A Shopkeeper's Millennium

Paul E. Johnson. A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. Hill and Wang, 1978 and 2004.

This is the 25th-Anniversary edition of Johnson's book; it includes a new introduction in which he responds to the criticism and commentary generated in response since the initial publication. Johnson admits that the original study was very much a product of the New Social History movement which by the late 70's was already hitting its limits (unbeknownst to practitioners such as himself). He also recognizes that religious history is a much more developed sub-field than it was then, and many religious historians have taken exception to what they perceive as a reductionist strain in his approach. Having conceded that he no longer accepts the positivist assumptions behind the new social history approach, and that he should have been more circumspect and qualified in some of his assertions, he still stands by the essential premise--that the phenomenon of mass conversion in Rochester in the wake of Charles Finney was grounded in specific social and economic conditions.

I don't think Johnson underestimates the importance of sincere religious belief, and those critics who accuse this book of being reductionist are (understandably) mistaken. Instead, Johnson acknowledges that the converts were responding to religious appeals--but he also argues that they framed many social anxieties of the time in religious terms.

The context of Rochester is, Johnson admits, not "typical" but rather exceptional. Rochester was exceptionally tied to, and affected by, the social and economic changes wrought by the Eric Canal. Sitting on the falls of the Genesee River where the canal met it, Rochester was well positioned as a manufacturing center as well as a midpoint on the canal. As a result it grew quickly, and experienced the changes in the relationship between business and labor that marked the early years of the Market revolution.

The decline in the apprentice system and more importantly the decrease in the older values in mutuality reinforced by journeyman and workers living with their employers as part of the household had the effect of removing the working class from earlier forms of social control. This also denied the social elite an important means of imposing that control even as they tried to maintain existing social and cultural norms in which their status and self-respect were bound up in that control.

Attempts to restore social control through coercion--particularly regarding temperance crusades--not only failed, they also divided the middle class elite against each other. At the same time, the rise of more democratic politics in the form of the second party system further divided the elite even while empowering the working class against them.

Finney's crusade, then, came at a time when the elite were searching for purpose and validation--the fact that converts sincerely experienced spiritual and theological revelations and changes does not negate the suggestion that these new ideas also met pressing social anxieties.

Johnson concludes the book with a chapter detailing the success Finney's middle-class converts had in bringing a sizable minority of working class peoples into the fold. These latter converts were explicitly accepting a bourgeoisie religion and the values of self-restraint and individual economic activity; a basis for the Free Labor movement to follow.