A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837

In this chapter, Johnson traces how the growth of Rochester’s industries fundamentally altered Rochester’s social order over the course of the 1820s. Though Rochester was presided over by a group of wealthy men with deep ties to the surrounding country, the vast majority of Rochester’s population was workers who lived as “young, unattached drifters” (37). As Rochester’s economy developed, the working class lived increasingly separate lives from Rochester’s wealthy elite, leading to a sense of a “loss of social control” amidst upper-class Rochesterians (38).

As Rochester’s industry grew, workers manufacturing goods became increasingly separated from the merchants whom they worked for. Johnson traces this development amidst the industries of shoemaking, coopering, and construction. Before Rochester’s growth in the 1820s, all of these industries were centered around small shops, with the owners conducting business directly next to the workers producing the goods. However, as businesses grew in the 1820s, most adopted a factory system centered around teams of workers who were separated from the shop owners. Workers became accustomed to never interacting with the “merchant capitalists” who paid their wages and began to experience “harsher, more impersonal, and more transparent forms of exploitation than had men in the same trades a few years earlier” (41-42).