-
2. Jefferson County
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Jefferson County Jefferson County’s isolated location far from the Erie Canal as well as its Vermont immigrant population provide a valuable context in which to study revivalism; most obviously because revivalism was a national phenomenon in the nineteenth century, primarily centered in rural areas. And although revivals’ characteristics differed significantly between regions and denominations, few regions or denominations remained unaffected . Urban areas, however, outside New England—where a different form of enthusiasm prevailed—were likely the least susceptible to early excitement. Methodist camp meetings represent the paradigm of Second Great Awakening revivals, the spontaneity of which required economically and socially marginal communities. Communities and churches whose members did not apparently shape social mores and whose members had nothing to gain by the maintenance of the status quo most readily accepted and encouraged the excitement of the revivals. In effect, the success of revivalism along the northern frontier in the early nineteenth century represents the success of popular religion over elite religion. For example, the merchants and other paragons of Paul Johnson’s Rochester would never have tolerated the pandemonium of the early rural revivals. But when the revivals were formalized in , they became more acceptable to urban populations, and more like the New England urban revivals.1 Yet urban areas have dominated the literature on the Second Great Awakening, while their populations were not the chief participants, only the most in charge of the media, namely newspapers. Furthermore, studies of urban areas (especially those along the Erie Canal) have tended to conclude erroneously that it was the urbanization and commercialization coincident with the revivals that led to social dislocation and the promotion of the revivals.2 Such a conclusion ignores Whitney Cross’s assertion that “the phenomena of Burned-over District history belong to a stage of Jefferson County economy either of full or of closely approaching agrarian maturity”; and Cross’s conclusion that “areas whose prosperity failed to approximate advance expectations, like the triangle between Lake Ontario, the Black River, and Oneida Lake [roughly and most notably the southern half of Jefferson County] . . . provided a fertile soil for isms.”3 While the residents of Utica and Rochester were adjusting to a radically redefined lifestyle after the arrival of the canal, the residents of Jefferson County maintained to a large extent their former lifestyles. The population grew and the economy suffered when the Erie Canal redefined the major trade routes (the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario) and removed them from Jefferson County, but Jefferson County on the whole changed little. It was an agricultural county, largely isolated from other areas. George M. Thomas’s discussion of isomorphism in Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States provides the most helpful explanation of the social processes at work in Jefferson County. According to Thomas, religion reflects culture. Thomas disputes “crisis” and “strain” theories; as he asserts that religion and culture are isomorphic. Religions, rather than reacting against cultural change, make sense out of the culture by giving it meaning. In turn, the culture gives religion its meaning and its legitimacy. Thomas contends that “the knowledge and rules of a particular institution [including religions] are an integral part of the cultural order as a whole. . . . Because the same ontology or underlying rule structure is being worked out and specified in each institutional sphere, there is a congruence or similarity of structures across diverse spheres.”4 In this and the following chapters, I rely on this understanding of isomorphism, and in accord with it, I argue that revivalism appealed to lower-class, nearly stable,5 and agrarian populations, usually “antiformalists ” such as the Baptists and the Methodists. Revivalism, as an egalitarian expression of a lack of strict social rules and obligations, was isomorphic with these groups. Rule-bound, orderly, commercial, nonagrarian populations , however, shunned the revivals as unseemly. The Baptists and the Methodists, who were the most intensely interested in revivals, shunned reform. The “formalist” Presbyterians and Congregationalists expressed their religiosity through a concern for moral uprightness and in the support of reform movements, which were attempts to maintain the status quo. The concern of this chapter is to identify the background to these social developments in Jefferson County and to locate the regions most [52.205.159.48] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:04 GMT) Jefferson County hospitable to antiformalist inclinations, as well as those most hospitable to formalists. Jefferson County’s socioeconomic geography divides neatly...