it. Unlike landowners and manufacturers, they had little invested, either financially or emotionally, in the concrete and established. They probably owned less real property, and in any case, the property they owned was often secondary to their occupation rather than essential; they were not tied to the falls or to a farm. So they generally found the evolution of Rochester less alarming. In a way, change was traditional for them.
(Continued in the comments because I've run out of room. Apparently they limit you to 20,000 characters.)
October 24, 2014
This is a heck of a book even if I can't necessarily recommend it to everyone. Not everyone is going to read about revivals in Rochester, NY, but it's really fascinating case study of the social roots of Great Awakening in a specific city. It's also a great use of structural functionalist perspective in history. Johnson isn't really that concerned with the religious views of Rochester's citizens. Rather, he looks at the function of religion in society and in class relations. His basic argument is that upper middle class citizens failed to reform or coercively control the behavior of the flood of lower class workers into Rochester during the market revolution. Instead, after Charles Finney's evangelical revival, the upper and middle classes used their economic power and sway over social mobility to enforce norms like temperance on the upwardly mobile lower classes. This book is concise, rich with data, and quite fascinating. It could easily be mistaken for a Marxist history, but Johnson's understanding of religion is far too complex to fit into a reductionist Marxist perspective.
July 25, 2011
Interesting and useful case study of Rochester, NY on the link between changing social structures of the middle and working classes as influenced by the 2nd Great Awakening, temperance movement, and the rise of the market/capitalist system. Not the most gripping of narratives.
May 28, 2024
In his detailed case study, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Paul Johnson attempts to answer the question of what triggered the evangelical revivals in Rochester, New York, in the early to mid 1830s. Through his work, Johnson asserts that Charles Finney’s revivals in Rochester were a direct result of the deteriorating social relationship between economic classes, largely due to the growth of market capitalism. Johnson’s exhaustive analysis of the social practices of Rochester’s inhabitants provides ample evidence to substantiate his claim that revivalism derived from more than rapid industrialization and urban growth. Johnson’s intensive focus on class relations and the “voiceless” firmly situate A Shopkeeper’s Millennium within the “New-Left” school of thought. In addition to class relations and warfare, Johnson’s emphasis on the development and resulting consequences of industrial capitalism directly align with New-Left idealism. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium largely follows a chronological structure, in which Johnson details the emergence and growth of Rochester, the subsequent social deterioration between economic classes, and finally, the resulting revivals conducted by Finney and their impact. In critique, while Johnson claims to focus on the “voiceless”, large portions of chapters in A Shopkeeper’s Millennium are dedicated to the inter-politics and philanthropic benevolence of wealthy families within Rochester. While Johnson ultimately does tie the impact of these wealthy families back to the working-class, this prolonged emphasis on the bourgeois muddles the book’s focus at times. Although Johnson acknowledges that his work is a case study of a specific city, the fact remains that the subject matter itself is incredibly niche. Thus, it can sometimes be difficult for the reader to match Johnson’s enthusiasm on the topic, leading to A Shopkeeper’s Millennium being a slog at times. Despite these flaws, Johnson’s A Shopkeeper's Millennium is an overall convincing study of the impact that class conflict and capitalism had on the origins of evangelical revivalism in Rochester, New York, and consequently the greater north-east United States.
September 27, 2021
A Shopkeeper's Millennium is a good (though dense) overview with a clear central argument; but it leaves many of the best parts out of consideration entirely.
Johnson's claim is primarily a Marxist one: the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening were an antidote to the increasingly poor quality of life brought about by industrialization's spread to Rochester. He adheres very closely to Marx's "opiate of the masses" dictum. However, in making his argument, Johnson ignores the variety and extremism which makes the Second Great Awakening so interesting. No mention is made of either the Millerites or the Mormons. John Humphrey Noyes is mentioned only once in passing. If one is to ask the question of "what caused the Second Great Awakening?" one can't get a full answer by not addressing the emerging religious movements that were unique to the era. For all the time Johnson spends on minute details, this seems like a massive oversight.
Johnson's claim is primarily a Marxist one: the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening were an antidote to the increasingly poor quality of life brought about by industrialization's spread to Rochester. He adheres very closely to Marx's "opiate of the masses" dictum. However, in making his argument, Johnson ignores the variety and extremism which makes the Second Great Awakening so interesting. No mention is made of either the Millerites or the Mormons. John Humphrey Noyes is mentioned only once in passing. If one is to ask the question of "what caused the Second Great Awakening?" one can't get a full answer by not addressing the emerging religious movements that were unique to the era. For all the time Johnson spends on minute details, this seems like a massive oversight.
April 22, 2023
for a class, didn’t enjoy
June 7, 2020
In this well-done and extremely useful case study, historian Paul E. Johnson attempts to dig beneath the surface of the Second Great Awakening to unearth what he thinks were the immediate causes of this episode of American religious history.
Yet, for reasons that will also be explored below, there are significant reasons to disagree with the author’s conclusions.
Summary of Analysis
Johnson noted that many historians had written that social unrest caused the rise of religious fervor and conversion in this Armenian movement, as opposed to the more Calvinistic theology of salvation of the First Great Awakening. He adopted the methods of social history to create a composite biography of many of the men who joined the various Rochester, New York churches during the famed revivals led by Charles Finney in 1830 and 1831. In so doing, using city directories, property record, and local church records, Paul Johnson build a compelling case that men involved in specific types of lines of business were much more likely to convert.
Importantly, PaulJohnson demonstrated that the men who were most often converted to evangelicals Christianity in the late 1830s (as measured by joining participating churches) were those whose whose businesses had been most impacted by the new city’s changing class structure in the 18020s. This group included grocers (the local stores that sold liquor by the drink most commonly), master builders, and master shoemakers.
Johnson’s evidence suggests that many of these men had removed their families’ residences from what had previously been households combining workshop and dwelling place for them, their families, and their workers, including apprentices, journeymen, and clerks. They had also generally combined craft manufacture and stores in a single location. Interestingly, he reminds the reader that, in the older social and economic system, workers generally expected a dram of whisky as part of their daily pay and both working men and their masters enjoyed a degree of drinking alcohol together. That world was disappearing in the 1820s.
While the author does not well significantly on the existing literature about the idea of a middle-class identity centered on domesticity and the nuclear family, Professor Johnson does suggest that these men who were draw into the first wave of Christian conversions to hit Rochester, New York by the Finney-led revivals had generally made an intentional choice to withdraw from a common household with their workers into a domestic sphere which separated work from family life. He puts this, with a nice touch, as ceasing to be eighteenth-century heads of household and becoming husbands on a nineteenth-century model.
To build context, Paul Johnson actually began his history of Rochester at an earlier point in time, as suggested by the book’s title.
Rochester had been carved out of four large tracts that were held by a small group of landowners who had speculated on the potential of this area with the coming of the Erie Canal. Rochester was built along the canal at a spot where a very steep fall of the water created a natural power source for mills. These original proprietors and their protegees controlled the economy, politics, and social norms.
Then, in the 1820s, this elite was fractured (and withdrew from politics) owing to disputes over Masonry and Anti-Mason conflicts, Sabbatarianism, and temperance. According to Johnson, those men who had lost out on these religiously-based social and legal issues were generally the same men who had lost control over their workforce’s personal lifestyles by withdrawing to a private home life, leaving these working men to pursue a more raucous and often alcohol-including social life in the village’s newly developed working class sections.
A Shopkeeper’s Millennium also argued that the turn of this particular section of the Rochester middle class, followed by those men who wanted to rise to those ranks, from employee to business owner, were attracted to the social perfectionism of the Second Great Awakening’s theology.
Thus, with the social relationships that had been part of the old household structure had ended, and attempts to enforce these new norms of temperance and evangelical Christianity through politics had failed, then these business owners attempted, Johnson argues, to enforce their own new social and religious norms of conduct by hiring and promoting only such men who showed - at least by an external measure - their agreement with these new norms by their churches and actin in a manner consistent with these religiously-based standards of personal conduct.
Limitations and Questions
One areas where I would suggest that Paul Johnson’s fine book remains significantly limited is due to its apparent failure to take religious belief itself as a matter of inquiry and historical explanation. In his tightly argued book, the author does not adequately explain the sorts of religious convictions espoused by Charles Finney or the Second Great Awakening converts in Rochester. In fact, it took almost 100 pages before anything was explained beyond the fact of his reliance on the functionalist model of Emile Durkheim. While the reader gathers that a sort of theology that emphasized individual choice for salvation and a certain mode of conduct were a key component across, denominal lines, Professor Johnson, I would suggest, seems unwilling either to explain these religious views on their own terms and, moreover, to ask seriously if these beliefs were sincerely held.
Taking seriously what a person or group of people believed, in my judgment, s a significant part of the historian's task. That process does not negate offering a social explanation for why certain beliefs had been congenial to a person or a group of person's studied. Yet, without a clear explanation of the ideas (theological positions), one can hardly expect the reader to assume that the explanation of the group's attraction to those ideas to be accepted readily, even when he may well be on the right track.
While I am familiar with Durkheim and give the sociology of religion its due as an academic theory, Johnson seems unable to move beyond seeming scoffing at religious belief and experience to articulate a clear understanding of religious beliefs.
Professor Johnson wrote, on page 98, for example, that Christian denominations were largely separated by their view of how one attains salvation. While E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War would should that different theological positions on salvation, referred to as Soteriology has been an important dividing line, that is hardly a reasonable basis for grouping differing American Christian denominations.
The book would have been greatly strengthened by giving the reason greater confidence that Johnson understood the diverse theological traditions and denominations involved in the Rochester Revival would have been to explore the views on salvation, church organization (ecclesiology), membership, and a Christian lifestyle. For example, on the question of salvation, Johnson never explains the Armenian theology of the Second Great Awakening. Neither did the book adequately explain the theological rationale behind the calls for temperance. Instead, Dr. Johnson seemed content to conclude that working class men simply rejected what they viewed as middle-class religion.
Further, as suggested previously, this book addressed the apparent emergence of a middle-class domesticity and the greater moral authority of women as wives and mothers in such households without deeper explanation. Neither does the book really adequately ask whether the collapse of apprenticeship and the emergence of early manufacturing in the United States during this same time period might better explain – or at least help with a fuller explanation – of how changes in the organization of businesses and manufacturing shaped this story. We do not find out anything about the middle-class women nor the working class women.
In short, Paul Johnson has missed opportunities that would have required giving greater context to history of Rochester’s Revival.
Yet, for reasons that will also be explored below, there are significant reasons to disagree with the author’s conclusions.
Summary of Analysis
Johnson noted that many historians had written that social unrest caused the rise of religious fervor and conversion in this Armenian movement, as opposed to the more Calvinistic theology of salvation of the First Great Awakening. He adopted the methods of social history to create a composite biography of many of the men who joined the various Rochester, New York churches during the famed revivals led by Charles Finney in 1830 and 1831. In so doing, using city directories, property record, and local church records, Paul Johnson build a compelling case that men involved in specific types of lines of business were much more likely to convert.
Importantly, PaulJohnson demonstrated that the men who were most often converted to evangelicals Christianity in the late 1830s (as measured by joining participating churches) were those whose whose businesses had been most impacted by the new city’s changing class structure in the 18020s. This group included grocers (the local stores that sold liquor by the drink most commonly), master builders, and master shoemakers.
Johnson’s evidence suggests that many of these men had removed their families’ residences from what had previously been households combining workshop and dwelling place for them, their families, and their workers, including apprentices, journeymen, and clerks. They had also generally combined craft manufacture and stores in a single location. Interestingly, he reminds the reader that, in the older social and economic system, workers generally expected a dram of whisky as part of their daily pay and both working men and their masters enjoyed a degree of drinking alcohol together. That world was disappearing in the 1820s.
While the author does not well significantly on the existing literature about the idea of a middle-class identity centered on domesticity and the nuclear family, Professor Johnson does suggest that these men who were draw into the first wave of Christian conversions to hit Rochester, New York by the Finney-led revivals had generally made an intentional choice to withdraw from a common household with their workers into a domestic sphere which separated work from family life. He puts this, with a nice touch, as ceasing to be eighteenth-century heads of household and becoming husbands on a nineteenth-century model.
To build context, Paul Johnson actually began his history of Rochester at an earlier point in time, as suggested by the book’s title.
Rochester had been carved out of four large tracts that were held by a small group of landowners who had speculated on the potential of this area with the coming of the Erie Canal. Rochester was built along the canal at a spot where a very steep fall of the water created a natural power source for mills. These original proprietors and their protegees controlled the economy, politics, and social norms.
Then, in the 1820s, this elite was fractured (and withdrew from politics) owing to disputes over Masonry and Anti-Mason conflicts, Sabbatarianism, and temperance. According to Johnson, those men who had lost out on these religiously-based social and legal issues were generally the same men who had lost control over their workforce’s personal lifestyles by withdrawing to a private home life, leaving these working men to pursue a more raucous and often alcohol-including social life in the village’s newly developed working class sections.
A Shopkeeper’s Millennium also argued that the turn of this particular section of the Rochester middle class, followed by those men who wanted to rise to those ranks, from employee to business owner, were attracted to the social perfectionism of the Second Great Awakening’s theology.
Thus, with the social relationships that had been part of the old household structure had ended, and attempts to enforce these new norms of temperance and evangelical Christianity through politics had failed, then these business owners attempted, Johnson argues, to enforce their own new social and religious norms of conduct by hiring and promoting only such men who showed - at least by an external measure - their agreement with these new norms by their churches and actin in a manner consistent with these religiously-based standards of personal conduct.
Limitations and Questions
One areas where I would suggest that Paul Johnson’s fine book remains significantly limited is due to its apparent failure to take religious belief itself as a matter of inquiry and historical explanation. In his tightly argued book, the author does not adequately explain the sorts of religious convictions espoused by Charles Finney or the Second Great Awakening converts in Rochester. In fact, it took almost 100 pages before anything was explained beyond the fact of his reliance on the functionalist model of Emile Durkheim. While the reader gathers that a sort of theology that emphasized individual choice for salvation and a certain mode of conduct were a key component across, denominal lines, Professor Johnson, I would suggest, seems unwilling either to explain these religious views on their own terms and, moreover, to ask seriously if these beliefs were sincerely held.
Taking seriously what a person or group of people believed, in my judgment, s a significant part of the historian's task. That process does not negate offering a social explanation for why certain beliefs had been congenial to a person or a group of person's studied. Yet, without a clear explanation of the ideas (theological positions), one can hardly expect the reader to assume that the explanation of the group's attraction to those ideas to be accepted readily, even when he may well be on the right track.
While I am familiar with Durkheim and give the sociology of religion its due as an academic theory, Johnson seems unable to move beyond seeming scoffing at religious belief and experience to articulate a clear understanding of religious beliefs.
Professor Johnson wrote, on page 98, for example, that Christian denominations were largely separated by their view of how one attains salvation. While E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War would should that different theological positions on salvation, referred to as Soteriology has been an important dividing line, that is hardly a reasonable basis for grouping differing American Christian denominations.
The book would have been greatly strengthened by giving the reason greater confidence that Johnson understood the diverse theological traditions and denominations involved in the Rochester Revival would have been to explore the views on salvation, church organization (ecclesiology), membership, and a Christian lifestyle. For example, on the question of salvation, Johnson never explains the Armenian theology of the Second Great Awakening. Neither did the book adequately explain the theological rationale behind the calls for temperance. Instead, Dr. Johnson seemed content to conclude that working class men simply rejected what they viewed as middle-class religion.
Further, as suggested previously, this book addressed the apparent emergence of a middle-class domesticity and the greater moral authority of women as wives and mothers in such households without deeper explanation. Neither does the book really adequately ask whether the collapse of apprenticeship and the emergence of early manufacturing in the United States during this same time period might better explain – or at least help with a fuller explanation – of how changes in the organization of businesses and manufacturing shaped this story. We do not find out anything about the middle-class women nor the working class women.
In short, Paul Johnson has missed opportunities that would have required giving greater context to history of Rochester’s Revival.
January 15, 2018
Intro and Ch. 1-3
Johnson places the evangelical Protestant movement within the context of changing social, economic and political relations in the city of Rochester, NY between the years of 1815 and 1837. Johnson's straw man is the argument the "revivals were society's antidote to individualism" (p. 32) Against this, he argues that religious revival was an attempt by old elites to reestablish the patriarchal mores which under girded a specific economic ordering of society.
First, Johnson sets up the economic structure of Rochester at its founding. "Rochester's entrepreneurial community was no capitalist free-for-all. It was a federation of wealthy families and their friends." (p. 27) This was a stable community where, despite the myth of the self-made man, the determinant of prosperity was connections with a family-based elite (p. 31). It was this old elite, grounded in the production for an agriculturally-based market, which flocked to the revivals of Charles G. Finney in 1831 (p. 36).
In his chapter on society, Johnson outlines the patriarchal merchant household which formed the basis for the old elite's conception of society. He does this by contrasting it with what society was increasingly becoming in the 1820s. Work in the original Rochester society took place in the merchant's household. Workers were members of the merchant's family circle. By the time Finney arrived "workingmen were leaving the home of their employers." (p. 45) Merchants were becoming capitalists (p. 41) in the process of separating themselves, both in terms of social status and in terms of physical habitation, from their workers. Johnson notes that throughout the 1820s the workers were increasingly living in neighborhoods distinct from their employers (p. 48).
A proletariat was emerging as a class with distinct interests from its bourgeois employers. The role of the temperance movement was to reestablish bourgeois control over proletarians who were, by definition, workers no longer integrated into the household economy (p. 60) Alcohol had once been a normal part of the household society, now workingmen were drinking outside the control of their employers.
In describing the political ferment surrounding anti-masonry and democratic politics, Johnson shows a front on which the old elites retreated of their own volition. Politics assumed a brawling quality which offended the genteel sensibilities of the "old political families" (p. 70). Significantly, religion and politics were becoming increasingly separated (p. 76). Revival religion would provide an excellent opportunity to reassert the values of that group.
Ch. 4-6 & Afterward
In chapter four, "Impasse", Johnson portrays a working class which is both rowdy and out of control of the elites. To remedy this the elites try two approaches in the 1820s. he first is the approach attempted by the temperance reformers, moral suasion. The leasing men of Rochester joined the temperance movement to set and example for their employees (p. 82). This movement was only partially successful because workingmen had their own neighborhoods where they drank outside the masters' control. A glass of whiskey became a mark of a workingman's independence.
Another way in which elites attempted to regain control was through legislating the observance of the Sabbath. The Sabbatarian movement attempted to pass laws which would make conduct of business on Sunday illegal. Josiah Bissell, founder of the Pioneer Line, was the leader of this movement in Rochester. This attempt to legislate morality was primarily the attempt of wealthier members of the Rochester community, men who were mostly Presbyterians (p. 87). the end result of the Sabbatarian movement was the splitting of the elite , with churches dividing along Sabbatarian and anti-Sabbatarian lines. This division in turn caused a decrease in church membership in the late 1820s (p. 93).
In chapter five, "Pentecost", Johnson demonstrates how the revival movement lead by Finney overcame the division within the Rochester community. The evangelical movement which the revival embodied put the onus on the individual for their own salvation (p. 96). By "uniting in social prayer" believers could convert the heathen. The meetings held by Finney were enormously popular, and "conversions became grand public spectacles" (p. 102).
Examining new church membership, Johnson finds that those who joined the churches during Finney's revivals were primarily those who had "abdicated their roles as eighteenth -century heads of households", i.e. those merchants and master craftsmen who had the closest contact with the working class (p. 108). It is also significant that "women were converting their men". Johnson sees the revivals as a family affair, much in the same way as Mary Ryan. However, Ryan gives much more attention to the role of women as leaders than does Johnson.
By converting merchants and master craftsmen, Finney had constructed the Rochester community. His vision of the Millennium, as something which could be created on earth, united the business community. The division in the churches was overcome by the very nature of the social control which the new religion offered. The merchants and master craftsmen who participated in the revival recognized the fact that social control had now been reshaped in the form of the individual's direct accountability to God. Social controls, in other words, had become internalized (p. 111). Thus the revival allowed for the reconstruction of the "moral personality" in the workingman.
In chapter six, "Christian Soldiers," Johnson addresses the phase of working class assimilation into the churches which occurred in the early 1830s. Building the Millennium in the here and now. Rochester's wealthy merchants even paid for the construction of new workingmen's churches (p. 118). The were also, however, coerced by their employer to go to church (p. 121). Simply put, those workers who showed no religiosity did not advance in the Rochester business world. As it had always been in this city, "no man made his way alone." Employment, advancement, and credit were all dependent upon others' god will. "By dispensing and withholding patronage, Christian employers regulated the membership of their own class " (p. 127). In concluding this chapter, Johnson argues that the Whig Party was the political manifestation of this new-found religiosity on the part of the merchants and master craftsmen, which squared off against the workingmen's Democratic party during this period (p. 135).
In his afterward, Johnson summarizes his argument for religion as social control. he believes that the revival was the tool of the middle classes in exercising the social control over the working man with the creation of the proletariat. "The religion was not a capitalist plot, But it certainly was a key step in the legitimation of free labor ." (p. 141)
Johnson places the evangelical Protestant movement within the context of changing social, economic and political relations in the city of Rochester, NY between the years of 1815 and 1837. Johnson's straw man is the argument the "revivals were society's antidote to individualism" (p. 32) Against this, he argues that religious revival was an attempt by old elites to reestablish the patriarchal mores which under girded a specific economic ordering of society.
First, Johnson sets up the economic structure of Rochester at its founding. "Rochester's entrepreneurial community was no capitalist free-for-all. It was a federation of wealthy families and their friends." (p. 27) This was a stable community where, despite the myth of the self-made man, the determinant of prosperity was connections with a family-based elite (p. 31). It was this old elite, grounded in the production for an agriculturally-based market, which flocked to the revivals of Charles G. Finney in 1831 (p. 36).
In his chapter on society, Johnson outlines the patriarchal merchant household which formed the basis for the old elite's conception of society. He does this by contrasting it with what society was increasingly becoming in the 1820s. Work in the original Rochester society took place in the merchant's household. Workers were members of the merchant's family circle. By the time Finney arrived "workingmen were leaving the home of their employers." (p. 45) Merchants were becoming capitalists (p. 41) in the process of separating themselves, both in terms of social status and in terms of physical habitation, from their workers. Johnson notes that throughout the 1820s the workers were increasingly living in neighborhoods distinct from their employers (p. 48).
A proletariat was emerging as a class with distinct interests from its bourgeois employers. The role of the temperance movement was to reestablish bourgeois control over proletarians who were, by definition, workers no longer integrated into the household economy (p. 60) Alcohol had once been a normal part of the household society, now workingmen were drinking outside the control of their employers.
In describing the political ferment surrounding anti-masonry and democratic politics, Johnson shows a front on which the old elites retreated of their own volition. Politics assumed a brawling quality which offended the genteel sensibilities of the "old political families" (p. 70). Significantly, religion and politics were becoming increasingly separated (p. 76). Revival religion would provide an excellent opportunity to reassert the values of that group.
Ch. 4-6 & Afterward
In chapter four, "Impasse", Johnson portrays a working class which is both rowdy and out of control of the elites. To remedy this the elites try two approaches in the 1820s. he first is the approach attempted by the temperance reformers, moral suasion. The leasing men of Rochester joined the temperance movement to set and example for their employees (p. 82). This movement was only partially successful because workingmen had their own neighborhoods where they drank outside the masters' control. A glass of whiskey became a mark of a workingman's independence.
Another way in which elites attempted to regain control was through legislating the observance of the Sabbath. The Sabbatarian movement attempted to pass laws which would make conduct of business on Sunday illegal. Josiah Bissell, founder of the Pioneer Line, was the leader of this movement in Rochester. This attempt to legislate morality was primarily the attempt of wealthier members of the Rochester community, men who were mostly Presbyterians (p. 87). the end result of the Sabbatarian movement was the splitting of the elite , with churches dividing along Sabbatarian and anti-Sabbatarian lines. This division in turn caused a decrease in church membership in the late 1820s (p. 93).
In chapter five, "Pentecost", Johnson demonstrates how the revival movement lead by Finney overcame the division within the Rochester community. The evangelical movement which the revival embodied put the onus on the individual for their own salvation (p. 96). By "uniting in social prayer" believers could convert the heathen. The meetings held by Finney were enormously popular, and "conversions became grand public spectacles" (p. 102).
Examining new church membership, Johnson finds that those who joined the churches during Finney's revivals were primarily those who had "abdicated their roles as eighteenth -century heads of households", i.e. those merchants and master craftsmen who had the closest contact with the working class (p. 108). It is also significant that "women were converting their men". Johnson sees the revivals as a family affair, much in the same way as Mary Ryan. However, Ryan gives much more attention to the role of women as leaders than does Johnson.
By converting merchants and master craftsmen, Finney had constructed the Rochester community. His vision of the Millennium, as something which could be created on earth, united the business community. The division in the churches was overcome by the very nature of the social control which the new religion offered. The merchants and master craftsmen who participated in the revival recognized the fact that social control had now been reshaped in the form of the individual's direct accountability to God. Social controls, in other words, had become internalized (p. 111). Thus the revival allowed for the reconstruction of the "moral personality" in the workingman.
In chapter six, "Christian Soldiers," Johnson addresses the phase of working class assimilation into the churches which occurred in the early 1830s. Building the Millennium in the here and now. Rochester's wealthy merchants even paid for the construction of new workingmen's churches (p. 118). The were also, however, coerced by their employer to go to church (p. 121). Simply put, those workers who showed no religiosity did not advance in the Rochester business world. As it had always been in this city, "no man made his way alone." Employment, advancement, and credit were all dependent upon others' god will. "By dispensing and withholding patronage, Christian employers regulated the membership of their own class " (p. 127). In concluding this chapter, Johnson argues that the Whig Party was the political manifestation of this new-found religiosity on the part of the merchants and master craftsmen, which squared off against the workingmen's Democratic party during this period (p. 135).
In his afterward, Johnson summarizes his argument for religion as social control. he believes that the revival was the tool of the middle classes in exercising the social control over the working man with the creation of the proletariat. "The religion was not a capitalist plot, But it certainly was a key step in the legitimation of free labor ." (p. 141)
April 11, 2022
brilliant, well-written, and thick-headedly materialist.
September 4, 2025
I stumbled upon A Shopkeeper’s Millennium in a footnote of a different book and was intrigued, not only for the Mormon History element but for the detailed study of Rochester, NY and the religious revivals in the region (the “Burned Over District) from 1815–1837. The book that demonstrates how economic transformation and evangelical revival catalyzed one another in an early American boomtown. Johnson focuses on Rochester at the moment it rockets from frontier village to industrial hub known as “the Flour City”. John describes how that upheaval reset work, family, and community life in ways that made the Second Great Awakening both attractive and effective.
Johnson maps Rochester’s dizzying rise after 1815: waterpower from the Genesee, the explosive lift from the Erie Canal, and a reorganization of production from small, kin-based shops to larger, more impersonal enterprises. As shopkeeping and small manufacture professionalize, relationships between “masters” and “journeymen” loosen; wage labor and time discipline take hold; neighborhoods stratify; and civic institutions (temperance societies, voluntary associations, and new churches) proliferate. The upshot is a new middle-class sensibility—respectability, punctuality, sobriety, and self-control—that both flows from and reinforces the city’s market revolution.
Into this unsettled world strides evangelical revival—most famously Charles Finney’s 1830–31 campaign—offering not only salvation but a new moral vocabulary for work and home. Revivalism didn’t merely soothe spiritual anxieties; it organized and legitimated an emerging social order. Conversion narratives tracked the same logic as shop ledgers: self-scrutiny, accountability, debt and redemption. Church membership and reform work (especially temperance) became tools for stabilizing households, disciplining habits, and knitting together employers, clerks, and artisans around shared norms. In Johnson view Rochester’s revivals are less a backlash against modernization than a cultural technology that helped people live inside it.
Johnson detail is amazing. His research in based not simply on narratives from the area but on research into tax rolls, pew records, business directories, and church minutes. His argument is bidirectional: economy shapes religion, yes—but religion also shapes economic life, channeling ambition, restraining appetite, and creating trust. For readers in upstate New York (and especially Rochester), the local texture is a bonus: streets, mills, congregations, and family names animate the analysis.
Quotes:
“The new reformers did not want to control the inevitable excesses of drunkards and prostitutes and Jacksonian Democrats. They wanted to liberate them from their sins.”
“The revival made new hearts in hundreds of thousands of middle-class men and women, and set them off on a massive and remarkably successful crusade to remake society in God’s name.”
Johnson maps Rochester’s dizzying rise after 1815: waterpower from the Genesee, the explosive lift from the Erie Canal, and a reorganization of production from small, kin-based shops to larger, more impersonal enterprises. As shopkeeping and small manufacture professionalize, relationships between “masters” and “journeymen” loosen; wage labor and time discipline take hold; neighborhoods stratify; and civic institutions (temperance societies, voluntary associations, and new churches) proliferate. The upshot is a new middle-class sensibility—respectability, punctuality, sobriety, and self-control—that both flows from and reinforces the city’s market revolution.
Into this unsettled world strides evangelical revival—most famously Charles Finney’s 1830–31 campaign—offering not only salvation but a new moral vocabulary for work and home. Revivalism didn’t merely soothe spiritual anxieties; it organized and legitimated an emerging social order. Conversion narratives tracked the same logic as shop ledgers: self-scrutiny, accountability, debt and redemption. Church membership and reform work (especially temperance) became tools for stabilizing households, disciplining habits, and knitting together employers, clerks, and artisans around shared norms. In Johnson view Rochester’s revivals are less a backlash against modernization than a cultural technology that helped people live inside it.
Johnson detail is amazing. His research in based not simply on narratives from the area but on research into tax rolls, pew records, business directories, and church minutes. His argument is bidirectional: economy shapes religion, yes—but religion also shapes economic life, channeling ambition, restraining appetite, and creating trust. For readers in upstate New York (and especially Rochester), the local texture is a bonus: streets, mills, congregations, and family names animate the analysis.
Quotes:
“The new reformers did not want to control the inevitable excesses of drunkards and prostitutes and Jacksonian Democrats. They wanted to liberate them from their sins.”
“The revival made new hearts in hundreds of thousands of middle-class men and women, and set them off on a massive and remarkably successful crusade to remake society in God’s name.”
October 25, 2014
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.
February 17, 2025
If you wonder why the political coalition of evangelicals, blue collar workers and wealthy people still held together in 2024, you would learn a lot from reading this book about a religious revival in 1830s upstate New York.
This book is why I still keep some of the books I was assigned to read in college. After five household moves over three decades, this study keeps a spot on my shelf because it still packs a punch in a length that is short for a history book. My history studies in the late 1980s benefitted from the 1970s wave of data-driven history that transformed the way we view the American past, and this book was one of the shining examples because the data never overwhelms the story that the data informs.
This book is why I still keep some of the books I was assigned to read in college. After five household moves over three decades, this study keeps a spot on my shelf because it still packs a punch in a length that is short for a history book. My history studies in the late 1980s benefitted from the 1970s wave of data-driven history that transformed the way we view the American past, and this book was one of the shining examples because the data never overwhelms the story that the data informs.
February 26, 2025
It was pretty straight forward and short with an interesting premise connecting the growth of manufacturing/capitalism and the growing separation between employees and employers in the 1820s/30s to the revivals happening then. Not sure why I wasn't feeling this book. I think the writing style and I weren't clicking. I also think the overall topic of the revival isn't my thing, which made this book harder for me to read (enjoyment wise). However, the author makes a pretty good connection and provides a thoughtful exploration on why these revivals were happening in Rochester.
May 31, 2019
Johnson's social analysis is very good, but his complete lack of understanding of the history of Christianity undermines many of his assumptions and conclusions. He misidentifies commandments and gives his own meaning to terms that have an established usage in academic discourse.
August 19, 2025
Takes a long time to get anywhere interesting. The conclusion that evangelism was used as social control to create good workers is interesting in the context of modern American capitalism but there’s something missing within it all.
April 17, 2023
this shit got me crying in the library rn
September 7, 2018
Johnson was part of the social history movement in the 1970s - historians thought they could use statistics, demography, and early computer technology to finally achieve truly objective history, and the profession focused on matters of politics, business, labor, population trends, etc. Johnson uses all kinds of statistical data to support his narrative of Rochester politics and religion, anti-Masonic scheming, and finally the revival of Charles Finney in Rochester. However, his data is very selective, drawing only from a few church archives, and we know now in 2014 that it's basically impossible to create truly objective history. We need to consider more than empirical statistical data; we also need to consider what people said, what their motivations were, and what cultural ideas were at play. So I don't buy Johnson's claim that religious competition between different sects seeking the greatest market share only began in the Industrial Revolution. (Christian denominations had been slugging it out for converts since the Reformation.) I also think that he's not giving us as complete a portrait as he might have done. Still, his description of anti-Masonic feelings is interesting, and I still find his main thesis - that the Democrats and working men of Rochester wanted the government not to dictate their religious morality, but that businessmen and Whig political leaders used the momentum of Finney's revival to create a religious elitism and strict moral codes - viable. But I also recognize that this is a very localized study of just one city, Rochester, NY. I don't know if this triumph of Whig/Christian/business leader morals happened anywhere else.
Moral of the story: Just because a history book is considered a classic, doesn't mean that it's flawless in research and execution.
Update, September 6, 2018: The triumph of Whig/Victorian values, especially in the realms of publishing and workplace behavior, did occur in other cities. The book's limits are still apparent, but so are its charms.
Moral of the story: Just because a history book is considered a classic, doesn't mean that it's flawless in research and execution.
Update, September 6, 2018: The triumph of Whig/Victorian values, especially in the realms of publishing and workplace behavior, did occur in other cities. The book's limits are still apparent, but so are its charms.
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June 17, 2015Excellent, a landmark in several fields: 1820s/30s evangelical revivalism, American capitalism and class formation, temperance activity, indoctrination into a bourgeois democratic worldview. Johnson argues that revivalism/increased evangelical church attendance in the Jacksonian era was more about proving one's self to one's boss than anything else--overturning (or really just making more complex) previous arguments that revivalism was a simple response to "increased anomie" felt by individuals' new roles within a burgeoning capitalist system.
Not as compelling a story as -Sam Patch-, but lovely history nonetheless.
Key quote: "...the most powerful source of the workingman's revival was the simple, coercive fact that wage earners worked for men who insisted on seeing them in church. In 1836 a free-thought editor quoted...'I don't give a d--m. I get five dollars more in a month than before I got religion.'" (121)
Not as compelling a story as -Sam Patch-, but lovely history nonetheless.
Key quote: "...the most powerful source of the workingman's revival was the simple, coercive fact that wage earners worked for men who insisted on seeing them in church. In 1836 a free-thought editor quoted...'I don't give a d--m. I get five dollars more in a month than before I got religion.'" (121)
January 31, 2016
Johnson gives a detailed account about Rochester and its society and values, and why it had to change under the Second Great Awakening. Johnson is not straight forward in his account and constantly repeats themes in an overdone matter, while the audience is already well-acquainted with the given information. For example, "drinking" and variations on that terminology is used excessively in this account as well as the idea of a family-based society. I love how the book included maps; it really helped with the visualization of Rochester and its divisions. Overall, it seemed like the author was using fluff to add more writing to the chapters when he really could have just been more straight forward with his words.
November 6, 2010
I'm not a fan of this book, though it is decent. I'm expected to write a paper based on this, perhaps that plays a role in my unlikeliness of it. Nevertheless, I find the book a bit dry and at some point confusing. My TA, who's a grad history student, loves this book and claims that this is the type of book he reads for his classes. Thus, I guess it just really depends in one's book preference, maybe even historical aspect preference.
Currently reading
July 28, 2016It's a history book--one I bought for a class I ended up dropping. Some of it is dry, but the conclusions he draws along the way are interesting. So far, the book focuses on what led to the Second Great Awakening in one burgeoning city that Charles Finney visited.
January 17, 2013
Solid academic book. Learned some new things about religion and society in upstate New York. As with most academic writing, the interesting bits come after he's come to his conclusions and he lets himself speculate a bit about the role of religion as a social control.
April 23, 2014
Read for a history class in school. It was pretty interesting, I never realized that temperance movements had happened so many times in this country, or that the one in the 1820s was so bound up with religious revival.
March 21, 2016
Just started reading this for my History Class at Brockport, Rochester Reform Trail (http://www.brockport.edu/rocreformtrail/)
Interesting prospective on the role a minister named Charles Finney played in Rochester, NY's becoming the hub of both the Abolitionist and Women's Rights Movements.
Interesting prospective on the role a minister named Charles Finney played in Rochester, NY's becoming the hub of both the Abolitionist and Women's Rights Movements.
March 5, 2008
The new social history at its best. But would it have killed Johnson to give some credit to the women, especially since they outnumbered/converted the men?
Currently reading
August 6, 2009Very refreshing story. Great characters and plot.
December 31, 2012
Read some bits and pieces for class. A solid read
March 1, 2015
It was good. I am not unhappy about having read it. I may read it again.
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September 29, 2015Interesting study of the Second Great Awakening in New York.
November 5, 2016
This is an excellent book. Industrial revolution, anti-Mason's, second great Awakening, Whigs. All told well. Might be my favorite time in American History.
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