Joseph V. Palesano
Professor Zarate
History 7A # 6857
March 31, 2014
The Silent Separation
A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Authored by, Paul E Johnson in 1978, conveys the idea of the changing routes in trade, due to the efficiency of Eerie Canal, and the splitting political efforts from "The Elites", farmers turned business entrepreneurs, attempting to control the reformation movements until the religious revivals of Charles Finney, introduced a patriarchy style leadership to control the social and moral lives of the people in the city of Rochester. The author presents his narrative as more of a case study of the social, political, economic and religious development of the Middle Class Society in New York, evident by the brilliant use of information gathered from church records, economic registers, and political documents. There is a very interesting aspect that can be extracted from the narrative, specifically the separation of church and state. Were the “Elites” of Rochester of 1830, in violation of the first amendment of the US Constitution that became effective in 1789?
In 1820, the city of Rochester began to “BOOM”, landowners and farmers, began to flourish in the business of export. Now supplying major cities with food and textiles utilizing the most efficient trade route of the Eerie Canal to the best of their advantage, lowered their operating expenses and increased their profits, which they invested in building Mills that were powered by the waterfalls of the Eerie Canal. Another low overhead endeavor, as the mills required less personnel to maintain its output changing again reducing traditional overhead costs and increasing profits.
The pre-industrial society of Rochester, now entering the textile prod...
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... the good of the people. The “Whig party” is now known as the “Republican Party.”
The author explains that the revival enabled the social control that assisted in this transition. Not to be confused with Marxism, it was not a capitalist plot, but a way to legitimize free labor. Finney shows up as government fails to assert control. He then creates the evangelical army led by the Masters and filtered down to the workers, by presenting a free moral agent philosophy within the community. The correct interpretation the separation of church and state, in the US Constitution, is that it does not forbid contact between church and state, it protects the religious liberty for the entire country.
Works Cited
Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York,
1815-1837. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Print.
Hatch’s notion that democratization stemmed from the Revolution does not lend enough light and clarity to The First Great Awakening of the 1740s. Like Paul Johnson, he sees it as the inverse of the Second Great Awakening. And yet, if the Revolution gave rise to the Second Great Awakening, then the First Great Awakening gave rise to the Revolution. It planted the first fruitful seeds of authoritarian struggle. For example, the way in which people worshipped denoted a social reality. The gentry sat up in front at church and the lower classes would sit closer to the back. This all changed with the Great Awakening. Social order deteriorated because worship was moved to a field to accommodate the masses of people who would listen to itinerant like George Whitfield. Whitfield created an open market for people about what or who they thought was best for their salvation of their soul. He believed that authority needed to be in alignment with the people’s notion of orthodoxy. His was a “market-based revivalism”. Despite the populous still submitting to authority in a particular sense, the revival was lead by ministers; they had begun to examine personal spiritual impulses and their value. Thanks to Whitfield, primacy was given to those who had divine inspiration rather than those who could get it. He began to subvert the social order since anyone could be an itinerant. Still, all of the socio-political manifestations of the First Great Awakening happened unknowingly. Those who led it never saw it through a secular lens and used it as a way to create chaos and gain power; there is no Nietzsche here. The revival of religiosity was always the primary goal. The Great Awakening looks back as much as it looks forward. It was never simply the Revolution working into religion, but a revolution that was set into motion almost forty years
The southern revivals settled the arrangements of authority some of them declared interest of some evangelicals to race and the bitterness of the slavery.During the 1830, the s...
In The Kingdom of Matthias by Johnson and Wilentz, the authors clearly show the significance that the historical events had on the larger economic, social, and religious changes occurring in the United States during the 1820s and 1830s. Both social hierarchy and gender played a large role in the changes during that time period. The effect of the large differences in gender roles exhibited in the The Kingdom of Matthias is still visible and relevant in America’s society today.
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xvii + 396pp. Index, appendix, bibliographical essay, illustrations
Hickey, Andrew S. The story of Kingston, First Capital of New York State 1609-1952: New York, Stratford House, 1952
The Second Great Awakening swept through the United States during the end of the 18th Century. Charles Grandson Finney was one of the major reasons the Second Great Awakening was such a success. Finney and his contemporaries rejected the Calvinistic belief that one was predetermined by go God to go to heaven or hell, and rather preached to people that they need to seek salvation from God themselves, which will eventually improve society has a whole. Finney would preach at Revivals, which were emotional religious meetings constructed to awaken the religious faith of people. These meetings were very emotional and lasted upwards of five days. Revivalism had swept through most of the United States by the beginning of the 19th Century. One of the most profound revivals took place in New York. After the great revival in New York Charles Finney was known ...
In the North we saw a different religious awakening. Reform was popping up all over the Northeast. This reform came in different faces, depending on which state it wa...
Transportation was a large factor in the market revolution. During the years of 1815 and 1840, there were many forms of improved transportation. Roads, steamboats, canals, and railroads lowered the cost and shortened the time of travel. By making these improvements, products could be shipped into other areas for profit (Roark, 260). Steamboats set off a huge industry and by 1830, more than 700 steamboats were in operating up and down the Ohio and Mississippi River (Roark, 261). Steamboats also had some flaws, due to the fact of deforesting the paths along the rivers. Wood was needed to refuel the power to the boat. The carbon emissions from the steamboats polluted the air (Roark, 261). The building of roads was a major connecting point for states. There were some arguments of who would pay for...
They appeal to pathos by appealing to two things that many Americans may hold dear, their faith and their right to unionize. Verba goes on to explain how involvement in churches and unions are an ideal start in making the step to political involvement because they develop communication and organizational skills that could transfer over to politics. The authors argue that because churches and unions function quite similarly in developing future political involvement, the strength of religious organizations would counter the weakness of labor unions. They reach this conclusion because at the time, labor unions represented a lower amount of workers and in order to drive home that point, they provide us with this example, “a blue-collar worker is more likely to practice civic skills in church than in a union—not because American unions are particularly deficient as skill builders, but because so few American blue-collar workers are union members and so many are church
Stansell, Christine. “Women on the Town: Sexual Exchange and Prostitution,” in City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Illinois, 1987), 171-192. [ACLS Humanities E-Book, via Coast]
The economic transformation produced an explosive growth in the nation’s output and trade and a rise in the general standard of living, but in the Northeast it just grew the inequality between citizens. Alarmed at the threat of being reduced to the status of dependent wage earners, skilled craftsmen in the late 1820s created the world’s first Workingmen’s Parties, short-lived political organizations that sought to mobilize lower-class support for candidates who would press for social issues in favor of the country. In 1833, journeymen carpenters struck for higher wages and warned of more protest to come. Such actions and language were not confined to male workers; the young mill women of Lowell also walked off their jobs in 1834 to protest a reduction in wages. The mill women were active through the protests even two years later. Orestes Brownson said that “Emerson’s self-trust, self-reliance, self-control, self-culture- offered an adequate response to social inequality”. (p
People in the northern United States during the early nineteenth century wanted to rapidly industrialize and increase the amount of money they were making. The Erie Canal they believed was a great way to reduce the distance and time of shipping goods to the west. They also realized that the canal would probably increase their markets, which would mean a larger profit. The problem with all of this was how people had to destroy parts of nature in order for this to happen. Nathaniel Hawthorne, a prominent writer during the time, described the canal as “too rapid, unthinking advance of progress.” (57) Hawthorne and his supporters were very upset to see how forests and swamps were being destroyed and ruined in order t...
Government has filled a spot in the American Society that once belonged to the churches. People regularly attended church throughout American history and use the church as a place of instruction, guidance, support, and charity. The government now fills a larger role in American’s lives and at the same time church attendance is diminishing. The government is growing at a rapid pace and the expanded social programs have more influence on Americans than the church. America is a nation of immigrants which most fled from large governments (sometime oppressive) and now the American government is poised to grow larger than ever. The ideas behind the growth of government can have noble intentions, but more often than not results in wasted money and harm to the peoples it intends to help, and is replacing the roles churches once filled as a guiding and supportive structure in peoples lives.
McCullough explains how Johnstown became an example of ‘The Gilded Age’ industrialization prior to the 1889 disaster. The canal made Johnstown the busiest place in Cambria County in the 1820s. By the 1850s the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Cambria Iron Company began, and the population increased. There were about 30,000 people in the area before the flood. The Western Reservoir was built in the 1840s, but became generally known as the South Fork dam. It was designed to supply extra water for the Main Line canal from Johnstown to Pittsburgh. By saving the spring floods, water could be released during the dry summers. When the dam was completed in 1852, the Pennsylvania Railroad completed the track from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and the canal business began its decline. The state offered to sell the canal, the railroad company bought it for the right of ways yet had no need to maintain the dam, which due to neglect, broke for the first time in 1862. McCullough stresses that man was responsible for the...
...rian society of the mid-1800s changed with the rise of a modern city culture. Simple life styles became more complicated and cultured as the economy focused on a continual increase in production and an ever-widening distribution of manufactured goods. Family life, social and political culture, agriculture and industry were dramatically transformed, guiding in a new era of change. This relates to chapter 17 in the textbook, “Reconstruction.” During reconstruction, the South was brought back into the union but Republican hopes of having the South follow northern lines of development were never realized. Race relations and the comeback of conservative Democrats extremely limited African-American opportunities. The northern industrial continued by economic advances were less by corruption and the depression of 1873. The Compromise of 1877 ended the Reconstruction era.