From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750-1850 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS275 From Office to Profession: The New Enghnd Ministry, 1750-1850. By Donald M. Scott. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Pp. 199. $12.00.) This study draws upon a wide variety of nineteenth-century sources, including denominational records, seminary directories, diaries, tracts, and sermons, to describe pivotal changes taking place in the role and function of the New England Congregational clergy. To organize the material the author works around the themes of increasing sociological professionalization among the clergy ("by the 1840s . . . the relationship between a pastor and his people had become essentially a client relationship . . . [and] operated according to contract-like assumptions in which both sides were essentially equal." pp. 122, 123) within the historical categories of continuity and change. As a structural analysis of the Congregational ministry From Office to Profession represents a valuable chapter in American historical sociology . Although the theme of clerical professionalization is not new, this study does describe the institutional and vocational shifts taking place among the ministry in a breadth and detail unmatched in earlier efforts. Furthermore the author presents valuable quantitative collective biographies including career line analyses of Andover Seminary graduates, which further demonstrate his point about the changing idea of the ministry in nineteenth-century America. These observed changes are neatly correlated with broader changes taking place in American society, particularly the "Democratic revolution" of 1798-1814 which "fundamentally altered the place of the clergy in New England public life" (p. 18). Far less satisfactory is the historical categorization of continuity and change in the earlier period, 1750-1800. Indeed the first three chapters of the book are largely derivitive in nature and read like an extended introduction. "Continuity," it soon becomes clear, means the entire colonial period (including the Revolutionary era). From the tenuous premise that colonial ministers generally served only one pulpit in their preaching careers (a figure based on a limited sample of Yale graduates who are arranged serially over the entire colonial period rather than in the ten year cohorts he later utilizes for the nineteenth-century Andover graduates), the study concludes that colonial ministers uniformly "held the same assumptions about the character of the ministry as a public office" (p. xiv). Once asserting that the early period remained something of a glacial age of stability and unchanging habits the book moves on to describe the "really dramatic" changes taking place in the period 18101850 , when the author's own primary research properly begins. By defining fundamental changes within the colonial period out of consideration , Scott misses revolutionary shifts in the idea of the ministry that anticipated in embryonic form many of the structural changes observed in the nineteenth century. 276CIVIL WAR HISTORY Much more persuasive are the final chapters which trace changes in the nineteenth-century ministry from the initial attempts at voluntary organization, through the immediate abolitionist impulse in the 1820's and '30's, to the other-worldly "sentimentalism" of the 1840's. Here the author makes an important contribution to discussions of the evangelical clergy as he demonstrates how widespread popular dissatisfaction together with career uncertainties among the clergy transformed the role of the minister from zealous social activist to a devotional therapist who was "totally unaggressive and nonviolent" (p. 142). Instead of social control the minister sought the more limited and specialized goal of creating strong bonds of affection with his congregation and focusing their attention on the spiritual imitation of Christ. Like other emerging professionals the clergy discovered a unique skill to market in voluntary, client relationships. How long this clerical other-worldly sentimentalism survived, or to what extent the experience of the Congregational ministry can be equated with the "evangelical ministry", is not clear. What is now clear, thanks to Scott's analysis, is how closely the Congregational clergy conformed to patterns of segmentation and institutionalization which gave them a profession at the cost of an office. Harry S. Stout University of Connecticut American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War. By James H. Moorhead. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978. Pp. xiv, 278. $17.50.) One of theprincipal purposes of this book is to show how the evangelical background of nineteenth-century Protestantism conditioned the response...