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Tocqueville was among the first to link revival religion with the concept of social control. Many have followed, and most of these share his central insight and repeat his central mistakes. The insight is enduring and valuable: in a society that lacked external controls, revivals created order through individual self-restraint. But Tocqueville refused to ground either religion or the social discipline that derived from it in specific social processes and was content to say that religion helps “society” to control its members. With that, he severed the analysis of social control from the question of who controls whom. True, religion can make men perceive society as something
more than the social relations and patterns of action that make it up, and thus it can act as a powerful legitimizing force. But too many studies of revivals perform the same function. 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. And while there are few systematic studies of revivals in other cities, there is reason to believe that the Rochester case was not unique. In towns and cities all over the northern United States, revivals after 1825 were tied closely to the growth of a manufacturing economy. Whitney Cross, in his pathbreaking study The Burned-Over District, found that revivals were strong in such manufacturing centers as Rochester, Lockport, and Utica, while the commercial centers of Buffalo and Albany remained quiet.2 Subsequent studies have reinforced his observation. Canal towns that were devoted to commerce were relatively immune to revivals. So were the old seaport cities. But in mill villages and manufacturing cities, evangelicalism struck as hard as it had at Rochester. The relation between revivals and manufactures gains strength when we turn from cities to individuals, for in urban places of all types, revivals and their related social movements were disproportionately strong among master workmen, manufacturers, and journeyman craftsmen. There were relatively few merchants and clerks among the converts, and even fewer day laborers and transport workers.3 Clearly, urban revivals in the 1820s and 1830s had something to do with the growth of manufactures.
In the few towns that have been studied over time, revivals followed the same chronology and served the same functions as they had at Rochester. Everywhere, enthusiasm struck first among masters and manufacturers, then spread through them into the ranks of labor. The workingman’s revival of the 1830s
was effected through missionary churches, temperance and moral reform societies, and Sunday schools that were dominated by rich evangelicals. The religion that it preached was order-inducing, repressive, and quintessentially bourgeois. In no city is there evidence of independent working-class revivals before the economic collapse of 1837.4 We must conclude that many workmen (the number varied enormously from town to town) were adopting the religion of the middle class, thus internalizing beliefs and modes of comportment that suited the needs of their employers.
The analysis of Rochester, along with evidence from other cities, allows us to hypothesize the social functions of urban revivals with some precision. Evangelicalism was a middle-class solution to problems of class, legitimacy, and order generated in the early stages of manufacturing. Revivals provided entrepreneurs with a means of imposing new standards of work discipline and personal comportment upon themselves and the men who worked for them, and thus they functioned as powerful social controls. But there was more to it than that. For the belief that every man was spiritually free and self governing enabled masters to present a relationship that denied human interdependence as the realization of Christian ideals. Here we arrive at the means by which revivals served the needs of “society.” For we have begun to define the role of religious sanctions in the process whereby a particular historical form of domination could assume legitimacy, and thus could indeed come to be perceived as “society.” A significant minority of workingmen participated willingly in that process. And that, of course, is the most total and effective social control of all.
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This solves the first problem raised by Tocqueville’s analysis, but it confronts us with a second: the tendency to deduce
the origins of religion from its social functions. Tocqueville stated that religion was strong in America because it created order among free individuals. We have seen that revivals did indeed create order, but only along lines prescribed by an emerging industrial bourgeoisie. Here we enter dangerous territory. For if we infer the causes of revivals from their results, we must conclude that entrepreneurs consciously fabricated a religion that suited their economic and social needs.5 That would demonstrate little more than our own incapacity to take religion seriously. True, Charles Finney’s revival at Rochester helped to solve the problems of labor discipline and social control in a new manufacturing city. But it was a religious solution, addressed to religious problems. The revival will remain unexplained until we know how social problems became translated into specifically religious unrest.
The businessmen and masters in Charles Finney’s audience had been born into New England villages in which the roles of husband, father, and employer were intertwined, and they had reconstructed that village order on the banks of the Genesee. In the early years, disorder and insubordination were held in check, for master and wage earner worked together and slept under the same roof. Fights between workmen were rare, and when they occurred masters witnessed the intelligible and personal stream of events that led up to them. Wage earners loafed or drank or broke the Sabbath only with the master’s knowledge and tacit consent. When workers lived with proprietors or within sight of them, serious breaches of the peace or of accepted standards of labor discipline were uncommon. At the very least, workingmen were constrained to act like guests, and masters enforced order easily, in the course of ordinary social and economic transactions.
In the few years preceding the revival of 1831, Charles Finney’s converts dissolved those arrangements. And as many recent studies have pointed out, that dissolution posed immense problems of work discipline and social order. In the
experience of the master, however, it was worse than that. For when a master broke with home-centered relations of production he abdicated his authority as head of a household and as moral governor of society, and thus lost contact with a crucial part of his own identity. Given the money he made and the trouble he caused others, we need not sympathize too much. But if we are to render his turn to religion intelligible, we must understand that he experienced disobedience and disorder as religious problems—problems that had to do not only with safe streets and the efficient production of flour and shoes but with the “rightness” of new relations of production.
It was a dilemma that had no earthly solution. Rochester masters assumed the responsibility to govern wage earners. But at the same time they severed the relationships through which they had always dominated those men. Resistance in the workshops, the failure of the temperance crusade, and the results of elections in the 1820s dramatized what had become an everyday fact of life: workmen no longer listened when proprietors spoke. The authority of Rochester’s ruling groups fell away, leaving them with new economic imperatives, old moral responsibilities, and no familiar and legitimate means of carrying them out. Attempts by a minority to reassert control through coercive means failed and, in the course of failing, split the elite and rendered concerted action impossible. It was the moral dilemma of free labor and the political impasse that it created that prepared the ground for Charles Finney.6
The revival of 1831 healed divisions within the middle class and turned businessmen and masters into an active and united missionary army. Governing their actions in the 1830s was the new and reassuring knowledge that authoritarian controls were not necessary. For Finney had told them that man is not innately corrupt but only corruptible. There was no need to hold employees or anyone else in relations of direct dependence. Such relations, in fact, prevented underlings from discovering the infinite potential for good that was in each of
them. Thus they inhibited individual conversion and blocked the millennium. From 1831 onward, middle-class religion in Rochester aimed not at the government of a sinful mankind but at the conversion of sinners and the perfection of the world.
The missions were a grand success: hundreds of wage earners joined middle-class churches in the 1830s. This pious enclave within the working class provided masters with more than willing workers and votes for Whig repression. Sober, hardworking, and obedient, they won the friendship and patronage of the middle class, and a startling number of them seized opportunities to become masters themselves. These men demonstrated that paternalistic controls could indeed be replaced by piety and voluntary self-restraint: free labor could generate a well-regulated, orderly, just, and happy society. The only thing needed was more revivals of religion. Workmen who continued to drink and carouse and stay away from church were no longer considered errant children; they were free moral agents who had chosen to oppose the Coming Kingdom. They could be hired when they were needed, fired without a qualm when they were not.
Thus a nascent industrial capitalism became attached to visions of a perfect moral order based on individual freedom and self-government, and old relations of dependence, servility, and mutuality were defined as sinful and left behind. The revival was not a capitalist plot. But it certainly was a crucial step in the legitimation of free labor.