| When
industrialization swept through American society in the nineteenth
century, it brought with it turmoil for skilled artisans. Changes
in technology and work offered unprecedented opportunity for some,
but the deskilling of craft and the rise of factory work meant dislocation
for others. Journeymen for Jesus explores how the artisan
community in one city, Baltimore, responded to these life-changing
developments during the years of the early republic.
Baltimore in the Jacksonian years (1820s and 1830s) was America's
third largest city. Its unions rivaled those of New York and Philadelphia
in organization and militancy, and it was also a stronghold of evangelical
Methodism. These circumstances created a powerful mix at a time
when workers were confronting the negative effects of industrialism.
Many of them found within Methodism and its populist spirituality
an empowering force that inspired their refusal to accept dependency
and second-class citizenship.
Historians often portray evangelical Protestantism as either a
top-down means of social control or as a bottom-up process that
created passive workers. Sutton, however, reveals a populist evangelicalism
that undergirded the producer tradition dominant among those supportive
of trade union goals. Producers were not socialists or social democrats,
but they were anticapitalist and reform-minded. In populist evangelicalism
they discovered a potent language and ethic for their discontent.
Journeymen for Jesus presents a rich and unromanticized
portrait of artisan culture in early America. In the process, it
adds to our understanding of the class tensions present in Jacksonian
America. |
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