Theodore Parker and Orestes Brownson both address the growing power of the rising commercial class in the mid-nineteenth century U.S. Defining merchants as those who profit, not form their own labor, but from the labor of others, both Parker and Brownson see this class as central to reforming the nation. While in “A Sermon of Merchants” Parker exhorts merchants to use their influence righteously, Brownson in “The Laboring Classes” wants to dismantle their power by abolishing the inheritance of property.
