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40 pages 1 hour read

Paul E. Johnson

A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1978

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Important Quotes

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“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.”


(Introduction, Page 6)

Evangelicals such as Charles Finney differed from past Protestant theologians by arguing that individuals were not innately evil, but instead contained the capacity to embrace Christianity and follow God’s will. Such a belief encouraged temperance advocates and other reformers to attempt to convert alcoholics and sinners to Christianity, rather than simply enact laws that made their actions illegal.

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“To put it simply, the middle class became resolutely bourgeois between 1825 and 1835. And at every step, that transformation bore the stamp of evangelical Protestantism.”


(Introduction, Page 8)

Throughout A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Johnson analyzes the Rochester religious revival through the framework of class. Johnson will use church records and other archival documents to determine that religious revivalism appealed most to Rochester’s middle class and elite, as its theological teachings directly corresponded to their values of productivity and discipline.

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“These historians [of 19th century religious revivals] have been interested in religion, not in its foundations in the social order. Their causal statements are ague, principally because they are consumers rather than producers of social history, and social historians have given them little with which to work. We have more generalizations and less solid information on society in the years 1815 to 1850 than on any other period in the American past.”


(Introduction, Page 9)

In his introduction, Johnson describes how most historical accounts of the Second Great Awakening have explained its popularity through generalizations about a sense of isolation and social uncertainty. With A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Johnson intends to provide a concrete and specific analysis of which types of individuals were most drawn to religious revivals. Johnson believes that such a close historical account will provide historians with a deeper understanding of religious revivals.

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“For Rochester’s real money was in the country trade. The nature of that trade and of the men recruited into it produced urban entrepreneurs who retained the social practices and the moral vision of village storekeepers.”


(Chapter 1, Page 21)

Most of Rochester’s successful businessmen grew up and maintain strong ties with small villages in Rochester’s surrounding countryside. As the most lucrative of Rochester’s businesses was the “county trade”—or trading with rural farmers—Johnson argues that financial success in Rochester hinged upon an understanding of the moral codes and social customs of these small villages.

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“Individual fortunes were meshed with social networks that linked wealthy families with each other and with similar families in the hinterland, and entrepreneurial behavior was typified by caution and cooperation, and not by ungoverned individual ambition. The result was a remarkably orderly and closed community of entrepreneurs.”


(Chapter 1, Page 22)

Any entrepreneur starting a business in Rochester often needed more capital than was possible for one single person to possess. As a result, many of Rochester’s wealthiest businessmen began their businesses by asking for investments from their extended families, including their in-laws. Johnson argues that such a reliance on kinship formed a kind of “family capitalism,” with Rochester’s elite class consisting of a tight-knit community (21).

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“Neither of these men made himself. No doubt both were ambitious and talented, but talent and ambition were of no use without the cooperation and patronage of other men.”


(Chapter 1, Page 31)

Johnson discusses two men, Abelard Reynolds and Thomas Kempshall, who found financial success in Rochester despite hailing from poor families. Johnson argues against an individualistic interpretation of these men’s stories, as each of these men’s financial success was directly due to their ability to form social ties with Rochester’s business community.

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“[Working-class men] worked together and talked and joked among themselves, and they forged sensibilities that were specific to the class of wage-earning craftsmen. Basic to that mental set was the proposition that master and wage earner were different and opposed kinds of men.”


(Chapter 2, Page 42)

In the 1820s, Rochester experienced rapid industrialization, leading to the growth of factories where teams of workers labor for unseen businessmen. As a result of this gap, Rochester’s working-class men developed a sense of themselves as a distinct class from business owners, and believed that business owners were inherently opposed to the workers’ own well-being.

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“Rochester merchants and masters had grown up in communities in which labor relations and family life were structurally and emotionally inseparable. […] But in the 1820s the nature of work and of the work force made it difficult to provide employees with food, lodgings, behavioral models, and domestic discipline.”


(Chapter 2, Page 47)

As Rochester expanded in the 1820s, businessmen were no longer able to continue the practice of offering their workers lodging in their homes. Workers increasingly moved into boarding houses, and businessmen lost their ability to closely monitor their workers behavior. By the early 1830s, Rochester had become divided into distinct working-class and middle-class neighborhoods, with middle-class residents often deeply suspicious of workingmen’s behavior.

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“In 1829 the county grand jury repeated what had become, in a remarkably short time, bourgeois knowledge: strong drink was ‘the cause of almost all of the crime and almost all of the misery that flesh is heir to.’”


(Chapter 2, Page 55)

As workingmen and the middle class inhabited increasingly isolated social sphere, Rochester’s middle-class residents grew increasingly critical of the working classes' leisure activities. They particularly looked down upon alcohol, which they believed led individuals toward criminality. As a result, many middle-class residents embraced temperance as a means of further distancing themselves from the rowdy working class.

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“The rise of new leaders brought on a near-total collapse of the old political families. […] To put it simply, politics was no longer a gentleman’s game.”


(Chapter 3, Page 70)

While Rochester’s political life was initially governed by a handful of elite families (especially the Rochesters and the Browns), a controversy over the Masonic society led to new political parties taking control of the city government. These new parties embraced a less civil style of politics, causing the Rochester government to devolve into a largely powerless institution, paralyzed to take any direct action in city life.

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“Voters, it seems, were determined to stop pious assaults upon their freedom. The result was that politicians dissociated themselves from Sabbatarianism and the more radical forms of temperance agitation.”


(Chapter 3, Page 75)

In 1826, a new government charter changed Rochester’s election rules so that more workingmen were able to vote than had been before. Such a change forced candidates to actively seek working-class votes if they hoped to win. Though many of the candidates were advocates of temperance, they refused to embrace laws that would outlaw drinking, as they feared that doing so would make them untenable with working-class voters.

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“Underneath these gentle methods lay the assumption that Rochester had legitimate opinion makers, and that attitudes could radiate from them into every corner of society.”


(Chapter 4, Page 82)

Many of Rochester’s most elite businessmen formed a temperance movement in response to a seeming epidemic of working-class drinking. Rather than appeal to laws, these businessmen sought to use their societal standing to pressure working-class drinkers into abstaining from alcohol. Such attempts at persuasion relied on the belief that Rochester’s workingmen genuinely cared what the elite thought was proper behavior.

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“But now [workingmen] drank only in their own neighborhoods and only with each other, and in direct defiance of their employers. It taught the masters a disheartening lesson: if authority collapsed whenever they turned their backs, then there was in fact no authority.”


(Chapter 4, Pages 82-83)

Rochester businessmen believed that they could stamp out working-class drinking by explicitly forbidding their employees from drinking at the workplace. However, the effect of this was to simply push working-class drinking to social spaces separate from those the shop owners frequented. As a result, many of Rochester’s middle class realized how little control they held over their working population.

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“The Pioneers rejected moral authority as a means of reforming society. They did not care if dissolute men wanted to break the Sabbath. They wanted only to make them stop doing it.”


(Chapter 4, Page 87)

The Pioneers were the operators of a boating company that observed the Sabbath and did not sail on Sundays. The company was led by Bissell, and was connected to the larger Sabbatarian movement, which sought to enact laws forbidding working on the Sabbath. For the Sabbatarians, what mattered most was forcing individuals to follow Christian moral rules, rather than convincing sinners to embrace Christianity of their own free will.

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“The evangelical position was phrased (and it was understood by its detractors) as an increase in human ability so great that prayer and individual salvation were ultimately voluntary.”


(Chapter 5, Page 96)

Protestant theology had been founded upon the idea that God had preordained which individuals were sinners and which were Christians, leaving people unable to change such a decision. Evangelical preachers such as Finney altered this belief by preaching that each individual contained the capacity to actively choose a sinful or Christian life. By doing so, Finney emphasized the importance of prayer and of the need for Christians to actively convert sinners.

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“Finney’s revival techniques aroused controversy because they transformed conversion from a private to public and intensely social event.”


(Chapter 5, Page 97)

Finney’s evangelical services starkly differed from traditional Protestantism by encouraging individuals to prayer publicly and collectively. Finney’s services often lasted all night long and heavily featured groups of sinners renouncing their ways and embracing Christianity. These “spectacular public events” attracted Christians from a wide array of denominations, helping to bridge Rochester’s religious divides (97).

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“With few exceptions, then, Charles Finney’s revival was strongest among entrepreneurs who bore direct responsibility for disordered relations between classes. […] But at the beginning the new relationship between master and wage earner was created by masters who preferred money and privacy to the company of their workmen and the performance of old patriarchal duties.”


(Chapter 5, Page 106)

Johnson analyzes Rochester’s archival records to determine that Finney’s revival was most popular with Rochester’s manufacturers. Such manufacturers had helped to divide Rochester’s working and middle classes by industrializing their workplaces, causing the social crisis that had first instigated Finney’s revival.

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“We promise to make it the great business of our life to glorify God and build up the Redeemer’s Kingdom in this fallen world, and constantly to endeavor to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to Him.”


(Chapter 5, Page 111)

This quote comes from an “evangelical manifesto” signed by churchgoers in the midst of Finney’s revival (110). The manifesto states that the goal of the evangelical movement is to spur Christ’s Second Coming through direct prayer. Such a belief meant that anyone who failed to follow the evangelical movement served as an obstacle to achieving a new millennium.

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“Missionaries thought they knew the answer: revivals, they claimed, separated workingmen who were capable of discipline and self-restraint from those who were not. They were, of course, mistaken. Many wage earners rejected strong drink and riotous amusements as vehemently as they rejected the middle class and its religion.”


(Chapter 6, Page 120)

Many missionaries believe that participation in their evangelical movement was synonymous with rejecting sin, drinking, and promiscuity. Johnson argues that such a clear-cut distinction obfuscates the reality: that many workingmen abstained from drink while simultaneously critiquing the church and Finney’s revival.

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“In the 1830s men seeking jobs and credit knocked at the doors of businessmen pushed by their changed souls and by enormous social pressure to prepare Rochester for the millennium. By dispensing and withholding patronage, Christian entrepreneurs regulated the membership of their own class, and to a large extent of the community as a whole.”


(Chapter 6, Page 127)

Following the revival, Rochester’s business elite frequently required workingmen to be evangelical churchgoers if they hoped to obtain employment. Such gatekeeping practices had a serious impact on the general population makeup of Rochester. Those workingmen who embraced Christianity often climbed up the Rochester social ladder and joined the middle class, while those who eschewed church found “insecure employment” and often left Rochester for other cities (127).

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“The Whigs won by small majorities in every ward, and a worried Democrat announced that ‘the work of regeneration has commenced—a war of extermination against Barber poles and tavern signs.’”


(Chapter 6, Page 131)

The Whigs formed in 1834 to serve as a party of evangelicals, running on a platform advocating temperance against working-class drinking. For the Whigs’ rivals, the Democrats, such espousal of force amounted to an outright war against individual liberties, serving to unjustly close working-class social clubs in the name of achieving moral order.

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“Whatever shall be done to stay the tide of intemperance, and roll back its destroying wave, must be done by [per]suasive appeals to the reason, the interest, or the pride of men; but not by force.”


(Chapter 6, Page 132)

This quote comes from a statement issued by Democratic government officials pertaining to the question of temperance, which would serve as “Democratic dogma throughout the decade” (132). The Democrats opposed the Whig Party’s attempts to explicitly outlaw alcohol in Rochester, believing that such shows of force will only further fracture society. Instead, the Democrats argued for the importance of using “persuasion,” believing that men could be encouraged by society’s upper-class men to give up alcohol of their own accord (132).

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“[Tocqueville] noted the first day that Americans were a profoundly religious people, and during his travels he asked scores of ministers and laymen why that was so. He always received the same reply: religion was strong in America because it was necessary, and it was necessary because Americans were free.”


(Afterword, Page 136)

Tocqueville was a French diplomat who traveled through the US extensively in 1831, publishing an account of his travels in the book, Democracy in America. Tocqueville believed that America’s emphasis on individual freedom also meant that more Americans turned to religion in search of a moral code for how to live their lives. In Tocqueville’s analysis, religion takes the place of a monarch in American society, and that Americans are only superficially free.

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“Analyses of revivals and social control must not simply repeat that ‘religion’ holds ‘society’ together. They must define the ways in which particular religious beliefs reinforce the dominance of particular ruling groups. The Rochester revival served the needs not of ‘society’ but of entrepreneurs who employed wage labor.”


(Afterword, Page 137)

Johnson agrees with Tocqueville and other historians who have analyzed religious revivals as a means of control that keeps society in order. However, Johnson argues that one must consider which groups of people that such social control serves. In the case of the Rochester religious revival, Johnson argues that it explicitly served the bourgeois middle class who sought to discipline a seemingly rowdy working class.

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“The revival was not a capitalist plot. But it certainly was a crucial step in the legitimation of free labor.”


(Afterword, Page 141)

Though Johnson argues that the religious revival must be understood in terms of its social uses, he also argues against viewing the revival as having been actively concocted to discipline the working class. Rather, Johnson’s analysis emphasizes how Rochester’s businessmen were attracted to the revival because its religious teachings aligned with their own feelings of social disorder. Thus, though the evangelical revival was not a “plot,” it was a key force in shaping the development of capitalist class relations.

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