40 pages • 1 hour read
Paul E. JohnsonA Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Changing Relationship Between Classes in 1820s Rochester
One of the major themes traced throughout A Shopkeeper’s Millennium is how the growth of capitalism and industrialization fundamentally altered the class system in Rochester. Over the course of the 1820s, a myriad of social forces convened to lead to the separation of the working and middle classes, profoundly affecting social customs and moral values. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium explores how this transformed relationship between classes created a social crisis by the end of the 1820s.
Prior to Rochester’s population boom in the early 1820s, Johnson describes a small city in which workingmen and their employers lived in close contact with each other. This earlier version of Rochester more closely resembled the rural small towns that peppered the Genesee Valley, from which came most of the city’s merchants and shop owners. Crucial to this close relation between classes was the fact that many employers offered their employees lodging in their own homes as a part of their wages—a system which Johnson deems the “household economy” (57). The relation that the household economy entailed went beyond mere contractual obligations, as many of the employers considered their co-resident employees as outright members of the family. This familial relation meant that shop owners felt a personal responsibility for their employees, ensuring that they behaved civilly.
As Rochester grew into a major manufacturing center, the size of its population inevitably meant that the household economy was no longer viable. Business owners likewise happily ceased the practice of offering lodging, seeking to establish “domestic privacy” for themselves (55). As a result, most young workingmen lived in boardinghouses, creating “noisy” working-class neighborhoods separate from the quieter, more secluded middle- and upper-class neighborhoods (55). Industrial growth exacerbated this class divide, as teams of journeymen now worked in factories, with little to no interaction with their bosses.
Both the working and middle classes soon understood themselves as fundamentally distinct and opposed groups of individuals. Though alcohol had once been central to middle-class socializing, Rochester’s businessmen now viewed alcohol as a working-class leisure activity that inevitably led to “drunkenness and promiscuous sociability” (58). However, Rochester’s elites had largely given up their ability to control or influence working-class behaviors through their active renunciation of the household economy. By the end of the 1820s, Rochester’s middle class perceived the city as having succumbed to disorder and chaos, with little ability to assert their control over the city.
Religion as a Tool for Social Control
In the final chapters of A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Johnson argues that the religious revival’s success was largely due to its ability to be used as a means for “social control” (136). Rochester introduces this idea of social control in the book’s Afterword, through an anecdote about the French Diplomat Tocqueville. In his book Democracy in America, Tocqueville argued that religion was important in America as it provided a means for free individuals “to govern themselves” absent a tyrant or king (136). Johnson modifies Tocqueville’s thesis to argue that the religious revival specifically served America’s bourgeois class, who were desperately seeking a way to rein in the unruly working class.
Finney’s religious revival in Rochester came on the heels of a social crisis about working-class drinking. Many of Rochester’s businessmen and elites felt that they had lost total authority over their city, with the temperance movement having failed to pressure workingmen into following their orders. Finney’s evangelical religion appealed to them precisely because it offered a theological interpretation that was “order-inducing, repressive, and quintessentially bourgeois” (138). In contrast to Calvinism’s doctrine of predestination, Finney preached that all individuals had the potential to be good and could achieve this through prayer and individual discipline. In Finney’s services, he emphasized the necessity of the individual to devote himself to God and Jesus Christ, aligning with the middle classes’ capitalist values of independence and individual ambition. While most evangelicals only sought to encourage workingmen to join churches, many businessmen outright required that their workers be evangelical and temperate. Finney’s religious revival became the tool by which Rochester’s middle class explicitly shaped their community, only allowing fellow evangelicals to find work or stable residence.
Though Johnson emphasizes the religious revival as a form of social discipline, he is also careful to acknowledge that the revival cannot be considered a “capitalist plot” intentionally hatched to control the working class (141). In spite of evangelism’s usefulness to the emerging bourgeois class, the revival must be understood as a religious phenomenon that aligned with social needs. Johnson argues that Rochester’s middle class turned to Finney’s revival as they experienced the crisis over the working class as “specifically religious unrest” (139).
The Question of Freedom in Early America
When Finney preached in Rochester in 1830, America was still a relatively young country. Its system of democracy, which emphasized individual rights and representation in government, was unheard of in the rest of the world, where monarchy was still the norm. As such, the notion of freedom was a central topic in many social, political, and religious debates in America’s early years—debates that reappear numerous times throughout A Shopkeeper’s Millennium.
The notion of individual freedom was central to Finney’s evangelical revival. Though Finney was a Protestant, his theological worldview differed starkly from traditional Protestant doctrine. Earlier Protestant ministers, such as John Calvin, had taught that man’s fate was determined by God, and that individual action could do little to change whether one was destined for Heaven or Hell. In such a Calvinist theology, the only way of dealing with sinners was to seek to use law or force to constrain their evil behaviors. Finney, in contrast, believed that individuals could actively choose to leave a Christly life through prayer and voluntary conversion. New evangelicals now sought to “liberate [the sinful] from their sins,” and encourage them to choose a religious life (6).
Beyond its religious resonances, individual freedom was also a core political issue. In A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, one of the core debates over liberty comes in the differing attitudes toward temperance espoused by Rochester’s Whig and Democratic Parties. Though both parties consisted of middle- and upper-class Rochesterians who personally supported temperance, the two parties differed in how they believed temperance should be implemented societally. The Whigs, who were largely Evangelical, ran on a political platform arguing for the usage of legal force to outlaw alcohol and curb working-class drunkenness. The Democrats, on the other hand, won working-class support by arguing for the necessity of protecting individual liberty: “Whatever shall be done to stay the tide of intemperance, and roll back its destroying wave, must be done by suasive appeals to the reason the interest, or the pride of men; but not by force” (132). This question of liberty versus force would remain central to Whig and Democratic political debates for years to come, with neither winning decisive control over the Rochester government.
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