The Chartist Movement

In its Social and Economic Aspects

Frank F Rosenblatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429639401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1916, Professor Rosenblatt's The Chartist Movement was the first serious study of Chartism, using the techniques of modern scholarship, to appear in English. The book comprises a detailed account of the history of the movement, dealing mainly with the period from 1837 until the Chartist riots at Newport, South Wales, in November 1839.

As well as describing the political, industrial and social conditions that gave birth to the Chartist movement, this work contains extremely useful statistical tables of the 543 persons who were convicted for offences committed in the furtherance of Chartism between January 1839 and June 1840.

CHAPTER I

Chartism means the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad. … It is a new name for a thing which has had many names, which will yet have many.—Carlyle.

PROTOTYPES OF CHARTISM

THE term Chartism was coined in 1837 to designate a set of principles which were subsequently embodied in the famous “People’s Charter”. Universal suffrage, equal representation, annual parliaments, no property qualifications, vote by ballot, and payment to members — these formed the “six points” which for a number of years eclipsed all other political and social creeds. At its inauguration the movement attracted a number of recruits from the ranks of the middle class. In time, however, Chartism became ever more crystallized as a distinct labor struggle for the reconstruction of society. The form of the demands were purely political, but the object was strictly economic. Political equality was proclaimed as the only weapon to secure equality of condition and the abolition of class privilege. The concomitant social equality would then pull down the mountains of wealth and fill up the valleys of want. The task could be effected by the workingmen only. Coöperation of the middle class was generally tabooed as spelling imminent treason and danger to the people’s cause. It was this expression of class consciousness and realization of class interests that distinguished Chartism both from utopian socialism and from previous democratic movements in England.

Long before the Chartist demands were framed in the People’s Charter, political reform, of one kind or another, had been urged by the friends of the people. The spirit of democracy, which had been quelled by Cromwell’s defeat of the Levellers, revived a century later. Indeed, some of the Chartist “points” were promulgated as early as 1769 by the “Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights,” which, among other parliamentary reforms, demanded equal representation and annual parliaments. Petitions were for the first time presented to Parliament, protesting that its members were not self-representing individuals, but trusted delegates whose authority ceased the very moment they disregarded the wishes and interests of their constituents. Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, soon pronounced himself a convert and professed that “the constitution intended that there should be a permanent relation between the constituents and representative body of the people.” On the first of May, 1771, he asserted that “the act of constituting septennial parliaments must be repealed. … Our whole constitution is giving way, and, therefore, with the most deliberate and solemn conviction, I declare myself a convert to triennial parliaments.”¹ His son, William Pitt, went even further, declaring that “the restoration of the House of Commons to freedom and independency, by the interposition of the collective body of the nation, was essentially necessary to our existence as a free people”; that an equal representation of the people by annual elections and the universal right of suffrage appeared to him “so reasonable to the natural feelings of mankind, that no sophistry could elude the force of the arguments which were urged in their favor.” The bills which he introduced in 1782, 1783 and 1785 provided for the extension of the franchise to householders, and for the gradual extinction of all rotten boroughs. William Pitt was far from being an extremist among his colleagues. The writings of Stanhope and of Major John Cartwright appeared as early as 1774 and 1776, respectively, and demanded universal suffrage as a natural right. In his Legislative Rights of the Commonalty Vindicated, Cartwright argued that “freedom is the immediate gift of God to all the human species,” and that the franchise is a prerequisite of freedom. “The very scavenger in the streets has a better right to his vote than any peer to his coronet, or the king himself to his crown; for the right of the peer and of the king are derived from the laws of men, but the scavenger’s from the laws of God” This idea became so popular that the Whigs began to consider it advantageous to identify themselves with the reformers. Aristocratic clubs, such as the “Constitutional Society”, the “Whig Club”, and the “Society of the Friends of the People”, vied with each other in radicalism and in their emulation of the idealistic maxims of Rousseau and the French Encyclopedists. In 1780 the Duke of Richmond introduced a bill for universal suffrage and annual parliaments. The preamble contended that since the life, liberty and property of every man is or may be affected by the law of the land in which he lives, no man is, or can be, actually represented if he has no vote in the election of the representative whose consent to the making of laws binds the whole community. The state of election of members of the House of Commons was declared as a gross deviation from the “simple and natural principle of representation and equality.” In several places members were returned by the property of one man while the number of persons who were suffered to vote did not amount to one-sixth of the whole community. The great majority of the commoners were thus governed by laws to which they had not consented either by themselves or by their representatives.¹ Triennial and septennial Parliaments were described as tending “to make the representatives less dependent on their constituents than they always ought to be”. The same year Charles James Fox, the Whig leader and Chairman of the Committee of Westminster Electors, recommended the very same “six points” which were later embodied in the “People’s Charter”. The “six points” were also urged by the “Society for Constitutional Information”, which included among its leaders a number of the most distinguished members of the English nobility, such as the Duke of Richmond, the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Effingham, the Earl of Selkirk, Lord Mountnorris, and others.

The bright prospects of Major Cartwright and his adherents, however, soon came to an end. The germs of radical ideas, which had infected the nobility, began to spread also among the lower strata. The alarmed government found itself in a lurch, and its peace of mind had to be bought at the price of coalition in 1783 between Lord North, the representative of the government, and Mr. Fox, the spokesman of the Whigs. This coalition brought about a complete metamorphosis in the attitude of the Whigs, which became the more intense during the French Revolution. A feeling of abhorrence swayed the professed reformers against all societies which were suspected of revolutionary ideas. All attempts at parliamentary reform were doomed to crushing defeat. The former illustrious advocate of reform, Edmund Burke, agreed in this matter with his rival Pitt. In his great zeal he stigmatized the people as a “swinish multitude”, and led the Whigs in their support of the government policy of oppression.

The adhesion to the government on the part of the aristocracy was the natural reaction of their optimistic idealism which evaporated when brought under pressure of active life. They had believed that the doctrine of “natural, unalienable and equal rights” could be disseminated among the people with perfect safety to their own class and traditions. Some even went so far as to contend that “equality” was a safeguard against “levellers”. This view was elucidated by the Duke of Richmond in the following extract of his letter to Lieutenant-Colonel Sharman:

Another subject of apprehension is that the principle of allowing to every man an equal right to vote tends to equality in other respects, and to level property. To me it seems to have a direct contrary tendency. The equal rights of men to security from oppression, and to the enjoyments of life and liberty, strike me as perfectly compatible with their unequal shares of industry, labor and genius, which are the origin of inequality of fortunes. The equality and inequality of men are both founded in nature; and whilst we do not confound the two, and only support her establishments, we can not err. The protection of property appears to me one of the most essential ends of society; and so far from injuring it by this plan, I conceive it to be the only means of preserving it; for the present system is hastening with great strides to a perfect equality in universal poverty.¹

The French Revolution led some of the English aristocracy to realize that abstract ideas of equality and natural rights meant absolutely nothing to the common people, unless they went hand in hand with concrete equality in distribution of wealth. Moreover, they learned that the abstract idea of natural rights was the treacherous snake that goaded on the people to demand concrete equality, and they determined to avert this at any cost. Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, published in 1790, preached a crusade against Republican France, as well as against French principles in England. The Reflections exerted a deep influence on the men in power, but at the same time gave an impetus to the counter activities of the radicals. The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, the exact antithesis of the Reflections, gained a wide circulation among the middle and lower classes. The arduous task of reform was taken up by the “London Corresponding Society”, which was founded by Thomas Hardy, a shoemaker. Counting but four members at its inauguration, the first meeting in 1792 was attended by nine individuals, all personally acquainted with each other. Encouraged by the endorsement of the Duke of Richmond, the Society jealously began to spread its tenets all over the United Kingdom and, within a short period, attained importance and celebrity as one of the largest radical organizations. The government, in its alarm, was led to believe that “there were evil-minded persons in the country, who, acting in concert with other persons in France, designed to overturn our happy constitution, and introduce a system of bloodshed and plunder.” The war with France in 1793 was primarily a war against Jacobinism, and Pitt, who was always seeing visions of “thousands of bandits”, was logically compelled to combat the foe within the country. Numerous spies were employed to shadow the steps of every suspicious person, and on the testimony of these spies, many were subjected to severe penalties. A certain Mr. Frost, an attorney, was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, to stand in the pillory and be struck off the roll, because he had dared once in a coffee-house to declare himself “for equality and no king”. A well-known Mr. Ridgway was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and £200 fine for selling Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The former friends of the “London Corresponding Society” began to see treason in its activities. Two delegates sent by this society to Scotland in 1793 were arrested, tried, convicted, and transported for fourteen years. In its report of 1794, the Secret Committee of the House of Commons claimed to have discovered seditious practices. It was this report that was chiefly responsible for the suspension of the habeas corpus act.¹ Pitt declared the matter urgent, and the bill was passed at a special sitting the next day after its introduction by the government. Fox openly accused the ministers of a design to terrorize the people in order to shield themselves from the condemnation for involving the country in a disastrous war. The government became inexorable in its oppression of associations, as well as of individuals. Reform bills were introduced only to encounter ignominious defeat. All reform societies were disbanded, all public meetings prohibited, and reformers were rendered innocuous either through imprisonment or intimidation. For nearly two decades the English people lived, as it were, in a state of internal siege.

Radicalism had been crushed to revive again, however, with much greater force, after the war cloud, which hovered over Europe for almost a quarter of a century, was dispersed at Waterloo. The war made England a world-monopolist. Foreign manufacturers, writhing under the sword of Damocles in their own countries, invested their capital in England which alone was safe from foreign invasion. By virtue of the complete monopoly of Great Britain as a water-carrier, English trade was carried on in the remotest parts of the world. All this changed with the end of the Napoleonic career. The demand for English manufactures suddenly shrank, capital was withdrawn, and labor thrown out of employment. The disbanded militia and discharged sailors greatly swelled the ranks of the unemployed. Symptoms of discontent which were local in the beginning, soon became universal and burst into violence after the passage of the Corn Laws in 1815. Owing to the failure of the harvest and the high import duties, the price of wheat during 1816 rose from 52s. 10d. to 103s. 7d., and jumped still higher during the first months of 1817.¹ To urban riots, many of which were not suppressed without bloodshed, and to machine-breaking were added peasant insurrections and incendiarism. Flags were hoisted with ominous mottoes, like “Bread or Blood”; “Willing to work, but none of us to beg”. The distress assumed threatening proportions. The attention of Parliament was called to the fact that whole parishes had been deserted, and the crowd of paupers, increasing in numbers as they went from parish to parish, spread wider and wider this awful desolation.

The failure on the part of the House of Commons to alleviate the condition of the distressed revived the feeling of hostility towards the government, and political agitators soon emerged from obscurity. Parliamentary reform was again urged as the panacea for all social evils. But this time the demand emanated from a group of men entirely different from their predecessors, the reformers of the eighteenth century. They came not from the ranks of aristocracy and they appealed not to aristocracy. They were humble writers of “two-penny trash”, and their writings were intended for the still humbler workingmen. The members of the radical clubs of the eighteenth century, as Burke aptly argued against them, conceived reform not as a means of expediency and necessity, but as a means of advancing justice. The later reformers cared very little for abstract ideas; they demanded political equality as a necessary weapon in the daily struggle for existence of the lower classes, and their Hampden Clubs became the haunts of courageous men. The writings of William Cobbett² became the New Testament in almost every cottage in the manufacturing districts. According to his contemporaries, Cobbett’s Political Register was read at “meetings of people in many towns, and one copy was thus made to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• Table of Contents
• CHAPTER I PROTOTYPES OF CHARTISM
• CHAPTER II THE WHIG RULE
• CHAPTER III THE NEW POOR LAW
• CHAPTER IV THE UNIVERSAL DISTRESS
• CHAPTER V LABOR LEGISLATION AND TRADE UNIONISM
• CHAPTER VI THE PEOPLE’S CHARTER
• CHAPTER VII THE LEADERS
• CHAPTER VIII THE GOSPEL OF REVOLT
• CHAPTER IX THE PEOPLE
• CHAPTER X THE PETITION, THE CONVENTION AND THE GOVERNMENT
• CHAPTER XI THE WRESTLING FORCES
• CHAPTER XII THE NEWPORT RIOT
• APPENDIX A Petition agreed to at the “Crown and Anchor” meeting, February 28, 1837
• APPENDIX B The People’s Charter
• APPENDIX C The National Petition
• APPENDIX D Dialogue on war, between a moral force Whig and a Chartist, by Bronterre
• INDEX