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Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 09:50:20 -0400
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Subject: Towers on Sutton, _Journeymen for Jesus_
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (August, 1999)
William R. Sutton. _Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans
Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore_. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. xvi + 351 pp. Maps,
notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-271-01772-4;
$22.50 (paper), ISBN 0-271-01773-2.
Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Frank Towers <[log in to unmask]>, History
Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
William Sutton's _Journeymen for Jesus_ is a welcome addition to a
new wave of scholarship on religion and antebellum social history
that argues for the relevance of evangelical Protestantism in
popular movements.
The book has many strengths. The author digs into newspapers and
religious publications to document the links between Baltimore
evangelicals and artisans. Sutton provides a thoughtful and
extended discussion of what he terms "evangelical producerism" (p.
7), and he challenges the interpretation of religion and artisan
radicalism offered by labor historians writing in the 1970s and
early 1980s. Resisting the temptation to fall into a one-sided
tribute to artisan radicalism, Sutton maintains a focus on the
competition between conservative and emancipatory tendencies within
evangelical producerism. This work adds to a relatively sparse
record of secondary works on Jacksonian Baltimore, particularly its
workers. Finally, the book contributes to a developing body of
scholarship exploring the links between spirituality and labor
activism in the nineteenth century.[1] Students of American religion
and labor history will benefit from reading _Journeymen for Jesus_.
Sutton's ambitious effort to re-cast the history of evangelical
workers raises interesting questions about class and the influences
of evangelical Protestantism on social conflict. While he has
discovered a strand of radical evangelicalism, it is difficult to
know how widely evangelicals held these ideas and to what extent
evangelical reformers or artisans spoke for antebellum workers.
Scholars looking for the connections between evangelicalism and
working-class women, African Americans, and immigrants will be
disappointed. Had these groups and issues related to them been more
fully incorporated into the book, the limits on evangelical artisan
radicalism might appear to have been even more pronounced.
The book begins with a review of the literature on religion and
labor history, a topic Sutton has covered at greater length in an
earlier article.[2] Sutton criticizes some of the major works of the
new labor history for viewing religion as a kind of opiate of the
masses that inhibited radical challenges to capitalism by directing
believers inward to private contemplation of sin.[3] On the other
hand, he laments "the inability or unwillingness of religious
historians to recognize class tensions and contradictory cultural
impulses within the Second Great Awakening" (p. 18). Missing from
these works is an awareness of evangelical producerism, a popular
belief that "flourished in situations where socioeconomic
dislocation was obvious and faith commitments to traditional tenets
of Christian social justice were strong" (p. 7). Populist
evangelicals battled hierarchy within their churches and fought for
a traditional moral economy that gave labor a fair return on its
efforts and protected producers from the inequalities of the market.
These radicals offered "a powerful and attractive counterhegemonic
alternative to market economics and industrial capitalism" (p. 62).
Sutton emphasizes the contested character of evangelical belief.
Some embraced the liberal individualism of the market, others
rejected it, and many vacillated between these two poles (pp. 44,
60). He places artisans closer to the middle class of independent
proprietors and lower-paying white collar trades than to unskilled
laborers who lacked the control over working conditions to carry on
craft traditions (p. 38). Despite these qualifications, the
author's main concern is to show how evangelical rhetoric and
membership in evangelical denominations, particularly the
Methodists, interacted with artisans who expressed dissatisfaction
with the spread of market relationships and the decline of skilled
work. Baltimore's populist evangelicals distinguished themselves
because "rather than meekly submitting to the cultural authority of
their socioeconomic betters, this group assessed the morality of
capitalist change (or lack thereof) according to their own
experience and in light of the interpretations of the Scripture"
(p. 64).
Sutton lays out the story of evangelical producerism in three parts.
He starts by examining the struggle of populist evangelicals to
decentralize authority within congregations. Methodist infighting
gets the most attention, particularly the Methodist Protestant
schism of the late 1820s and early 30s. Methodist Protestants wanted
to give the laity more power in church government. Always aware of
the "conflicted" nature of evangelical challenges to established
authority, Sutton argues that the dissenters, most of whom were
artisans, criticized hierarchical social relationships in their
campaign to make the clergy more responsive to congregational
sentiment, but after they gained power reformers developed a
"preoccupation [with] maintaining the existing order, rather than
following the more difficult path of continued social melioration"
(p. 108).
Baltimore's zenith of artisan radicalism occurred during the
mid-1830s when trade unions flourished, Workingmen's party
candidates won office, and artisan rioters boldly challenged the
authority of bank directors. Sutton devotes two chapters to the
years 1833-37 and makes the case for this period as a culmination of
the egalitarian activism of the 1820s. His chapter on the trade
union movement of 1833 adds much new information to the history of
Baltimore, and his treatment of the Bank of Maryland riot of 1835
and its aftermath compliments earlier studies.[4]
Sutton's main objective in these chapters is to document the
"unprecedented producerist opposition to capitalist innovation"
that parallelled the populist struggle against hierarchy in the
Methodist church (p. 132). For Sutton, the activists of the 1830s
fought a traditional struggle to maintain communal solidarity and
enforce some aspects of a moral economy rather than engage in new
kind of class conflict. Sutton shows that union leaders in
Baltimore, like the other seaports, employed an artisan variant on
republicanism to advance their claims for shorter hours, just prices
and a more democratic politics. Trade unions emphasized Christian
ethics, requiring "good moral character" from their members and
"discountenanc[ing] all vice and immorality" (p. 146). Radical
clergy were not directly involved in the ten-hour movement, the
Workingmen's campaign of 1833 or the bank riot, but some sympathized
with unions and bank rioters, and the imagery used by both groups
overlapped.
The final chapters examine evangelical reform and its relationship
to labor. Sutton gives examples of individual master craftsmen who
practiced a "producerist ethic of limited accumulation" (p. 223),
and he portrays religious social reform, manifested in factory
preaching and temperance lobbying, as "the results of the creative
collective agency of populist evangelicals intent on carving out
viable social spaces for themselves" (p. 218). Mill villages
surrounded Jacksonian Baltimore, and Methodist ministers like Henry
Slicer routinely preached to the operatives in these communities.
Slicer's sermons emphasized both an inward looking "spiritual
consolation" and "empowerment ... as he appealed to Scriptures that
demanded the righteous confrontation of social ills" (p. 249).
Sutton argues that while the paternalism of mill village life
enhanced the social authority of factory owners, it also had a
radical potential to bind employers to communal morality as
understood by their operatives. He also views reform groups like
the artisan-dominated Washingtonian temperance society and issues
like Sabbatarianism as vehicles for limiting exploitation in the
market revolution rather than tools the upper-class used to control
social disorder.
The book concludes on an appropriately ambivalent note. In his
epilogue, Sutton states that the failure of evangelicals to unite in
protest at the arrest of abolitionist minister Charles Torrey in
1843, "prefigured an inability to maintain producerist ethics across
the board" (p. 308). He goes on to show that many of the
evangelical artisan leaders of the 1830s had moved up and out of
their manual trades by the 1840s, and had less concern for labor
issues as a result. To counter-balance this picture of radicalism
in decline, Sutton quotes at length from a series of anonymous
letters reprinted in the Baltimore Sun in 1843 and 44. The letters
attacked "the growing abuses of unchecked consumerism and finance
capitalism," and, for Sutton, showed that "the producerist legacy
continued to find its champions" (p. 312).
_Journeymen for Jesus_ is a thought provoking study that deserves a
wide audience. Sutton should be commended for his thoughtful
analysis, his even-handed approach to the work of other scholars,
and his detailed archival work. Some questions raised in the book
call for more attention to unexplored aspects of artisan and
evangelical experience.
As Sutton notes, the history of workers in Jacksonian Baltimore is
under-studied in comparison with cities further north. His book is
essentially an intellectual history of the evangelical producerism,
but it would help to have a fuller picture of the structural context
of politics and the economy that underlay the protests of the book's
subjects. The case for the salience of producerist rhetoric would
be stronger if readers knew how many manual workers fit the
definition of artisan, how many of these individuals attended
evangelical churches, and how changes in the antebellum economy
corresponded to critiques of price gouging and skill erosion. A
discussion of the numbers follows, and it suggests that the
conservative side of evangelical producerism was more pronounced
than the rhetoric indicates.
Lacking more concrete economic data, Sutton attributes the surge of
labor and evangelical militancy to two causes. One is the familiar
model of skill erosion in the face of "dislocation" caused by mass
production techniques and a growing labor supply (pp. 7, 26-28), and
the other is the moral ambivalence of religious artisans to the
"temptations inherent in liberal capitalist development" (p. 134).
The artisan decline theory should take into account studies of
metropolitan industrialization that show skilled work flourishing in
the major Atlantic ports even as it faded in smaller industrial
cities like Lynn and Newark. Similarly, George Thomas and others
have criticized the "strain" interpretation of religious movements
as reactions to economic dislocation or social stress in favor of
viewing them as more or less continual features of a society that
operate independently of other forces.[5]
The available studies on Baltimore's economy suggest that in some
trades, like construction, craft rules and culture survived, but in
others, like textiles and food processing, they were under pressure
if not gone by the 1830s.[6] Sutton shows that evangelicals preached
to factory operatives, but he can't find much beyond a rally by
seamstresses in 1833 to suggest that unskilled workers participated
with great enthusiasm in trade unions and labor politics. Given
women's preponderance in church services and the spread of female
factory and sweated labor, why didn't working women become more
involved in evangelical protest? Instead, the trades that produced
most of the radical artisans were those resistant to mass production
techniques and ones in which skilled workers like printers and house
carpenters could rise to run their own businesses or move into
related professions like contracting and editing. As Sutton
observes, "many of those most suspicious of capitalist
transformation had enjoyed a previous measure of success and social
status" (p. 142). The correspondence of radical republican activism
with prosperity on one hand, and the apparent disconnect between
these ideas and people employed on the bottom rungs of the
occupational ladder on the other is an interesting pattern that asks
for more explanation.
Numbers would add to the book's treatment of artisan politics.
Sutton provides a fine analysis of the issues and leaders of the
1833 election in which the Workingmen's party upset the city's
dominant Democratic party, but his assessment of this campaign as an
"ambiguous" labor victory may be an understatement (p. 161). The
election data suggest that the Workingmen's party was less a popular
movement than a one-time bolt from the Democrats opportunistically
exploited by the National Republicans (later the Whigs) who endorsed
the third-party ticket. Workingmen did best in wards that had a
weak or negative correlation with Democratic support in elections
from 1828 to 1840. The residents of these wards had more taxable
wealth than the city average. Conversely, Workingmen garnered less
than their citywide victory margin in wards with lower property
values and more manufacturing enterprises. These results suggest
that wealthy men who otherwise sided with the Whigs found reasons to
vote for the Workingmen, and that some artisans like block maker and
Methodist class leader Robert Millholland were attracted to the
Whigs.[7] Because evangelical congregations included professionals
and the wealthy along with middling artisans, it would be
interesting to know how and if rich men invoked producerist
arguments in their public battles. In other words, how malleable
was the rhetoric of artisan radicalism?
In other cases it is a question of the glass being half full or half
empty. In the aftermath of the Bank Riot of 1835, 75 percent of
those voting for the mayor chose General Samuel Smith, the
law-and-order nominee of both Democrats and Whigs. His challenger,
Moses Davis, was a carpenter new to politics. Sutton takes the 1,611
ballots cast for Davis as "an indication of the ongoing resonance of
populist producerism" (p. 190). Viewed in the broader context of
1830s electoral history, Davis's showing appears remarkably weak.
Davis had the lowest percentage of the vote of any candidate for
citywide office in the 1830s. While he garnered one-fourth of the
votes in 1835 because of low turnout, Davis's vote total represented
only 16 percent of the ballots cast in 1834.[8] Extrapolating from
census data in 1830 and 1840, Baltimore had roughly 90,000 people in
1835. At a minimum, 20,000 of them were eligible voters. Davis's
poor showing could just as easily be taken as evidence that artisan
republicanism had few fans in 1835.
There is also a quantitative problem in regard to evangelicalism's
popularity among craftsmen. Working with Terry Bilhartz's data on
church membership and some informed guesswork, Sutton estimates that
1 in 6, or 17 percent, of all Baltimoreans attended Methodist
churches, the most popular Protestant denomination (p. 11). While
this rate exceeded that of other large seaports, it does not make
for a majority movement, especially given the heterogeneity of
church members. Bilhartz found that half of all Methodists belonged
to households headed by male artisans, but the majority of
church-goers were women, and African Americans made up as much as
one third of all Baltimore Methodists.[9] The numbers matter because
Sutton states early on that for reasons of sources he will not
discuss blacks and women but claims to be studying "popular
religious and ethical propositions ... shared by a significant
number of Americans in or sympathetic to the producing classes" (p.
14).
Sutton uses attitudes towards race and slavery to support a
chronology of radicalism rising in the late 1820s and early 30s and
declining in the 1840s. Black ship caulkers' support for the 1833
ten-hour drive by white journeymen shipwrights showed that there was
"a modicum of interracial unity in the Jacksonian ten-hour movement"
(pp. 137-38), and Torrey's arrest in 1843 manifested radicalism's
decline. This argument implies that white evangelicals took a more
egalitarian stand on racial issues prior to the mid-1840s. Almost
everything else historians know about blacks and Methodism in
Baltimore indicates racial animosity, not unity, even during the
high tide of labor radicalism. Recent books by Christopher Phillips
and T. Stephen Whitman on Baltimore African Americans demonstrate
the importance of black Methodists in building autonomous
African-American institutions, often in opposition to their hostile
white coreligionists.[10] The 1833 Workingmen's ticket kept silent
on issues related to black rights. As for shipbuilding, the
caulkers' endorsement of shorter hours did not prevent white ship
carpenters from staging a hate strike against black competition in
1836, an incident that produced Frederick Douglass's memorable
confrontation with white working-class racists.
The example of Henry Slicer is perhaps most instructive on this
score. Sutton states that Slicer's "populist credentials were
impeccable" (p. 122). But he downplays Slicer's role in defending
the rights of slaveowners to join the Methodist church and hold high
office in its bureaucracy. Slicer preached to black congregations,
but he told them that "Negroes should be orderly and subservient."
Like many of the radical artisans discussed by Sutton, Slicer was an
ardent Democrat. He served as chaplain to the U.S. Senate in the
1830s and 1850s, a job somewhat at odds with his anti-establishment
image. In 1840, Democrat Robert Ricketts, one of Sutton's
evangelical radicals, urged Slicer to tell Methodists how Democratic
presidential candidate Martin Van Buren fought abolitionist efforts
to drive slaveholders from the church. If he spoke for a brand of
evangelical populism, then Slicer's attitudes on slavery suggest
that he supported the racist egalitarianism evident in Jacksonian
Democratic policies like expanding white voting rights while
curtailing those of blacks, promoting white land ownership by
removing native peoples from the southeast, and defending slavery as
a barrier against the economic degradation of poor whites.[11]
Some examples of populism appear as weak challenges to established
authority in light of the more obvious inequalities that confronted
residents of a slave state. Slicer opposed dueling, but not
slavery. Methodist minister John Hersey expressed "universal
condemnation of modern liberal economics" and "saved his particular
disgust for those dismantling the just price ideal and the labor
theory of value." Hersey was also "outspokenly abolitionist" (pp.
124-25). At a meeting with Quaker philanthropist Moses Sheppard and
lawyer Benjamin LaTrobe, Hersey's "coarse" clothing contrasted with
that of his wealthy hosts, and he insisted that Sheppard and LaTrobe
kneel with him in prayer. Hersey's dress and manner may have irked
these rich men, but they probably were pleased that he accepted
their offer to travel to Liberia as assistant agent for the American
Colonization Society. Hersey's radicalism might be more credible
had he openly challenged colonization, a scheme designed to deport
free blacks to Africa, and something most advocates of immediate
emancipation deplored.
The same questions could be asked about more substantial examples of
radical reform, like temperance. While Sutton makes a compelling
case for artisan involvement in alcohol reform and shows how some
activists presented their case in producerist terms, it should be
kept in mind that the antebellum elite supported temperance. Noting
that most wealthy and political powerful northerners opposed
abolition but supported temperance, Paul Goodman has observed that
joining a temperance society incurred far less social risk than did
signing up with the abolitionists.[12]
Although Sutton considers gendered rhetoric in a few places (pp.
174 and 275, for example), he does not explore the tensions between
women and men inside of artisan households or reform groups like the
Washingtonians. As Theresa Murphy and Ruth Alexander have pointed
out, evangelicals not only reacted in ambivalent ways to the market,
they also contested prescribed gender roles in churches and reform
societies that had male leaders but relied on women for the bulk of
their membership.[13] Sutton's critique of the new labor history for
ignoring a vital element of workers' social experience resonates
with criticisms of the same scholarship for marginalizing women and
African Americans. Sutton's findings would have a greater impact if
he more fully explored the racial and gendered aspects of artisan
experience.
A final question is nativism. In his analysis of Baltimore's 1839
convent riot, Sutton seeks to show that evangelicals were not
responsible for this popular expression of anti-Catholicism rather
than looking at nativism as another of the double-edged swords of
evangelical social thought. Sutton absolves producerist
evangelicals of blame for the incident on the grounds that the
leading anti-Catholic clergy were Presbyterians and two Methodist
artisans publicly opposed the riot (pp. 288-89). While Sutton
makes much of artisan participation in the bank riot, he downplays
Joseph Mannard's evidence that the skilled and semi-skilled workers
predominated in the convent mob.[14] In 1845, nativists staged a
third party challenge similar to the Workingmen's bolt of 1833. In
the 1850s, the Know Nothings thrived in Baltimore. Did some radical
Methodists and artisans get involved in nativist politics? Given
that an increasing number of Baltimore Catholics were Irish and
German immigrants working in unskilled, low-paying jobs, the
nativist strand of evangelicalism could add a great deal to Sutton's
analysis of tensions between artisans and other manual workers.
The reviewer's familiarity with Baltimore sources might magnify the
importance of local issues that may not matter as much to a general
audience. These questions should not be taken as condemnation of
_Journeymen for Jesus_. Sutton has done a remarkable job of combing
the records to discover a strand of thought and a group of men
historians otherwise would know little about. His findings speak to
a broad scholarly audience, and his work makes a significant
contribution to several fields of historical study.
Notes
[1]. Some examples of these works are Jama Lazerow, _Religion and
the Working Class in Antebellum America_ (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1995); Theresa Ann Murphy, _Ten Hours' Labor:
Religion Reform and Gender in Early New England_ (Ithaca, 1992);
Ronald Schultz, _The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and
the Politics of Class, 1790-1830_ (New York, 1993).
[2]. William R. Sutton, "Tied to the Whipping Post: New Labor
Historians and Evangelical Artisans in the Early Republic," _Labor
History_ 36 (Spring 1995), 23-47.
[3]. Sutton refers in particular to Paul E. Johnson, _A Shopkeeper's
Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837_
(New York, 1978); Bruce Laurie, _Working People of Philadelphia,
1800-1850_ (Philadelphia, 1980); Sean Wilentz, _Chants Democratic:
New York and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850_ (New
York, 1984).
[4]. David Grimsted, "Rioting in its Jacksonian Setting," _American
Historical Review_ 77 (April 1972), 36-397.
[5]. Richard B. Stott, _Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity,
and Youth in Antebellum New York City_ (Ithaca, 1990); Wilentz,
_Chants Democratic_; Philip Scranton, _Proprietary Capitalism: The
Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800-1885_ (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983); George M. Thomas, Revivalism and
Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in
the Nineteenth-Century United States ([1989] Reprint. Chicago,
1997), 12-14.
[6]. Jo Ann E. Argesinger, "The City That Tries to Suit Everybody:
Baltimore's Clothing Industry," in Elizabeth Fee, Linda Shopes,
Linda Zeidman eds., _The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History_
(Philadelphia, 1991): 82-102; Lynda Fuller Clendenning, "The Early
Textile Industry in Maryland, 1800-1845," _Maryland Historical
Magazine_ 87 (Fall 1992): 251-266; Gary L. Browne, _Baltimore in
the Nation, 1789-1861_ (Chapel Hill, 1980), 86, 135-136; Edward K.
Muller and Paul A. Groves, "The Emergence of Industrial Districts
in Mid-Nineteenth Century Baltimore," _Geographical Review_ 69
(1979): 159-177.
[7]. Voting data comes from the Baltimore _American and Commercial
Advertiser_, October 8, 1833; Anita Rosalyn Gorochow, "Baltimore
Labor in the Age of Jackson," (Master's thesis, Columbia University,
1949), 13, xii; Whitman H. Ridgway, _Community Leadership in
Maryland, 1790-1840: A Comparative Analysis of Power in Society_
(Chapel Hill, 1979), 109.
[8]. _American and Commercial Advertiser_, September 8, 1835 and
Gorochow, "Baltimore Labor."
[9]. Terry D. Bilhartz, _Urban Religion and the Second Great
Awakening: Church and Society in Early National Baltimore_
(Rutherford, NJ, 1986), 23; Charles G. Steffen, _The Mechanics of
Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763-1812_
(Urbana, 1984), 256.
[10]. Christopher Phillips, _Freedom's Port: The African-American
Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860_ (Urbana, 1997); T. Stephen
Whitman, _The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore
and Early National Maryland_ (Lexington, Ky, 1997).
[11]. Henry Slicer Journals, October 30, 1859 and Robert Ricketts to
Henry Slicer, August 15, 1840 in Henry Slicer Papers, United
Methodist Historical Society of the Baltimore Washington Conference,
Lovely Lane Museum and Library, Baltimore.
[12]. Paul Goodman, _Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of
Racial Equality_ (Berkeley, 1998), 123.
[13]. Ruth M. Alexander, "'We Are Engaged as a Band of Sisters':
Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement,
1840-1850," _Journal of American History_ 75 (December 1988),
763-785, especially 781-784; Murphy, _Ten Hours' Labor_, 103-111.
[14]. Joseph G. Mannard, "The 1839 Baltimore Nunnery Riot: An
Episode in Jacksonian Nativism and Violence," _The Maryland
Historian_ 11 (Spring 1980), 15-27, see p. 18.
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