In 1857 James Waddel Alexander, prominent Presbyterian minister and former professor at what is now Rutgers University, and later at Princeton Seminary, spearheaded the publication of a short work called The Man of Business Considered in His Various Relations that collected essays and sermons from other prominent Presbyterians on the relationship between Christian piety and the growing number of self-identified businessmen in the antebellum United States. Waddel and his co-authors recognized that capitalism and the United States burgeoning industrial economy had made the businessman a far more common type than he had been at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century.
The essays in The Man of Business, according to the authors, intended to bear upon a very important class of the community-a class which in this country is constantly increasing.” Elite scholars like Alexander and his comrades perceived the rise of the businessmen to a significant enough phenomena to warrant the church speaking to publicly. “The walks of business become more ramified and extended, as the luxuries of civilization and the skill of human inventions become more multiplied and more widely displayed.” The new and varied commercial, mechanical, and executive businesses, “excited and created by the new wants and new imaginations of advancing society, will call for the creation and extension of new agencies to accomplish the labors which they must demand.” The Presbyterians ministers had no doubt that “the variety and number of business agencies of every kind must spread out in a constant increase. The earnestness of competition and the fertility of invention which characterize the walks of trade will also encroach more and more upon the previous comparative tranquility of professional life.” No social or cultural force, limited the influence and expansion of usiness-mindedness and other aspects of capitalist life on the still-largely Protestant society of the United States. “Men of all descriptions,” the clerics warned, “will, to a great degree, be transformed into business men.” Businessmen’s “temptations, their principles of action, their rules of enterprise, their responsibilities, and their peculiar aspects of influence, will become, to a great degree, the common aspects of the community of which, in earlier times, they have formed only a part.”[1]
Capitalism’s disruptive effect on older processes of social and moral catechesis was not lost on Presbyterian divines of the 1850s. Capitalism and business were as likely to corrupt youths as ideologically driven social change.
The young men engaged in the commercial houses of this metropolis are innumerable; the numbers rise by tens of thousands. Hence we are justified in giving a character somewhat local to these remarks, believing that the youth of other cities are not so diverse in nature or situation as that they may not derive benefit from advices calculated for the meridian of New-York. Within limits so narrow, much can not be said; but all that is offered proceeds from true sympathy and earnest good will. Of the countless throng of city clerks, some are living under the parental roof, but the great majority have come from the country. An increasing centripetal force bears the youth of rural districts towards the great emporium. While this infusion of fresh blood into the old veins is useful in many ways to the receiving party, it involves losses and exposures on the part of those who come. Each of them has left a beloved circle, which, alas! he has not yet learned to prize, and has entered into a comparatively homeless state. Many a man of business can look back to this juncture, when he sallied into the great world alone; and he shudders at the pitfalls and precipices which he has escaped.
What makes The Man of Business important is that is displays an important breadth of awareness by antebellum Protestants regarding societal change. Capture of politics was no more prioritized than reordering of the lives of businessmen towards Christian piety. In the 21st Century, few Protestants have an expansive or substantive understanding of the interaction between faith and institutions outside of presidential politics and the individual, an undoubtedly impoverished understanding of politics compared to 19th Century Protestants. Sermons on business were—and perhaps are—more important than yet another sermon on elections. [2]
[1] James Waddel Alexander et al., The Man of Business Considered in his Various Relations (New York: Anson DF Randolph, 1857), 6-8.
[2] Ibid.