A study of skilled artisans in the 1820s and 1830s whose
evangelical faith raised suspicions toward capitalist innovations.
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, itadds to our
understanding of the class tensions present in Jacksonian
America.
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