Impasse
NEITHER spontaneous controls nor a faction-ridden village government could tame the workingmen and drifters who filled Rochester in the 1820s. In their own streets and neighborhoods, dissolute men did what they pleased, and anxious merchants and masters had no means of stopping them. Some rich men sensed that they had the power to coerce workmen into being good. But most were uncomfortable with power, and tried to quiet society through a moral authority that had lost its basis in everyday experience. Arguments between advocates of power and advocates of authority surfaced periodically among the village trustees. The argument widened into an open fight in 1828, as Rochester’s weakened elite tried new ways of fighting social evil.
In 1828, worried gentlemen formed the Rochester Society for the Promotion of Temperance, and affiliated with a national movement led by Lyman Beecher of Boston. These men proposed to end drunkenness through persuasion, example, and the weight of their names. Every old family and every church submerged their differences and contributed leaders to the society. Colonel Rochester himself, along with his son-in-law Jonothan Child, represented the Rochester clan and the Episcopal Church. They were joined by their old enemies Matthew Brown and Levi Ward, and by Ward’s son-in-law
Moses Chapin. The Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist ministers were among the founders. So, temporarily, was Father McNamara of the Catholic chapel.1 The Observer scanned the names and concluded that “when we see that they are the most respectable, wealthy, moral, and influential individuals in society, we feel confident that this reformation will not cease but with the extermination of intemperance from our land.”2
The temperance reformers were wealthy men, and they possessed enormous power. But they preferred to translate power into authority, and to reform lesser men by persuasion rather than by force. Lyman Beecher, whose Six Sermons on Intemperance guided the movement from its beginning, defined the goal as “THE BANISHMENT OF ARDENT SPIRITS FROM THE LIST OF LAWFUL ARTICLES OF COMMERCE BY A CORRECT AND EFFICIENT PUBLIC SENTIMENT …” by social pressure and an aroused public opinion.3 The society aimed its appeals at wealthy men, for these had always set standards for others. Members of the society gave up even the most moderate use of liquor. They would not buy it, drink it, sell it, manufacture it, or provide it for their guests or employees, and they would use all their influence to encourage others to do the same.4 The organization and its methods were based on the touching faith that poor men would drink only “so long as the traffic in liquor is regarded as lawful, and is patronized by men of reputation and moral worth …”5 Temperance men did not want to outlaw liquor or to run drunkards and grogsellers out of town. They wanted only to make men ashamed to drink. Reform would come quietly and voluntarily, and it would come from the top down.
Most temperance appeals were directed at businessmen and masters who hired wage labor and who were in daily contact with those elements of society with the strongest taste for alcohol. “‘I’LL LEAVE OFF WHEN THE BOSS DOES,’ said a young mechanic to his companions. This shows the influence and responsibility of those who carry on an extensive business. If
an employer refuses to abstain from strong drink, we need not wonder if many whom he employs refuse to abstain, encouraged by his example.”6 Temperance-minded masters stopped providing the daily dram as part of a workman’s wages, and set out to convince others that work, particularly strenuous outdoor work, was better and more profitably done without the stimulus of alcohol. Master carpenters reported putting up houses “without the use of ardent spirits—without the least difficulty. Indeed it is much the safest way to put up frames.”7 A nearby farmer announced that he had grown tired of the “bobbling and idleness which ardent spirits uniformly produces” and that he no longer gave whiskey to his harvesters. The happy result was that “he had no difficulty in keeping them perfectly subject to his directions. They conducted and labored like sober, rational men, and not like intoxicated mutineers.” 8
Temperance propaganda promised masters social peace, a disciplined and docile labor force, and an opportunity to assert moral authority over their men. The movement enjoyed widespread success among those merchants and masters who considered themselves respectable. After one year’s agitation the Observer announced proudly that “public opinion has already, in a great degree, branded as disgraceful, the practice of dram-drinking, among the more respectable part of the community.” 9 Of course hundreds of less “respectable” men continued to drink. But temperance men stood firm in their belief that “regiments of drunkards can present but a feeble resistance compared with a few respectable church members.”10
In workshop after workshop, masters gathered their men and announced that they would no longer provide drinks or allow drinking in the shop, and that the new rules derived from patriotism and religion. Sometimes employees took a hand. When a printer’s apprentice completed his training in 1829, he refused to buy his shopmates the customary round of drinks. Instead, he gave them each a Bible, a glass of cold
water, and a knowing look.11 If a workman continued to drink off the job, the master took him aside for a firm but friendly talk and tried “by persuasion and all other proper and suitable means” to bring him to his senses.12 These must have been odd conversations—earnest pomposity on one side, foot shuffling and hidden grins on the other. Masters finished talking with the assurance that they had done all that they properly could. It only remained for workingmen to take their advice.
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. Indeed for many reformers the temperance crusade may have been a final test of that belief. But while masters asked wage earners to give up their evil ways, they turned workers out of their homes and into streets and neighborhoods where drinking remained a normal part of life. A journeyman who put up with strange new practices on the job experienced strong pressures to drink on his own block, where the grocery was the principal place to relax with workmates and friends. Temperance men talked loudest in 1828 and 1829, years in which the autonomy of working-class neighborhoods grew at a dizzying rate. In each of those years the village granted nearly 100 licenses to sell whiskey by the glass, suggesting that there was a legal drinking establishment for every twenty-eight adult men in Rochester. These neighborhood bars dispensed nearly 200,000 gallons of whiskey annually.13 Perhaps the workshops were dry. The neighborhoods certainly were not.
By 1830 the temperance crusade was, on its own terms, a success: society’s leading men were encouraging abstinence. But even as they preached, they withdrew from the social relationships in which their ability to command obedience was embedded. Wage earners continued to drink. But now they 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. It was a lesson that masters were learning in a wide variety of situations. But nowhere was it dramatized more starkly than in the social relations and cultural meaning that had come to surround a glass of whiskey.
The temperance movement proved once and for all that workingmen were immune to middle-class advice. From the beginning, there were men who knew that, and who suggested the use of power. Through boycotts and proscription they could force other men to give up their dissolute habits. Failing that, they could force them out of Rochester. If talk would not quiet workmen’s thirst for whiskey, then godly employers should “combine to compel the intemperate to reform, by withholding from them any employment if they will not wholly abstain from the use of ardent spirits.”14 And if businessmen would not listen to the voice of organized morality, they could be made to experience its power. What could the godly do with merchants and distillers who resisted?
They can, in the first place, withhold, as far as possible, the means of carrying on this nefarious and murderous business. Withhold your wood, withhold receptacles, withhold your grain, for the same reasons that you would withhold powder, pistol, and dirk from the midnight assassin. After suitable forbearance and affectionate entreaty, they can, in the second place, withhold patronage of all kinds; withdraw fellowship; treat them in all respects as felons, upon the same principle that slave dealers and incendiaries are treated as felons.15 These proposals flew in the face of Lyman Beecher’s warning that coercion would arouse resistance and shatter the social harmony which, at bottom, temperance men were trying to create. Such ideas gained few adherents within the temperance
society. But in a second effort at reform, advocates of force gained control. The result was what Beecher had predicted: failure, and an open and debilitating fight between society’s leading men.
Among the problems that came to Rochester with the Erie Canal, none but intemperance was more troublesome than violation of the Sabbath. Rochester businessmen and masters had been born into villages where it was a punishable offense to cook after sundown on Saturday or to leave the house during the next twenty-four hours for any purpose other than going to church. This was true not only in the countryside but in the largest towns. Passing through in 1831, Tocqueville marveled that “Boston on Sunday has, literally, the appearance of a deserted town.”16 Rochester, however, was a different kind of city. Freight and passenger boats operated seven days a week, and activity along the canal and on the loading docks went unabated on the Lord’s Day. Rochester’s concerned citizens were helpless. When the Reverend Joseph Penney of First Presbyterian Church petitioned the state legislature to shut down the locks on Sunday the lawmakers refused, and asked Penney if he really wanted hundreds of boatmen and transients stranded in his village on Sundays. Some of Penney’s wealthiest neighbors agreed: not only was six-day travel bad for business, but boatmen would use their free Sundays to “drink grog and court Venus.”17
With Sabbath breakers, the state government, and businessmen in their own town ignoring them, Rochester Sabbatarians held one more weapon: they could force boat owners to stop doing business on Sunday. In 1828 they began pressuring the forwarding merchants. One small line had already stopped Sunday travel, and the first public meeting of Sabbatarians announced that “we will give our business and patronage to such lines as do not travel on the Holy Sabbath,” something very much like a boycott of the other lines.18 Sabbatarians demanded that people abstain from Sunday travel and that
they deny patronage to the seven-day lines even on weekdays. They knew that workingmen and transients would not reform voluntarily, and their stated aim was “to act on the owners of steamboats, stages, canal boats, and livery stables; and through the medium of their pockets, to prevent them from furnishing conveyances on the Sabbath, for that large mass of tbe community who neither fear God nor obey man.”19
Almost simultaneously, Elder Josiah Bissell of Third Presbyterian Church, with donations from rich townsmen and from such pious outsiders as Lewis Tappan of New York, organized a Sabbath-keeping stage and boat line. The Pioneer Line, as the venture was called, did not operate on Sunday. The boats and coaches did not run, tickets were not sold, horses were not shod, boats were not repaired. The stage drivers and boatmen were non-drinkers, and at stops the Pioneer stages served hot coffee rather than the customary rum. The Rochester House and Christopher’s Mansion House closed their bars and affiliated with the Pioneer, offering safe, suitable accommodations to travelers on the Pioneer Line.20 When businessmen argued that the end of Sunday travel would impair delivery of the mail, Elder Bissell went to Washington to secure post-office contracts for the Pioneer. Rebuffed, he returned to Rochester and, in concert with Lewis Tappan and Lyman Beecher, organized a nationwide campaign to abolish transportation of the mail and the opening of post offices on Sunday. Overnight, Rochester was at the center of a national crusade to maintain Sunday as sacred time.21
Pioneer tactics were alien to the spirit of the gentler reformers: Bissell and his friends called for boycotts of non-cooperating businessmen. Immediately they found themselves opposed by some of the richest and most pious men in Rochester. These claimed to be as disturbed as anyone else by violations of the eighth commandment. But they felt that compulsion and boycotts were “contrary to the free spirit of our institutions.” Pioneer tactics were a threat to individual conscience, and
these gentlemen “resolved, unanimously, that we invite all good men to aid us in promoting, temperately, but with firmness, the great interests of morality and social order; blending the humility and meekness of the Christian with the benevolence of the philanthropist.”22 Boycotts in particular aroused a shocked and angry opposition. The Observer, staunch supporter of the Pioneers, admitted that a lot of good Christians were repulsed:
They consider them as wrong in principle, contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, and inconsistent with that universal toleration of religious opinions, which is allowed by the laws of our country. They contend, that all combinations of Christians to withdraw their business and patronage from any class of men, on account of their belief and practice in matters of religion, is a sort of compulsion and an invasion of the rights of conscience, which is inconsistent with the law of kindness to our neighbor and an injury to the cause of the Redeemer.23 Early in 1829 word came that the Sabbath mails petitions had been rejected. Senator Richard Johnson, to whose Post Office Committee the memorials had been referred, explained that the federal government could not make laws concerning religion, and that in any event the new economy demanded a seven-day circulation of information. Johnson urged Sabbatarians to give up their new political course and suggested that they return to the old and ineffective methods of gentle persuasion: “Would it not be more congenial to the prospects of Christians,” he asked, “to appeal exclusively to the great Law-giver of the universe to aid them in making men better, in correcting their practices by purifying their hearts?”24 Johnson’s Report was the classic Jacksonian statement on relations between church and state. It was also a shrewd and powerful political tract, and it helped win Johnson the Vice Presidency of the United States in 1836. In Rochester, Sabbatarians were surprised and dismayed. But a Quaker publisher
who had stood against them printed thousands of copies of the Report, some of them bound in white satin, and advertised them as “a supplement to our Bill of Rights.”25
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. The result was a sharp religious and moral division within the elite. Both Sabbatarians and the men who opposed them were rich and respectable. But fully two-thirds of the Sabbatarians were Presbyterians, and their Sabbath mails petition included the signatures of three clergymen of that denomination and, in sharp contrast to the temperance society, none from other churches.26 Throughout the career of the Pioneer Line, the Observer denied charges that the movement was dominated by Presbyterians, but those charges had solid roots in fact.27
More than half the anti-Sabbatarians were non-church members, but their leadership included some of Rochester’s leading Protestant laymen. The Quaker Elihu Marshall lent his voice and the voice of his newspaper to the struggle of conscience against compulsion. Heman Norton, recently elected to the assembly as an Antimason, was one of the forwarding merchants under attack, and he too fought the Pioneers—from within First Presbyterian Church. Jonothan Child, whose Pilot Line was the largest fleet of packets on the canal, led a large Rochester family contingent into the fight. Child had few doubts about his own sense of responsibility. He was, like Marshall and Norton, an ardent temperance man. He was also vestryman at St. Luke’s Church, and he maintained a strict moral police over his boat crews. But neither Child nor his wealthy friends liked being coerced. The Sabbatarians read the list of men who opposed them and shook their heads. “There may be something imposing,” stated the Observer,
in the respectability of some of the names connected with these singular proceedings, but the Christian will reflect that the “great, mighty, and noble,” or the wise men of this world, are not always the humble followers of our Savior and may not be the safest guides in things of a moral and religious nature …28
Rich Christians were fighting in public.
By 1829 the Pioneer Line was a failure and a national laughingstock. But during its noisy and ineffectual career the Sabbatarian crusade split Rochester’s ruling elite and wakened humbler men to the dangers of religious control. In the streets and on the canal, opposition to the Pioneer Line was immediate and sometimes violent. Pioneer handbills were torn down as fast as they could be put up, and strangers asking the way to the Pioneer offices were given bad directions. Rival boat crews made life miserable for men on the Pioneer packets. On one journey a Sabbath-keeping boat tried to pass one of the larger and slower freight boats. Men on the seven-day boat dumped two horses into the canal, cut in at locks, tore planks from the towpath to foul the Pioneer horses, cast loose a waterlogged barge to obstruct passage of the faster boat, and cut the Pioneer tow rope three times.29 As we have seen, opposition took quieter and more effective forms at the polls. Men who supported the Pioneers and made their support public almost invariably lost elections in the late 1820s. Elisha Johnson, a wealthy Democrat who was active in the anti-Sabbatarian organization, won election to three consecutive terms as village president between 1827 and 1829.
The Pioneers had sought to mobilize the power of wealthy men and turn it to the task of policing others. Instead, they split the elite and gave workingmen a clear idea of who their enemies were.
Battles over politics and reform in the late 1820s splintered the elite and left combatants bruised and angry. Sabbatarians advertised the perversity and religious ignorance of even their most pious opponents, and Antimasonry was based on the contention that every Mason was accomplice to murder. Public life lost its last traces of civility. For all their feuding and pouting, Bucktails and Clintonians had worked together whenever the interests of the business community as a whole were at stake: in lobbying for the county and for the bank charter and—for the last time—in forming the temperance society. Now political contests degenerated into vicious public fights followed by lawsuits and personal grudges that dragged on for years.30 It was a hopelessly divided elite that met the social crisis of the late 1820s.
Public life in Rochester had become an incoherent and many-sided squabble. But underneath the confusion there were two roughly continuous leadership factions throughout the late 1820s. One united Antimasons, Sabbatarians, and—to a lesser degree—temperance advocates. The other linked Democrats, Masons, and anti-Sabbatarians.31 Thus political groupings corresponded to the argument over means. The first faction included most advocates of force. The second included opponents of force and/or men who had experienced coercion at first hand. When the remaining Masons—almost all of them Democrats—tried to end the controversy by dissolving the lodge in 1829, they betrayed the now-familiar hurt feelings of gentlemen under attack:
Our appeal is to the friends of Peace and Good Order; and if the waters of strife are to be poured out, without reserve, embittering all the relations of life—if an unrelenting crusade is to be carried on against a numerous and respectable portion of our fellow men, merely on account of their speculative opinions, the responsibility will not rest upon us!32 Antimasons, Sabbatarians, and a minority within the temperance movement were discovering the uses of power. Their opponents recoiled at methods that forced Masons to give up their charters and excluded them from some churches, that denied employment and patronage to men who continued to drink or to belong to the Masonic Lodge, and that coerced businessmen into supporting the Sabbath measures.33 Few of these men, whatever their political positions, looked with approval upon public drunkenness, Sabbath breaking, or the murder of William Morgan. But there was an impassable line between advocates of force and advocates of gentler means, and it split Rochester’s elite into angry halves.
Unhappily, the argument spilled beyond politics, disrupting families and friendships, and dividing every Protestant church in town. Politics in the early 1820s had followed family lines. A by-product was relative unanimity within churches. Nathaniel Rochester could look back from his pew at St. Luke’s and nod to a house full of kinsmen and allies. Across the street at First Presbyterian, the Browns and Wards could do the same. Thus political divisions strengthened the sense of unity and common purpose within communities of believers. Late in the decade, however, the dividing line in politics was not kinship but ideology. Political fights were violent and personal, and they took place within Protestant congregations as well as between them. True, Antimasons and—especially—Sabbatarians tended to be Presbyterians. But with the withdrawal of the Rochesters and their Episcopalian allies, opposition to Antimasons fell more and more to Masons who were Presbyterians, and the correlation between political groups and denominations broke down.34 Leaders on both sides were present in nearly every church, and some of the ugliest disputes took place within the town’s troubled congregations.
St. Luke’s, for instance, was the old headquarters of the Rochesters and their Bucktail friends. It was here that anti-Sabbatarians found their most respectable supporters, and it
was here that many prominent Masons spent Sunday mornings. The pastor was Francis Cuming, one of the Rochester in-laws. The Reverend Cuming was also the highest-ranking Mason in Rochester, having been installed as Grand Commander in 1826—in ceremonies held at St. Luke’s Church.35 Cuming was among the first to speak in defense of the lodge, and Antimasons accused him of helping with the kidnapping and eventually had him indicted. Cuming reacted bitterly, and preached from his pulpit against the Antimasons. No doubt most of the congregation sympathized. But there were men at St. Luke’s who had helped to bring on the minister’s troubles. Timothy Childs, the first Antimason sent to Congress, heard Cuming’s counterattacks on his party. So did Thurlow Weed’s henchman Frederick Whittlesey, who had been elected vestryman at St. Luke’s a few months before Morgan’s disappearance. Men who hated each other shared the pews, and St. Luke’s became an uncomfortable place in which to worship. At the center of the controversy, Francis Cuming came under terrible pressure, both from outside and from within his church. In 1829 he resigned and left Rochester.36
Across the river, the crossfire of the late 1820s created another unpleasant situation at St. Paul’s Church, which had been organized in 1827 as the second Episcopal congregation. The two leading members were Elisha Johnson and William Atkinson. Johnson was an adamant anti-Sabbatarian. Atkinson was one of Josiah Bissell’s partners on the Pioneer Line and, to confound every pattern, one of the few Masons who continued to defend the lodge as late as 1829. When it came time to call a minister, the vestry invited Charles McIlvaine, a Low Churchman. Immediately the west-side Episcopalians, led by Thomas Hart Rochester and Jonothan Child, objected. With their support the Rev. H. U. Onderdonck of Brooklyn warned the people at St. Paul’s that McIlvaine was a graduate of Princeton Seminary, a dedicated evangelical, and “a zealous promoter of the schemes that would blend us with Presbyterians.”
37 That seems to have been what the Sabbatarian William Atkinson wanted, and he led the vestry into an ugly battle with the meddlers at St. Luke’s. The Rochester family won, and St. Paul’s withdrew the invitation to McIlvaine and adopted High Church ritual in 1829.38 But not before leading Episcopalians had taken turns insulting each other in public.
There were even nastier disputes between Presbyterians. Here the fighting centered on one man: Elder Josiah Bissell of Third Church. Bissell was a crusader. He had headed the Monroe County Bible Society (the first in the nation to devise the plan of giving free Bibles to the poor) since its founding, and he financed the militant Rochester Observer from his own pocket. A member of the original Morgan committee, Bissell was founder and operator of the Pioneer Line. He was also a remarkably abrasive and self-righteous man. Lyman Beecher, who worked with Bissell on the Sabbath mails campaign, complained that “our good brother Bissell may need some caution” in his dealings with wealthy but moderate benefactors, and indeed Bissell’s demands for donations paid little attention to the feelings of philanthropists.39
Josiah Bissell’s zeal had caused sporadic fights within his denomination throughout the 1820s. He became the center of continuous controversy in 1828, when his Pioneer Line and his Sabbath mails campaign made him the personification of proscriptive and coercive measures. One weekday Bissell spotted the Rev. William James of Second Church riding one of the seven-day stages. He intervened at Second Church and informed James that his congregation no longer wanted him. Joseph Penney of First Church entered the dispute on the side of his fellow minister and publicized intradenominational hostilities that had been brewing for years.
I regard Elder Bissell as an active man, prosecuting everything he does with untiring zeal and energy. But there is no distinction with him in his beneficial or injurious purposes, all are the
same if he has enlisted in them; they are pursued with the same spirit, right or wrong … I do not impute his measures to wicked motives; but to a willful course, deprecated by many, lamented by all, and perverting the influence of the church.40 Bissell’s plan, evidently, was to remove such moderates as Penney and James and replace them with militant evangelicals with whom he could work more closely. But the plan only aroused a bitter and demoralizing fight within all three congregations, each of which included large numbers of Bissell’s friends and enemies. Like the Episcopalians, Presbyterians could not worship without enemies at their sides.
By the end of the decade, churchgoing businessmen and masters had lost faith in their ability to govern. Beneath them was a new and unruly and altogether necessary urban working class. Masters had always governed such men spontaneously, in face-to-face transactions that were a part of everyday routine. That system collapsed in the middle and late 1820s. Now attempts to influence the actions of workingmen through authority and persuasion were unsuccessful and—worse—humiliating. Village officials, elected by the majority that many wished to regulate, did nothing. In 1828 some militant Christian businessmen tried to reestablish control through force. They failed, and in the course of failing they split the churchgoing community into warring camps. By 1830 the temperance and Sabbatarian crusades were bankrupt and ready to dissolve, and mystified church members fought each other until they were numb. The life went out of Rochester Protestantism. After steady gains throughout the 1820s and a hopeful revival in 1827, conversions stopped. In every church, the number of new members dropped dramatically in 1828 and 1829 and through the fall of 1830.41
Late in 1829 Elder Josiah Bissell wrote the evangelist Charles Finney. Bissell’s attempt to christianize the post office was the butt of jokes. His six-day transport line drained his
fortune and then failed, and at least half the Protestant church members in Rochester hated him personally. (There was trouble even at home. Bissell’s father, a merchant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, had fought drunkenness by taking liquor off his shelves. But he insisted that it was both “impolitic and improper … to enter into any combination for the coercive regulation of … opinions or habits.”42) Bissell told Finney of his problems with Penney and James, and described a few “specimens of the large budget of evils rolling through our land & among us,” dwelling on the moral dangers of canal life. He confessed that the good people of Rochester felt powerless to do anything about it: “the people & the church say it cannot be helped—and why do they say this? Because the state of religion is so low; because they know not the power of the Gospel of Jesus. ‘Through Christ Jesus strengthening us we can do all things,’ and if so it is time we were about it.”43