Chartism

John Walton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134862504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Chartism is an essential introduction to the movement, and examines the controversial debates surrounding the topic. As well as providing a concise period background, the author includes discussion of:
* the Chartists' economic, legislative and political goals
* patterns of regional and local support
* reasons for the Chartist decline
* the success of Chartism in the light of its goals and its influence over the Poor Law, Corn Laws, trade unions and factory reform
* the languages of Chartism - songs, gesture and propaganda.

1
Chartism in Outline

The Nature of the Charter

The People's Charter was officially launched on 8 May 1838. Its Six Points were directed at the opening out and purification of the constitution through reform of the procedures for choosing members of the House of Commons. Thus the extension of the vote to all men over 21 years of age expressed the democratic principle, while the secret ballot was intended to emancipate voters from the corrupting influences of bribery, coercion and intimidation. Accountability was pursued through the proposal for the renewal of MPs' mandates through annual elections, in an attempt to ensure that parliamentary life did not divorce them from the legitimate concerns of their constituents. The democratisation of Commons membership as well as electoral processes was envisaged. This was to be encouraged by the abolition of the property qualification to stand for parliament, which was to be replaced by the gathering of signatures from at least a hundred local electors, and the payment of a salary (of a substantial £500 per annum) to MPs, which would enable working-class representatives to serve in parliament and free them from potentially corrupting financial patronage from wealthy or governing interests. The sixth point, the introduction of electoral districts of equal size in population terms, not only did away with tiny constituencies which could be dominatedby individuals but, more generally, proposed to replace the existing logic by which the Commons was said to represent property and interests with a democratic, statistically minded understanding of how the will of the people should be embodied in the legislature (Ward, 1973 pp. 84–5).

It is interesting to see what was not included in this emblematic core of the Chartist programme: no mention of the House of Lords, for example, despite the anti-aristocratic rhetoric inherited from earlier critiques of the constitution which reverberated though the movement, and the proposals for abolishing or radically reforming the Lords which had emanated from Daniel O'Connell, Francis Place and J.A. Roebuck, for example, in the mid- 1830s; no overt challenge to the Crown (although some Chartists were also republicans); and no attempt to bring women back into the pale of the constitution after their exclusion had been confirmed in 1832, although this latter theme was at times a source of animated discussion. Anna Clark has argued that this disabled Chartists rhetorically, because they failed to follow through the logic of their position that full citizenship including the vote was a ‘universal political right of every human being', to include female suffrage, while making themselves vulnerable to ridicule from political opponents who highlighted that logic and argued that the Chartists would be bound by it, with what were widely assumed to be absurd and dangerous consequences (Vernon (ed.), 1996 p. 235). Chartism thus suffered the worst of both worlds on this issue, failing to get the full credit for its democratic assumptions but being tarred with the brush of sentimental impracticality by opponents who assumed that being female, or indeed not being master of a household, was an automatic badge of irresponsibility and disqualification from the vote.

The irony of this was that the Charter attempted to avoid giving such hostages to fortune, pursuing practical politics, but at the level of the working of the system: specific reforms and redresses of grievances would follow from the changing composition and concerns of a reformed parliament. Its demands were limited accordingly, and its creators maintained the fixation on the reform of the House of Commons which had sustained more than two generations of radical reformers. This meant that not only would the Charter itself have to be achieved through the existing parliament's acceptance of the overwhelming moral force of the document's innate rightness; the political gains which were supposed to flow from itwould also depend on recognition by the other elements of the constitution, the House of Lords and the Crown, that the democratic mandate of the Commons conferred a special legitimacy which had to be respected when controversial legislation emerged from the reformed House. This was assumed rather than discussed at the time, and was part of an optimistic set of expectations which flowed from the established language and assumptions of the culture of radical reform.

The Charter emerged from a widespread disaffection with the 1832 settlement which had been generating protest meetings and radical programmes in various parts of the country from the earliest days of the first post-Reform parliament. Already in September 1832 Birmingham's Committee of the Unemployed Artisans was advocating universal suffrage, the ballot, annual parliaments and the abolition of the property qualification (Behagg, in Epstein and Thompson (eds), 1982 p. 63). In April 1833 London's National Union of the Working Classes, which had been founded in 1831, was publicizing William Lovett's advocacy of the same measures.A month later a gathering at Padiham, in the Lancashire weaving district, came up with five of what were to become the Six Points; the Radical Association of Leeds made similar demands in 1835 (Ward, 1973 pp. 74–5, 89). Examples could be multiplied up and down the country. The Charter was the particular form in which the agenda of the radical reformers of the 1830s came to be embodied: it proved to be a very effective rallying-point, but there was nothing sacred or inevitable about its precise content, which reflected widespread current concerns. Its immediate genesis in 1837–8 came from the London Working Men's Association (LWMA), an organization of the capital's self-conscious artisan elite which set a premium on education and mutual improvement. The LWMA was distanced considerably from the ferment of provincial agitation (against the New Poor Law of 1834 and other threatening measures of the post-Reform governments) which was to provide the backbone of so much Chartist support. The credit for the actual wording and content of the Charter was disputed between William Lovett of the LWMA and the ubiquitous veteran London radical Francis Place, but what mattered was the timing of the initiative rather than the precise wording or even content of the text. Along with the LWMA, the Charter was signed by a group of parliamentaryradicals led by the Irish leader Daniel O'Connell, who was no friend to unorthodox economic measures, and still less to trade unions, for example;and the influence of Place, who was a complete convert to the rising orthodoxies of free-market economics, helped to ensure that no hint of challenge to recent economic ‘reforms', even the New Poor Law itself, would be allowed to compromise a purely political agenda. As John Belchem remarks (Belchem, 1990 p. 104), ‘The Charter was a moderately phrased statement of the traditional radical programme.' It was only the surrounding circumstances that turned it into an icon of political and economic dissent.

Origins of the Charter

The Charter caught on in the provinces, and became the basis for a national movement only when it was linked to the Birmingham Political Union's (BPU) campaign for one last great petition to parliament for manhood suffrage, coupled with the election of a National Convention or popular alternative parliament to organize its presentation. The BPU's original panacea was currency reform, aiming at expanding the money supply to increase popular purchasing power, demand and employment. It had pursued this agenda vigorously during the campaign leading up to the Reform Act, but this specific goal, the product of the banker Thomas Attwood's theories, was soon sidelined in the new agitation, while the scepticism of many of the BPU's middle-class leaders about universal suffrage was temporarily laid aside (Behagg, in Epstein and Thompson (eds), 1982 p. 67). The petition embodied only five of the six points of the Charter, because Attwood drew the line at equal electoral districts, but it lay at the core of subsequent campaigning (Mather, 1980 p. 10). Both the BPU and the LWMA were in touch with networks of sister organizations across the country, the inheritance of two generations of reform campaigns; and at the beginning of June 1838, at a meeting on Hunslet Moor on the outskirts of Leeds, Feargus O'Connor's Great Northern Union brought together in loose federation an array of local radical associations in Lancashire and Yorkshire whose strong language and forceful demeanour came more directly out of the frustrations of grappling with post-1832 parliaments over the Poor Law and factory reform.

There was some rivalry between the various spheres of influence. The northern group around O'Connor, and his London allies in the Marylebone Radical Association (which dated from 1835), were initially suspicious of the Charter's immediate origins. Its progenitors were held to be too closely associated with Whig reformers who were tainted with the memory of the compromise or betrayal of 1832, and with Malthusian doctrines which blamed poverty on fecklessness and early, ‘improvident' marriage and sought to restrain population growth and poor relief expenditure. But there was also much overlap. The crucial point was the extent to which local campaigns, many of which involved experienced activists and well-established radical groups who had campaigned on many previous issues and occasions, were finding common ground in pursuit of shared goals whose achievement was seen to depend on national political reform. Chartism built on established cultures of radical reform, whose deep roots were a strength, although the personal antagonisms and local jealousies which had emerged over the years could also be a hindrance.

What attracted enthusiastic support was the Charter itself, and the stirring (although far from novel) ways of moving towards it which were being envisaged. When O'Connor's recently founded Northern Star,with its charismatic editor and established commitment to the campaigns for factory reform and against the new Poor Law, took up the cause with enthusiasm, the picture was complete. The importance of the Northern Starin distributing arguments, rhetoric and information, offering justifications and affirming strength, commitment and a sense of community across a wide area, was such that Dorothy Thompson has suggested that it makes more sense to date Chartism's origins from the foundation of the paper in November 1837 than from the actual publication of the Charter itself (D. Thompson, 1984 p. 6). This may be contentious, and although the Starremained pre-eminent, a broader Chartist press with many regional and local outlets was already proliferating in 1838 (Ward, 1973 p. 108);what is clear is that by the late spring and early summer of that year a lively and assertive movement had been born, providing a common banner under which a variety of existing causes, grievances and organizations could be marshalled, and fusing together potentially contradictory elements (embracing, for example, the full spectrum of views on political economy and of religious attachment, and bringing representatives of employers and workpeople into uneasy alliance) in pursuit of a common political goal. How it was to be achieved, and what was to be done with it if success were attained, remained highly problematic and divisive issues.

The Convention and the First Petition

As industrial England moved into one of the severest trade depressions of the century, and the fiercely contested administrative introduction of the New Poor Law continued, the work of collecting signatures for the great petition, and setting up and sustaining the Convention, went ahead during 1838 and on into 1839. It was accompanied and reinforced by a quickening rhythm of theatrically presented open-air mass meetings whose scale, symbolism and oratory conjured up the possibility of armed conflict and revolution, thoroughly alarming those in authority. Nocturnal meetings by the flaring light of smoking torches, at which flamboyant speakers issued dark and graphic hints of the consequences if Parliament were to reject the petition, provoked flurries of special anxiety until a worried government declared them illegal in December 1838. They were abandoned, but only after a final show of defiance with valedictory meetings at Wakefield and Bury (Epstein, 1982 pp. 119–23). The excluded were mobilizing to claim their constitutional rights, and they were marshalling in at least as disciplined a way as in 1819 though in even greater numbers and with a broader agenda of potential change, which for many supporters went far beyond the letter of the Charter itself.

The delegates to the General Convention of the Industrious Classes had been elected by mass meetings during the summer and autumn of 1838. The great northern gatherings at Kersal Moor, Manchester, on 25 September and at Peep Green, between Leeds and Huddersfield, on 15 October, attracted crowds which were estimated at a quarter of a million or more, and the Kersal Moor meeting retained its enthusiasm through a heavy rainstorm (Gammage, 1969 pp. 59–66). Arrangements were made to collect a ‘National Rent' from the localities to fund its operations. Such a body was not a new idea: indeed, as Dorothy Thompson points out, ‘British parliamentary reform had been organized around the idea of an alternative Parliament since the middle of the eighteenth century', and the ill-fated Peterloo meeting in 1819 had been part of a similar process (D. Thompson, 1984 p. 63). There were exciting overtones of the French Revolution about such a process, but it also harked back to English constitutional precedents in 1660 and 1689 when bodies with the same label met to restore the monarchy. Every effort was made to deprive the authorities of any semblance of a legitimate excuse for dissolving this alternative legislature by force, despite its provocative role as an ‘anti- Parliament' which challenged the higher legitimacy of the existing body (Epstein, 1982 p. 138). This was difficult, because the legal position was problematic: as Dorothy Thompson puts it, ‘A central meeting of mandated delegates would certainly have been illegal under the Seditious Meetings legislation. However, by calling the meeting the General Convention of the Industrious Classes, carefully avoiding the expression “National Convention”, by having the delegates chosen by acclamation at public meetings and by limiting the number of delegates to forty-nine, the Chartist leaders hoped to keep within the law' (D. Thompson, 1984 p. 64). Even so, the formal legality of the Convention remained questionable, and it operated under the perpetual shadow of forcible dissolution and mass arrests. The obvious inequity of these limitations went far to outweigh the necessary loss of democratic credentials which the mode of election occasioned in the eyes of some later historians.

The Convention's members gathered to begin their deliberations in London on 4 February 1839, meeting originally at the British Coffee House in Cockburn Street. As originally constituted it was a very respectable-looking body, dominated numerically by businessmen, professionals and shopkeepers rather than by manual workers. At least 39 of the original 63 delegates listed by James Epstein fall squarely into one of these categories, including lawyers, surgeons, merchants, a Unitarian minister and a clergyman of the Church of England. Some were marginal members of what R.S. Neale has called the ‘middling class', working men who had moved into insecure small businesses, sometimes as a refuge from victimization for radical and trade union activities; but there was a core of solid middle-class representatives, especially the Birmingham merchants and master manufacturers of the BPU (Epstein, 1982 pp. 142–4; Neale, 1968). But there was a strong leavening of manual workers, such as the weaver Richard Marsden from Preston, although its extent was limited by the danger of losing one's job and being victimized and blacklisted by employers thereafter (King, 1981; Epstein, 1982 pp. 139–40; Kemnitz, 1978).Working men's circumstances persistently made Chartism dependent for its leadership, beyond the localities, on radical businessmen and professionals who could afford the time and cope with the disruption which a full-time delegate's role entailed.

From the beginning, the purpose of the Convention's deliberations was problematic. When its members gathered, the Petition still had only half a million signatures and there was debate over whether to send out ‘missionaries' to agitate the localities in pursuit of a more impressive muster. Fifteen were sent out, despite fears of illegality, but met with limited success in areas where Chartism had lacked spontaneous support (Epstein, 1982 p. 147; Ward, 1973 p. 118). Meanwhile, the Convention debated a variety of issues, but the key question was whether it should go beyond merely presiding over the presenting of the Petition, and consider what was to be done if – or when – it was rejected by the Commons. A formal proposal to confine activities to organizing the Petition was rejected by 36 votes to 6, and the Convention began to consider the ‘ulterior measures' which might be adopted to intimidate the Government into reconsidering a rejection. In May 1839 the suggested options were published as the ‘Manifesto of Ulterior Measures', which contained the famous phrase that the poor would prevail against their oppressors ‘peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must'. Several possibilities were outlined to make the Government's position untenable: withdrawing funds from savings banks; converting paper money into gold or silver (a ploy reminiscent of the campaign for reform in 1830–2); a general strike or ‘national holiday' lasting for a ‘sacred month' to bring the economy to its knees; the use of armed force to defend the people against injustice; the support of Chartist candidates at elections; abstaining from consuming articles from which government derived revenue through excises; refusal to pay rents and taxes; and ‘exclusive dealing', the boycotting of traders whose politics were adversarial to Chartism (Wiener, 1989 pp. 65–6; Ward, 1973 p. 122; Gammage, 1969 p.109). By the time this document was discussed, the Convention had moved from London to Birmingham: arrests of Chartist leaders had begun and a provincial venue, with plenty of assertive popular support and (as some delegates pointed out) a centre for arms manufacture, was deemed safer than the capital. Debate on the ‘ulterior measures' was fierce, and a decision on which should be given priority was remitted to a series of simultaneous mass meetings on Whit Monday, which also provided an opportunity for a show of numerical strength and enthusiasm. The Convention adjourned until 1 July, when it would reconvene to watch over the actual presentation of the petition to the adjourned House of Commons. Meanwhile, it surrendered the initiative to the mass meetings of the Whitsuntide holiday.

Repression and the Threat of Insurrection

Over the three months of its meetings the Convention itself had changed. It had lost the supporters of J.P. Cobbett, who had tried to insist on a purely petitioning role, and then the Birmingham manufacturers of the BPU, whose departure at the end of March was an alarmed reaction to the violence of some of the rhetoric. The replacements for these ‘respectable' members were almost all working men: a silversmith, a stonemason, a bricklayer, a framework knitter (Epstein, 1982 p. 144). The solidly middle-class Birmingham men had not been averse to bringing pressure to bear on the government by encouraging mass agitation but control of events had passed into other hands, and they were not prepared to subordinate themselves to artisan or working-class radicals of a different stamp. Their departure gave more weight to the group which Dorothy Thompson has described as the ‘Jacobins', who deployed the rhetoric and symbolism of the French Revolution and envisaged an armed rising as a genuine possibility: G.J Harney wore a red ‘cap of liberty', waved daggers before audiences and compared himself with the notoriously bloodthirsty French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. Their expectations were widely shared among Convention delegates as the spring of 1839 gave way to summer, and even William Lovett, later regarded as a moderate apostle of ‘moral force', shared in a language of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• IN THE SAME SERIES
• Time Chart
• Introduction
• 1: Chartism in Outline
• 2: Chartist Goals
• 3: Chartist Strategies
• 4: Repression and Concession: the state and Chartism
• 5: Chartism in Perspective
• Bibliography