Origins and History of the English Workers Movement (Pt. 5)

Chartism: 1837-1847

On June 6, 1836 a group of London artisans and Operatives met for the purpose of forming London Working men into the nucleus of an independent Labour Party. This meeting was called by hardened veterans of class and radical struggles most of whom were Owenites by inspiration, and was in the wake of other similar attempts in the previous year. The working class was still smarting from the shock of the betrayal of the middle-classes at the time of the reform bill of 1832, for the latter, after having rallied the working classes to the cause of suffrage had promptly turned on their short-lived allies after having won their cause. That this was still the subject of much resentment is witnessed by an extract from an address which the newly constituted organization issued:

“There is at present a contest between the two great parties both in and out of parliament – between the agricultural and privileged classes on the one hand and the moneyed and commercial classes on the other. We have little to expect from either of them. There are persons among the moneyed classes who, to deceive their fellow men, have put on a cloak of reform; many boast of freedom while they help to enslave us, preach justice whilst they help to oppress us’. Towards the end of this address, it was noted: ’There are in the United Kingdom 6,023,752 males over 21 years of age, only 840,000 have a vote, and owing to the unequal state of representation about one-fifth of that number have the power of returning a majority of members”.

The association spread its influence rapidly, and branches were soon started all over England. For many in the other classes, the very fact that working men should be in an organization in which they were involved in all aspects of its work, was in itself a declaration of independence, for hitherto it was deemed necessary to have someone allegedly ‘more competent’ or ‘respectable’ to organize things, and to have some well-known political or parliamentary ‘lion’ as the speaker. Instead, the L.W.A. assumed that any member of the working classes has a store of wisdom about social science superior to the other classes.

In 1837 the London Working Mens Association, With the support of radicals, drew up a petition in Parliamentary form, embodying the following six points: (1) Equal representation (2) Universal Suffrage (3) Annual Parliaments (to make bribery more difficult) (4) No property qualifications for M.P’s (5) Vote by ballot (to protect the elector) (6) Payment to members (to enable workers to sit in parliament).

At it’s first public meeting, the association urged all those attempting reform to support only those candidates at the 1837 elections who would support the “People’s Charter” as the six points were now called. Women’s suffrage was however withdrawn, it being thought that it might prejudice the possibility of obtaining manhood suffrage. The Charter was to be backed by a petition to support the demands, and “missionaries” were sent out all over the country to advocate it, as a result, it was soon possible to report the foundation or affiliation of over a hundred societies in other parts of the land. The Birmingham Political Union soon signified its assent. This society had been active in fighting for the 1832 Reform Bill, and its support was to be a key factor in ensuring support for the charter in the Midlands, and enabling Chartist agitation to become far more widespread than otherwise might have occurred. The Charter, now drafted as a parliamentary bill was published on May 8, 1838.

Scottish trades now organized a big demonstration for May 21 in Glasgow, with more than seventy trades societies reported as having marched. The object was to cause the Scottish people to adopt and sign the national petition for the Charter. The Birmingham Political Union was reviving the idea of a General Strike and also putting the idea of “A National convention” back on the agenda, despite the controversial reception the idea had met with in 1833 with its overtones of the French revolution. This petition was to be presented to Parliament.

This became the signal for mass meetings all over the country. At Manchester 300,000 collected with banners of a threatening character. “Murder demands justice” was a motto inscribed under a picture of the Peterloo massacre. Another showed a banner with a hand grasping a dagger with a scroll, “O tyrants! Will you force us to this?” Demonstrations became military reviews with the workers marching in columns with bands and standard bearers to the places of assembly. but since demonstrations by day caused loss of wages and the authorities thwarted meetings in the local town halls, by the end of the year these became sensational nocturnal gatherings with torchlight processions.

Most commentators date the formal launch of the Chartist movement to a vast meeting at Newhall Hill, Birmingham, on 6 August 1838, where the ideas for a ‘national convention’ to present the charter to Parliament backed up by a petition, were formally ratified. From now on, in all parts delegates were elected for the coming congress, and there was fundraising in the form of collecting a “National Rent”, though these collections were considerably hampered by having to be raised at a town level so as not to fall foul of the legislation that prevented alliances between organizations.

But before describing the political events further, what was the context to Chartism and who were its main adherents ? It was a time of extreme hardship, for during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century there had been a population explosion that was to be exacerbated by the stock market crash in 1836 and the more extended crisis from 1837-42. This sent hosts of unemployed factory workers and handloom weavers to seek parish relief, whilst the measures of the harsh new Poor law were pushed through by the bourgeoisie, against the interests of the Landowners, in the new reformed parliament. Response to the new poor law was extremely fierce with the two leaders of the movement, Richard Oastler and the Rev. Stephens both proponents of violence in the fight against it. This movement set the stage for Chartism with its mass meetings and also its direct collaboration with Chartism.

Britain at this time had a highly diversified labour force, in some respects more varied than anytime before or since. In the 1830’s, cotton handloom weavers still outnumbered power-looms by five to two and were affected not only by increasing mechanization but also by a glutted labour market. This in part because the prosperity of many handloom weavers during the war years, had encouraged a steady flow of workers into the trade, enabled by the fact that weaving was one of the easiest trades to learn and could be learnt in a matter of weeks. Also, it was difficult for a male handloom weaver to move into the power-loom branch, as women and girls could work the new machines. In the woollen areas of Yorkshire, a similar massive movement to machine production was taking place.

Attempts to unionize on the part of the hand-loom weavers was a failure as they were both dispersed in their various workshops and working in a doomed industry. These dispossessed handloom weavers and outworkers, those in the decaying industries clearly affected by the growth of mechanization, were to represent an extremely militant element within Chartism. W.Cooke Taylor, in his tour of Industrial Lancashire found a reckless desperation among the handicraft workers of Padiham which was unequalled by anything he witnessed elsewhere. ‘We wait for the word to begin’, was openly stated by every handloom weaver or block printer he met there. But despite this militancy, all too often the weavers yearned for a machineless, pastoral past of gainful self-employment, as a result of which they were to bring a reactionary perspective to the struggle for the Charter.

The London Working Men’s Association with its membership representing shoemakers, printers, cabinet makers, tailors and coach builders, represented different interests. This group, along with the newly risen mechanics and engineers, formed an aristocracy of labour. They enjoyed a considerably higher standard of living than most workers, and were linked socially with small shop keepers and master manufacturers, who also engaged to some extent in Chartist activities. However, even the position of the skilled craftsman had been badly affected by the repeal in 1813 of the clauses in the Elizabethan statute of artificers which had insisted upon a seven years apprenticeship, and now unapprenticed and unskilled labourers entered the formerly protected crafts.

As far as union organization went, this was still in a very rudimentary stage and there were different demands from different sectors. The industrial worker was striving for subsistence against his employer, the ‘polished dandy who has been taught at great expense, at boarding schools and colleges, that he is not to work for his bread’. For them the contrast between the wage earner and the boss was far more stark than for the artisans. The artisans represented the labour aristocracy and their demands were that of maintaining the privileges of their trades, along with the masters, against unskilled labour and protecting their status and independence.

Both sectors though were concerned with the problem of entry into the trades, the artisans by protecting traditional apprenticeship arrangements, and the new factory working unions by “creating an ‘artificial’ apprenticeship system. At both ‘national’ conferences of the cotton spinners in 1829 and 1830, it was agreed that spinners were to be allowed only to train members of their families and poor relations of millowners. The Glasgow spinners went further and tried to prevent mobility by excluding those who had not started as a piecer in Glasgow”. (Popular Movements, c. 1830-1850, W.H. Fraser) In the words of William Lovett and Francis Place – both involved in the drawing up of the Charter and both involved in Union activity – the principal object of the unions was ‘to obtain a fair standard of wages’, an attitude effectively imprisoning workers within a corporatist framework. Bronterre O’Brien, the ‘school-master of Chartism’, informed his readers that:

“A fair day’s wage is a very captivating sort of phrase, but may be moulded into as many different meanings. Under present conditions there is no possibility of realising that demand. The combined power of capital, machinery, and competition must continually reduce the wages and prospects of working men to promote their interests by trades unions alone. Trades unions, at best, can only prevent the employers cutting down the wages of mechanics and artisans to the level of the agricultural labourer. The trade union is only in some degree efficacious in those branches of labour in which the personal skill of the mechanic stills plays an important part. Is there any hope that without an entire change of the system an operative will be able to command a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work? The thing is, in my opinion, impossible”.

We shall see dramatic confirmation however, during the ‘turn-out’ of 1842, of the working-classes ability to move beyond unionism, whilst within Trades organizations, and shed the corporatist framework in times of extreme hardship.

Owenism was the main influence through the years 1837-42, emerging from its decline after the failure of the General unions. A radical politician of the middle classes to whom this state of affairs was repugnant noted “Owenism, as those are aware who habitually watch the progress of opinion, is at present in one form or another the actual creed of a great portion of the working classes”. This was certainly the case with respect to virtually all the Chartist leaders, and if one traces the twists and turns of the various episodes of Chartism, it is possible to see ‘Utopian Socialism’ stamped over every facet of it from start to finish. Beer comments: “The masses of the working class who adhered to Chartism adopted the social criticism of Owenism, but they rejected his dogmas of salvation, which Owen considered precisely the most important part of the system and he regarded Chartism therefore as a retrograde step”. (History of British Socialism, vol.2, p.46.). There were, however, multifarious other approaches. O’Brien, himself influenced by Owen, was influenced by Bray and Hodgskin, the English economists who were amongst those laying a basis for the criticism of vulgar economy. Indeed, O’Brien was in contact with Hodgskin who approved of O’Brien’s practical application of his work. O’Brien was also an admirer of Buonarrotti, and translated his Conspiracy of Equals into English. He thought that

“with the Charter, national ownership of land, currency, and credit, people would soon discover what wonders of production, distribution, and exchange might be achieved by associated labour, in comparison with the exertions of isolated labour. Thence would gradually arise the true social state, or the realities of socialism, in contradistinction to the present dreams of it. And doubtless the ultimate consequences would be the universal prevalence of a state of society not essentially different from that contrived by Owen. But the idea of jumping at once from our present iniquitous and corrupt state of society into Owen’s social paradise, without any previous recognition of human rights and without establishing a single law or institution to rescue the people from their present brutalised condition of ignorance and vassalage, is a chimera”. (National Reformer and Manx Weekly Review, Jan 30, 1847)

O’Brien was to exert a great influence on Julian Harney, who wished to emulate the french revolutionaries and who was later to form International organisations that laid the basis of the First International.

Another main influence was that of Irish groups like the ‘United Irishmen’ and the ‘Whiteboys’. These groups were mainly to exert their influence by way of Feargus O’Connor who was a member of both organizations. The latter was a conspiratorial organization formed by small-holders to resist the enlosures of the cattle-barons who were fencing off more and more land to graze the newly profitable cattle, and the former had been formed as an Irish Nationalist movement through an alliance of disgruntled colonists and members of the catholic population. O’Connor would set up a rival organization to the London Working Mens Association called the Great Northern Union. It was this organisation which would specifically define a set of attitudes for those who would identify themselves as ‘physical force’ Chartists. It resolved in its programme “That physical force shall be resorted to, if necessary, in order to secure the equality of the law and the blessings of those institutions which are the birthright of free men(…) the union should recognize no authority save that which emanates from the legitimate source of all honour, namely, from the people”. Harney and O’Connor worked closely together, with Harney eventually becoming editor of O’Connors newspaper in 1842.

The National Convention

To return to the earlier sequence of events, the National Convention that had been suggested earlier became a fact, which met for the first time in London on February 4, 1839. This became known as the ‘The General convention of the Industrial Classes of Great Britain’ and 56 delegates were elected, of whom 53 took up their mandate, with Lovett elected secretary.

In the first week £700 was collected, prominent orators were appointed as “missionaries” to the provinces to enlighten the masses, and a committee was appointed to negotiate with members of Parliament. On February 5,1839, one day after the setting up of the convention, Parliament opened with a Queens speech that gave clear hints of a threatening nature.The Convention’s reply indicated that armed resistance might be resorted to if need be. From now on, despite being down on numbers because of the “missionaries” and committtees, the convention sat without interruption until September 14, 1839. During this time only two things were really discussed: Free trade and “ulterior measures”.

The discussions on ‘free trade’ were effectively to define the Convention’s attitude towards the Anti-corn law league. This group was uncompromisingly gradualist, insisting that it was important to repeal the corn laws first and then fight for enfranchisement. Such ideas, issuing from an organization which was obviously being funded with much largesse by industrialists, was guaranteed not to be very inspiring to workers; it was not surprising that a motion recommending total opposition to and depreciation of the Anti-corn law league by O’Brien was carried unanimously. The issues were being debated everywhere and it was evident to many, that cheap corn would seem to indicate a future drop in wages. Anti-corn law meetings almost inevitably had Chartists there to heckle, and demand support of the Charter, sometimes resulting in open collisions.

The issue of “ulterior measures” was the consideration of what to do if the Charter was not accepted by Parliament. The differences consisted of a wide spectrum of emphases on varying degrees of peaceful, constitutional means through to physical force and outright insurrection. These differences fell broadly into what were known as the ‘physical force’ and ‘moral force’ parties. The degrees of inclination towards physical or moral force related undoubtedly to the differing degrees of prosperity to be found in different areas. Mathers comments:

“Chartism in Scotland leaned definitely towards moral force as there was an expansive boom in the metallurgical industries and also the poor law did not apply in Scotland. Also, the dirty and underpaid jobs were manned by Irish immigrants whose separate identity more often than not kept them out of Chartism altogether. Conversely, the Bradford district of West Riding where thousands of Woolcombers were being thrown out of work by the competition of combing machinery,was perhaps the most outstanding area of physical force in England in the spring of 1848”. (Historical Association pamphlet)

To begin with, the whole issue of “ulterior measures” was seen by the Convention as premature, but because of the insistence on its importance from the representatives of “physical force”, it was eventually agreed to set up a committee to consider the issue. This despite its seeming reasonableness, caused a polarization at both extremes. Harney, heavily influenced by the events of the French revolution, continued to advocate insurrection in any event. He was backed by Major Beniowski, a refugee from the Polish insurrection of 1831, who contributed articles to the ‘London Democrat’ on the worthlessness of the Convention, as well as on the Polish revolution, revolutionary tactics and strategy. The ‘moral force’ contingent and the right saw these activities as prejudicing the ‘moral’ credibility of the convention and a vote of censure was passed on Harney. However, this didn’t prevent a meeting being called at the ‘Crown and Anchor’ at which Frost, O’Connor, Harney and others called on the masses to prepare for the coming fight. Meanwhile, the government was preparing the armed forces and police to combat the growing tide of unrest. These ‘preparations’ eventually resulting in a call to arms from the Chartist leaders. The convention now moved to Birmingham, with the delegates arriving to a massive reception of workers on May 13. The Government sent in infantry and artillery ready for action. On the following day, the report of the committee of ulterior measures was published as a manifesto.

It was observed: “the mask of CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY is thrown for ever aside and the form of despotism stands hideously before us: for us it can no longer be disguised, THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND IS A DESPOTISM AND HER INDUSTRIOUS MILLIONS, SLAVES.(…) we have patiently yielded one infringement after the another till the last vestige of RIGHT has been lost in the MYSTICISM of legislation and the armed force of the country transferred to soldiers and policemen”. It was further proposed that a series of mass meetings be held to gauge the will of the people, where a number of proposals would be submitted as possible means to implement the Charter.

This list of proposals submitted, whether the people would be prepared at the request of the convention to: cause a run on the banks by converting money to gold; Support a rent and tax strike; a general strike; support only Chartist traders and whether they would arm to defend their rights. When the Convention reopened on July 1st, many of these measures were approved, along with an expressed need for a more efficient organization. On the left, Taylor arranged for a future insurrection by burying five brass cannons (hopefully some other comrades lent a hand!) There now followed more arrests and riots in Birmingham, eventually reaching a pitch where police were compelled to seek sanctuary in peoples houses – and in the stonemason’s union lodge! Still more riots ensued, resulting in the arrest of many Chartists.

On July 8 the convention resolved to return to London for the 2nd reading of the petition on July 12 in the House of Commons. The petition was defeated by 235 votes to 46, with all the radicals and freetraders voting for it.

Bolstered with the news of a strike of 25,000 miners caused by the arrest of leading Chartists, and having witnessed the power of the masses in Birmingham after suffering disappointment with Parliament once again, the preparations went ahead for a general strike. The Convention was seen as now potentially taking on a new role as a kind of central bureau, for most of the delegates shared the general conviction that a general strike would speedily lead to a general insurrection and civil war.

On July 16, a motion was carried, fixing the date for the strike, or ‘sacred month,’ on August 12. However, the subject was not off the agenda, and for days afterwards doubts were shared until eventually a motion of O’Brien’s was carried making the keeping of the general strike voluntary. The shopkeepers of England were nevertheless scared. They appealed for help to the government, which stepped up repressive measures until in August there were 130 Chartist leaders arrested. August 12 was to be disappointing. There were mass meetings in all the towns, with some rioting and disturbances, but little support from the trade-unions and no possibility of a unified general strike.

On August 26 the convention assembled, but with no immediate aim in view following the failure of the petition and general strike. On September 6, the convention dissolved. One of the last acts of the convention was a drafting of a “declaration of the constitutional rights of Britons” which was avidly read by most literate Chartists and was to be quoted on many occasions in defense trials.

The Newport Rebellion

In October 8, 1838, Lord John Russell delivered a speech at a banquet in Liverpool in which he actually backed the Chartist agitation saying:

“I think the people have a right to meet. If they have no grievances, common sense would speedily come to the rescue and put an end to these meetings. It is not from the unchecked declaration of public opinions that governments have anything to fear. There was fear when men were driven by force to secret combinations. There was fear, there was danger, and not in free discussion”.

This was the government’s policy and it was just such a combination had been formed by the left after the failure of the petition and the massive spate of arrests in the summer of 1839. This group formed around a fraction of five delegates from the adjourned convention and resolved to emancipate the working classes by means of an insurrection. A confession of one of the leaders, Zephaniah Williams, reveals a plan to overthrow the government and set up a republic. The secret conspiracy was organized in a cell system, after the manner of the United Irishmen and to this day little is still known about it. However it is known that there was a national conference at Heckmondwick, and lesser organizing conferences elsewhere. The country covered by Chartist agitation was divided into districts, in which the Chartists were classed in groups of 10, 100, and 1000 men with leaders and captains. With various areas seen by them as ripe for revolt, eventually the matter was decided by force of circumstances and a revolt broke out in Newport, Wales.

The miners and ironworkers of South Wales had been involved in a good many struggles since 1829 when the miners wages were cut. In 1831 the miners and ironworkers of Merthyr Tydfil wrecked the court of requests where the accounts of the debts they owed to the employers shops were kept, and they had been confronted and beaten back by soldiers with twenty-one workers killed and about seventy wounded. The employers went on to sack anyone who belonged to a trade union, and the workers retaliated by forming a secret group called the ‘Scotch cattle’ to beat up the managers of truck shops and workers who under- cut their wages. By 1839 the ‘Scotch cattle’ were Chartists.

The arrest and bad treatment of Henry Vincent in jail – the Chartist leader with the most influence in the West country and Wales – the prohibition of weapons, the forbidding of assemblies and harsh prison sentences on earlier rioters combined to create a mood of extreme militancy and the demand to set Vincent free by force. Instrumental in all this was John Frost, a draper, mayor, magistrate and justice of the peace who had been involved in the advocating of radical doctrines since 1817 and converted to Chartism on the arrival of Henry Vincent in Wales in 1838.

At the meeting at Heckmondwick, the forty delegates were informed of the intention of the Welsh to rise, and it was decided to aid the rebellion with an outbreak in the North. O’Connor was asked to lead the rebellion and agreed to do so. From this point, historians differ as to what occurred. It is evident that O’Connor having manoeuvred himself into this position of advantage, did everything in his power to stop the rebellion. He told the Welsh that the Northerners were not ready to rise and that the rising was a government plot, and he told the Northerners that the Welsh were not ready to rise. The Yorkshire men, however, decided to rise anyway, at which point their leader, Peter Bussey, was suddenly ‘taken ill’. His little boy was to blurt out the truth to a customer in his father’s beer shop a few days later. “Ah’ said the boy, ‘you could not find my father the other day, but I knew where he was all the time; he was up in the cock-loft behind the flour sacks”. On account of this, Bussey had to wind up his affairs and depart post-haste for America. Meanwhile, O’Connor thought it a timely opportunity to visit Ireland and did not return until the outbreak was over. Why? As stated by himself ’to persuade the electors of a single county – the county of Cork – to register their votes, so as to be prepared to return a Liberal member at an ensuing election, whenever that might occur’ (R.C. Gammage, ‘History of the Chartist Movement’). A far flung excuse indeed!

The Welsh then stood alone. Towards the end of October it was resolved by a committee including Frost to march on Newport with a column of a thousand men and release Vincent from prison. These men were mobilized, armed with muskets, pikes and clubs, then they marched on Newport on November 4. On arrival in Newport, and after minor skirmishes with the police, the columns advanced to the Westgate Hotel to confront the magistrate and demand the release of prisoners. This they did, unaware that the authorities were well prepared and that soldiers had been positioned in the hotel. The soldiers greeted the demands with musket shot and twenty Chartists lay dead with about fifty wounded. The insurrection was over. Numerous arrests followed with several of the leaders sentenced to death or transportation. Later in 1856 a complete amnesty was to be granted.

A strange post-script was that a meeting was arranged in London to discuss ways of rescuing Frost. O’Connor was elected to the committee at this meeting, but apparently never once attended any of it’s meetings. However he was at a secret meeting where it was decided to fix a date for an insurrection on 12th January if Frost was not released. This decision was approved and on that date risings took place at Sheffield and other places, which were denounced in O’Connor’s paper, The Northern Star. Such behaviour would not have surprised Marx, who summed O’Connor up thus:

“He is essentially conservative and feels a highly determined hatred not only for industrial progress but also for revolution. His ideas are patriarchal and petty bourgeois through and through. He unites in one person an inexhaustible number of contradictions, which find their fulfilment and harmony in a certain blunt ‘common sense’, and which enable him year in year out to write his interminable weekly letters in the ‘Northern star’, each successive letter in open conflict with the previous one.(…) But such people serve a useful purpose, in that the many ingrained prejudices which they embody and propagate disappear with them – with the result that the movement, once it has rid itself of these people, can free itself from these prejudices once and for all”. (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May-Oct. 1850)

By June 1840, 380 Chartist leaders in England and 62 in Wales had been arrested and either acquitted or sentenced. Out of the 442 arrested 425 belonged to the working class; textile operatives, metal workers and miners forming the main contingent. The speeches for the defence relied for the most part on an appeal to nature, whilst descriptions of the sufferings experienced by some of those accused gave an eloquent defense, on some occasions moving the audience to tears. The costs incurred in all these trials put a great strain on the financial resources of chartists and further, the Chartist press suffered from persecutions with eight publications closing down by 1840.

The National Charter Association

The experiences of the early years of Chartism had impressed the Chartist leaders that the problem to be faced was that of organization. A correspondence was entered into, including jailed Chartists, followed by a conference on July 20, 1840 in Manchester, which was to give birth to the National Chartist Association.

The object of the N.C.A. was the radical reform of the House of Commons and it contained all the previous demands of the Charter, but emphasized a form of organization which would be built up in tiers from the localities, culminating in an executive of seven members who would be paid for their work. Thus emerged a formal national organization despite the Corresponding Societies Act of 1799 which made it illegal for societies to have branches. The way the act was circumvented was by having local members appointing members to a general council, which in its turn, then appointed local officials and delegates. An address was issued accompanying the formation of the organization calling on all Chartists to join, and which emphasized its constitutional nature, its disapproval of conspiratorial organization and speaking for the diffusion of knowledge and temperance.

Many views emerged from the conference, and amidst the calls for temperance etc, Dr.M’Douall – who had been involved in the Newport insurrection – called for organization in the trade unions so that they would eventually form the basis of agitation. Up to the end of 1842, there were to be many such organizations, such as the Chartist Association of Hatters, of Joiners, of Stockingers etc, and his line of thinking was to pay off dramatically with the general strike or ‘turn out’ of 1842.

In 1841, Sir Robert Peel, making the most of the discontent in the country, forced a vote of censure on the Whig (liberal) government in order to force them to resign. This move was successful after which electoral policy became the main topic of debate amongst Chartists, and a host of different tactics and views emerged. The Northern Star recommended in one article “wherever by splitting with the Tories you can return your man, do so. Wherever by splitting with the Whigs you can return your man, do so”. On the same day though, in another article it recommended total lack of support for the Whigs. Extraordinary manoeuvrings and rationalizations occurred. One faction backed the liberals as they seemed to have more radical ideas. Other factions felt it better to back the Tories, as an open enemy was better than a false friend.

There was also another line of thought represented by O’Brien who believed in using the elections for agitation purposes. Chartist candidates could appear at the hustings and deliver speeches, and become unofficially elected candidates through a show of hands. These people could form the basis of the National council of the unrepresented people until the dissolution of Parliament. O’Brien believed that this was far better than getting lured onto the terrain of Bourgeois intrigue, and was different in that it became quite clear that the Chartist candidates were for the workers. His view was violently opposed to the most influential line of thought, represented by O’Connor who could wield his control through the Northern Star, with its nationwide network of correspondents, and who almost as a point of principle, defended the tactics of manoeuvring amongst the established parliamentary parties.

The liberals were defeated in the elections and this was largely popular with the working classes. The spin-off from this was the N.C.A. organizing another petition to present to parliament for the People’s Charter. This Charter, whilst similar to the first contained a number of other grievances included a demand for the repeal of the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland. A Convention was formed, as in 1839, to present a petition to Parliament with 3,317,752 signatures, (as opposed to 1,280,000 in 1839), again the bill was defeated, with Macaulay, an M.P. explaining ‘that universal suffrage would be fatal to all purposes for which government exists… and was utterly incompatible with the very existence of civilization’. But soon things were to be taken out of the domain of electoral intrigue and petitions back into the more persuasive world of starvation and poverty. The next phase of Chartism was to consist of the Chartists involvement in a massive strike movement.

The General Strike of 1842

Towards the end of July, 1842, the workers of Ashton, Stalybridge, and Hyde following a number of wage reductions, called meetings in order to discuss their situation. The scene had been set by a series of miners strikes in Staffordshire in late July, which had brought the organized unemployed into the arena of political action. At a meeting of unemployed miners in Hanley a resolution was read, “that it is the opinion of the meeting that nothing but the People’s Charter can give us the power to have ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’”. Soon, in response to various cotton barons giving notice of massive wage reductions, the cotton workers were to come out as well. A meeting was announced in late July with aims echoing the unemployed colliers, and was ‘for the purpose of taking into consideration the propriety of stopping work until we obtain a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work… by order of the committee of factory operatives.’ A local Chartist and member of the N.C.A. executive was chairman of this meeting, who spoke for pursuing the aims of the charter whilst one Richard Pilling, a local Chartist leader and the man who was to lead the strike through many key phases of it’s development, moved the resolution to strike if the factory bosses should institute the wage cuts. More meetings took place and isolated strike actions causing some of the bosses to retract on the wage reductions.

However, at one factory, Bayley’s mills, the notice of a 25% wage cut was not to expire until the 5th August. On the 4th, the weavers and others employed by Bayleys went on strike. The next day, a workers committee met up with the management who told them that if they didn’t like the wage cut ‘they better play awhile – which would perhaps alter their resolution’. This retort was soon on everyone’s lips as an example of capitalist attitudes to wage demands. At a meeting two days later, on the 7th August came the first announcement of a general strike. “Tomorrow a meeting will take place at Stalybridge at 5 o’clock in the morning, when we will proceed from factory to factory, and all hands that will not willingly come out we will turn them out. And, friends, when we are out we will remain out until the Charter, which is the only guarantee you have for your wages, becomes the law of the land”. The bosses of Bayley’s mills scurried back to say they wouldn’t institute the wage cuts after all, but because of rumours that they were proposing a month long lock-out anyway, the general strike went ahead. By now the demands were demands of the working class as a whole.

On the 8th, the scheduled meeting took place and soon a huge procession formed, later splitting into two to cover more ground, which marched from factory to factory stopping work everywhere and initiating mass meetings along the way. On one of the banners was written the now famous injunction: «The men of Stalybridge will follow wherever danger points the way – They that perish by the sword are better than they that perish by hunger».

On August 9, having passed through Ashton and Oldham, the processions converged on Manchester. On entering the city, the procession broke into smaller groups that covered the Manchester factories publicising the strike and urging others to join, which most invariably did with little intimidation. Here they were confronted with troops and police and several pitch battles ensued. By the second day of the turn-out in Manchester everyone had downed tools, and soon the entire area around Manchester was turned out including railway men, mechanics, workers in manufacturing – everybody.

So was this a case of a ‘spontaneous’ reaction by the working class? A knee-jerk reaction? Almost all the bourgeois historians who have commented on the general strike of 1842 would have us believe so, but this is definitely not the case. The initial ‘turn-out’ was the subject of considerable deliberation, mass meetings, and a response to a series of attacks on the working class that had accelerated to the point where there was no option but to take drastic action, and when the strike movement reached Manchester, the organization of the strike was to take on an intensely organized form at local and central level, unifying strikers and the various trades through the means of a trades conference in close contact with the Chartist party; In other words precisely in the way that it seems most likely the revolutionary struggle will develop in the future – workers committees unified across trades in contact with the party of the working class. The background to the form of working class organization that was to emerge had already been set by the smiths of Manchester and South Lancashire, who, after the collapse of Owen’s Grand National Consolidated union, had continued the struggle to create a union that united five of the trades of mechanism – millwrights, engineers, iron moulders, smiths and mechanics. Prime mover in this attempt were the workers of Sharp, Roberts and Co. of Manchester who were at the time producing the most advanced machines in the world who were badly hit by the British protectionism that forbade the export of textile and some other machinery. These attempts produced a paper called the Trades Journal and an organization called the United Trades Association. At one of the many meetings involved in these moves, Alexander Hutchinson, an Owenite and Chartist Engineer and prime mover of these attempts at organisation declared:

“It is said that union is strength; and if one single society can do good, five can effect much more. You are all engaged upon the same work – often in the same workshops; your interests are all inseparably the same. Yet when the oppression comes, your employers do not reduce you all at the one time; it better serves their end to do so gradually and when one or two branches have been conquered, the rest become an easy prey. Instead of one shop or place having little disturbances, let it be general and by such a practice we shall avoid that ill feeling and contention I have mentioned”.

These attempts were not immediately successful – but important enough to warrant the interest of the local police, military and the Home Office – and out of their remnants would emerge the Amalgamated Society of Engineers ten years later to cover the engineers of Great Britain and Ireland.

From the first days that the strike movement reached Manchester, there were discernible efforts to establish a central strike leadership. To start with two main trades bodies met to discuss what to do – the striking power loom weavers ‘and various trades’, and the united mechanics around Hutchinson and workers from Sharp’s. Various resolutions were passed, virtually unanimously in favour of the strike and The Charter, and a resolution “that a general meeting of delegates from all the various trades of Manchester be held on Monday afternoon in the Carpenters’ Hall…”. Over the next two days there were meetings big and small to elect delegates for the main conference on The 15th May.

This conference was known as the Great Delegates Trades Conference and it met under the chairmanship of Alexander Hutchinson. At this conference it was decided: “that the delegates in public meeting assembled, do recommend to the various constituencies we represent, to adopt all legal means to carry into effect the People’s charter; and further we recommend that delegates be sent throught he whole country to endeavour to obtain the co-operation of the middle and working classes in carrying out the resolution of ceasing labour until the Charter becomes the law of the land”.

Along with this, a motion was passed emphasizing keeping the wages question to the fore and one which, after censuring of the employers declared, “We are also of the opinion that until class legislation is entirely destroyed and the principle of united labour established, the labourer will not be in a position to enjoy the full fruits of his labours”. The following day, a poster was printed in bold red type declaring amongst other things “to persevere in our exertions until we achieve the complete emancipation of our brethren of the working classes from the thraldom of monopoly and class legislation by the legal establishment of the people’s Charter. The trades of Britain carried the Reform Bill. The trades of Great Britain shall carry the Charter”.

The following morning the conference met again and elected an executive committee of twelve, plus the chairman. They called for local committees to organize and lead the strike, and to negotiate with the middle-class and shopkeepers, keeping them sweet with bills of credit, etc. This latter move of diplomacy towards the shopkeepers was not made gratuitously as meetings of shopkeepers had come out behind the workers. But they had also ‘tried to pour oil on troubled waters’, vacillating characteristically by sending delegations to meet the employers, after one such meeting they declared that they would withdraw their support of the workers ‘should the question turn to politics’.

The governent were not slow to see the significance of these conferences. On August 15th, Sir James Graham, Secretary of State for the Home Department wrote to Major-General Sir William Warre, Army Commander for the North, “It is quite clear that these delegates are the directing body; they form the link between the trade unions and the chartists, and a blow struck at this confederacy goes to the heart of the evil and cuts off it’s ramifications”. Four days later five of the principal delegates had been arrested, and the next day, Alexander Hutchinson and the principal officers of the conference were behind bars.

Meanwhile, the strike spread to Lancashire, Yorkshire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire, the Potteries, and extended to Wales and Scotland, where the miners came out. In Middleton silk mills, cotton mills, dye houses and printworks were won to the turn-out. By the 12th, in Rochdale “the whole of the hands in the cotton and woollen mills and operatives of every description for miles around had ceased to work and business was at a complete standstill” and this city became an organizing centre for marches and processions and the extension of the turn-out.

By this point, the government was mustering it’s forces, at Ashton the workers response was to take over the railway station to prevent troop movements as a result of which the local authorities swore in some hundreds of special constables. Troops and police were moved hither and thither opening fire on several occasions with several workers killed and wounded in Preston on the 12th. But parts of the states repressive apparatus started to break down and many workers were hauled up before the magistrates for refusing to take oaths of allegiance to the crown as special constables, and those who were recruited were known to be notoriously unreliable. Furthermore, contingents involving war veterans, namely the Chelsea pensioners, were reported – after less than enthuisiastic ‘actions’ – by one of their organizers as ‘by no means to be relied upon, in such an emergency as the present’. (Jenkins, ‘the General Strike of 1842’, Lawrence and Wishart, p.199).

Another telltale sign of working class struggles is the breaking down of artificial polarities. 1842 was no exception, with a large number of women drawn into the strike, who fought with an equal tenacity and courage as the men, arming themselves in some instances with stones bludgeons and cutlasses (stuff hatpins!) After all, it was women and children who made up the bulk of the original industrial proletariat. At one factory where mass picketing was taking place the Guardian noted “the most active assailants being women, with their aprons full of stones’. And this was not an isolated incident. In another article, in early September, the same paper noted ’In the course of the afternoon, a meeting of female operatives was held at Ashton, when a resolution was passed to the effect that they neither go to work themselves, nor allow their husbands to do so, until they get their price as agreed upon” (Jenkins, p.217).

In some places factories were smashed to pieces and workers threatened with violence if they didn’t stop work, in others the strikers raked out the fires from beneath the boilers and knocked out their plugs. (from this one feature, bourgeois historians have contrived to sum up the whole of this period with one of their ‘pithy’ labels – to them this period was; ‘the plug plots’). Everywhere ‘committees of factory operatives’ and strike committees sprung up, in some case issuing permits to manufacturers to finish off half finished work or stock that risked being damaged. Everywhere ‘ordinary’ people showed their capacity for organisation and disciplined class action and it was notable in this respect, that plundering nowhere took place. The working class remained in control of the richest centre of the cotton industry for a whole week despite occasional conflicts with soldiers, and the workers of Manchester were to remain out for a full seven weeks.

What of ‘official’ Chartist involvement? A meeting in Manchester of the National Charter Association had been scheduled in March to discuss the dissent in the movement and to take part in a commemoration of the Peterloo massacre and had been set then for August 16th, the day after the grand delegates conference. This meeting had been proposed by none other than Alexander Hutchinson, and if this piece of information is combined with the fact that Dr. Peter Mcdouall – the chief proponent of union organization in the unions – had his stronghold in Lancashire and Cheshire and was involved in the Newport rising, it is tempting to think that the general strike had been hatched many months earlier. Indeed when the army arrested the delegates at the trades conference, papers were seized which disclosed an extensive conspiracy going back as far as July 1841 (Mick Jenkins, p.194). The presence of the National Charter Association conference transformed the strike by enabling it’s organization, which was far more national in scope, to be used in extending the strike and those Chartsits who favoured industrial action like Mcdouall, took the lead. At the conference it was resolved that “all officers of the association are called upon to aid and assist the peaceful extension of the strike”. Thomas Cooper, present at the conference described the delegates as fully believing that ‘the time had come for trying, successfully, to paralyse the government’.

Mick Jenkins in his excellent book on the strike of ’42, from which many of the keys facts pertaining to the strike are drawn, comments: “From the moment of this proclamation the strike became fully national. Across the country all units of the National Charter Association became pledged to organize support. Areas that had previously remained quiet, the Merthyr valley in south Wales, certain parts of Scotland, the Dorset and Somerset textile industry, now joined the strike” (Jenkins. op.cit.).

O’Connor, acknowledged head of the movement by virtually all Chartists by this time, having arrived at a position where strong leadership could have carried the day, and having said on numerous occasions that he was ready to conquer or to die, once again bowed out at the crucial juncture as he had done at the time of the Newport rising. His reasoning was that the entire strike movement had been engineered by the manufacturers in the interests of the Anti-Corn Law League, and whilst no doubt some employers wanted to close their factories because of the crisis, it was hardly relevant given the scale of the rebellion, but even several of the ‘physical force’ Chartists hung back on this occasion. Slowly the insurrection became a demand neither for higher wages, a demand for the Charter, or a workers insurrection. Slowly, oppressed by hunger, workers returned in dribs and drabs to the factories until the end of September, they were abandoned by both Chartist and union leaders, with O’Connor going to London to elaborate plans for agrarian reform and M’Douall taking to flight against the possibility of arrest.

There followed a wave of an estimated 1,500 arrests of trade unionists and Chartists aged from 15 years old to an old man of 101! To begin with sentences were severe, but as the months went by, they became less so as the likelihood of an insurrection subsided. Jenkins gives four reasons why the insurrection failed:

“The success of Graham’s unifying of the ruling class forces into an effective machine under his and his nominees’ leadership; the arrest of the turn-out leaders; the disbanding of the trades conference; and the ending and disbanding of the Chartist conference,. [these] were bound to have an profound effect on the turn-out and in great measure determined its outcome. Although the two main demands – for wage increases and for the Charter – remained the main demands, nevertheless it was inevitable with the failure to maintain a central leadership that the issue of wages would begin to dominate”.

So what was the balance sheet? In the domain of wages, concrete gains were undoubtedly made. In most instances the cuts to wages were not enforced and in some areas even wage increase occurred. Regulations were pushed through in 1844 and 1847 limiting the working day in factories and in 1843, a law was passed that enabled machinery to be exported bringing about a boom in engineering. But the bid for working class power failed and the Charter failed ‘to become the law of the land’. Engels, who moved to Manchester only two months after, could see why the fight for universal suffrage was so important and why the English ruling classes would not grant it for another seventy-six years. Writing from London in November 1842 he wrote: “… the middle class will never renounce its occupation of the House of Commons by agreeing to universal suffrage since it would immediately be outvoted by a large number of the unpropertied as an inevitable consequence of giving way on this point… In England’s present condition, ‘legal process’ and universal suffrage would inevitably result in revolution”. (Marx and Engels collected works, II, p.368-9). Twelve months later he wrote, “Democracy true enough is only a transitional stage, though not towards a new improved aristocracy, but towards real human freedom” (ibid,III, p.466) (our emphasis).

The fact that the perception of both Marx – which we will demonstrate later on – and Engels, was that universal suffage at the time was tantamount to revolution, is an instructive corrective to any notions of superiority we might feel as revolutionaries of the present day who, in England’s present condition reject parliament. But when we look back to this period, we should bear in mind how little adapted parliament was to the needs of the rising bourgeoisie; bear in mind that only fifty years before it was still in a struggle against the attempt of George III to restore the power of the monarchy; that it was yet struggling with the landed aristocracy. We can easily speculate how the yet protean, and unformed nature of Parliament might have been transformed by having a majority of representatives of a revolutionary and militant working class!

Once again, the working class was thrown back, in defeat, to the pursuit of reforms, and reconciliation with the middle-classes was back on the agenda, and a conference called by Joseph Sturge of ‘the complete suffrage Union’ to that end, was convened in December 1842. All strands of Chartist and radical thought were represented at this conference, but by the end of the conference the frail unity collapsed into it’s various components. First, Sturge and his followers left after his organizations ‘Bill of Rights’ had been voted against in favour of the Charter, and voted for their bill at a seperate conference, then Lovett, representing the London artisans, and his followers left. With Lovett gone, there remained from the original 400 delegates, only 37 to discuss a plan of organization to pursue the interests of the Charter. A further convention was proposed which eventually met in September 1843, with O’Connor attempting to form a shadow executive: ‘the London council of 13’ which he could control to his own, constantly vacillating ends. He would drop this in favour of his ‘land plan’.

During this slightly more prosperous period, Chartism continued its decline with organized membership falling to three or four thousand, whilst the trades turned to trade societies and Co-operative stores. It was a time of bitter infighting and slanging matches between various factions, and suspicion was cast from many quarters on the conduct of the executive of the N.C.A, and O’Connor’s use of the main Chartist organ,the Northern Star to pursue his own personality cult and as a mouthpiece for his wavering and contradictory views. R.C.Gammage, who was active in the Chartist movement at this time commented, “It is by no means a pleasant task to wade through the mass of treachery, falsehood and folly, that engrafted itself on one of the noblest movements that ever engaged the energies of man” (‘History of the Chartist Movement’, 1839-1854, reprinted by Merlin press, London, 1976, p.267).

Before moving on to the specifically political events, what of the economic movements lurking behind them? It is sufficient to paraphrase an article that Marx wrote in 1850. The years of 1843-5 were years of industrial and commercial prosperity giving rise to a large amount of speculation. This speculation was centred mainly around railways, giving rise in 1845 to 1,035 bills being put before parliament for the formation of railway companies, but it also affected cotton, with the opening up of the Chinese and East-Indian trade, and corn following the failure of the potatoe crop which hit Ireland worst, but also England and the continent. By April 1847, a combination of overproduction and bad harvests resulted in the collapse of all three and a credit crisis. Bankruptcies, unheralded in the history of commerce hit old and new firms alike, spreading from merchant houses to private bankers and joint stock companies.

“The panic which broke out in Paris after february, and swept across the whole continent together with the revolution was very similar in its course to the London panic of April 1847. Credit disappeared suddenly and business transactions came to a standstill; in Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam everyone hurried to the bank to change notes for gold (…) At any rate, it is certain that the commercial crisis contributed far more to the revolution of 1848 than the revolution to the commercial crisis. Between March and May England enjoyed direct advantages from the revolution which supplied her with a great deal of continental capital. From this moment on the crisis can be regarded as over in England: There was an improvement in all branches of business and the new industrial cycle began with a decided movement towards prosperity. How little the continental revolution held back the industrial and commercial boom in England can be seen from the fact that the amount of cotton manufactured here rose from 475 million lb. in 1847 to 713 million lb.in 1848”. (Marx, Neue Rheinische Zeitung: May-October 1850)

In these years, harvests were good, and development in the railways slowed to a normal level of development. 

O’Connor’s Landplan: The Last Gasp of Utopianism

At the Birmingham conference of September ‘43, O’Connor introduced a scheme for placing the working class on the land, “with a view to their social redemption,(…); and it was one of the best schemes for dividing and breaking up the Chartist movement that could possibly have been invented by the genius or folly of man” Gammage, op.cit. p.248). This scheme was avowedly non-Socialist, and can be summed up in O’Connors own words “peasant proprietorship is the best basis of society”. This scheme was to dominate the working class movement for the next 7 or 8 years, indeed, to begin with, the name ’National Charter Association’ was taken over lock, stock and barrel by O’Connor in pursuance of his utopian dream, until on legal advice, the political side of the N.C.A. became separated. Eventually O’Connor founded the Chartist Co-operative Land Society in 1845.

The scheme was, baldly put, property speculation involving a long string of remortgages on country properties. Money was raised through initial subscriptions by Chartists who put up their money in the form of shares. These shareholders would then be balloted to obtain small holdings. Tantalized by the celebrated imagery of the country cottage and an idyllic peasant existence away from the cares of the squalid cholera ridden towns, 70,000 subscribers joined the scheme, forming 300 branches of the Land Society.

Thousands of Chartists from towns would be settled in the countryside as smallholders where they would earn their living as farmers. According to O’Connor, this would reduce competition for jobs in industry where wages would go up, and unemployment would be reduced. The first estate was bought in 1846 at Heronsgate near Watford, and – shades of the modern organic movement – spade culture would be emphasized as better than using those nasty mechanical ploughs. Later in the year a ballot was held to decide on the first 35 settlers. The settlement was modestly referred to as O’Connorville lest it’s creator be forgotten. Soon three other estates were purchased and 250 shareholders were lucky in the lottery. The last of the estates, Charterville, was mortgaged by O’Connor to raise money for other estates and when he could no longer meet the interest payments, all but 2 of the tenants were evicted by the money lenders in 1850.

In 1851 the National Land Company was ended by act of Parliament, by which time three-quarters of the original settlers had left anyway and subscribers had dwindled to nothing. Thus ended the land-plan six years after the last of Robert Owen’s schemes, Harmony Hall, perished in 1845 through mismanagement and lack of funds. The working class could no longer yearn for smallholdings in the countryside, and machinery was obviously now here to stay. Agriculture was becoming more and more mechanised and concentrated into larger holdings, and fewer and fewer country squires were left to preside over country festivals and keep the notions of a patriarchal past alive. For the working class there was no going back – only forward.

But The Land Scheme was by no means without it’s critics. O’Brien, through his paper the national reformer, ridiculed the Land-plan, maintaining that it bypassed the issue of taking political power on which all else hung. ‘The reformer’ counterposed smallholdings to the Nationalization of the land, and the gold standard to “the quarter or bushel of wheat, to be henceforward the recognised standard of value – its average price (measured by labour) to be the unit of account”, (National Reformer, Jan.16,1847). Similarly he backed equitable exchange and co-operative stores. One can see in these theoretical stirrings, the attempt to unmask capitalist economy by showing the basic source of wealth as labour. But as the working class movement would discover, a co-operative capitalist or even a national capitalist can exploit as well as sole proprietor or a joint-stock company. It would not be until Marx and Engels had unmasked the mysteries of accumulation that the working class movement would be able to realize it’s mission – to destroy market economy on an International scale, and with it, labour as a commodity. In the next article, we will examine the last phase of Chartism and how, out of it’s distintegration, its left wing started looking towards internationalism, and connected up with and formed early Communist organizations, but let us leave to Marx the job of summing up the difficult, confusing but ultimately hopeful and optimistic period:

“The continentals are prone to underrate the importance and meaning of the English ‘Charter’. They overlook the fact that over two-thirds of French society are peasants and one-third townspeople, while in England more than two-thirds live in the towns and less than one-third in the countryside. In England the results of universal suffrage must be in the same ‘inverse’ proportion to its results in France as town and country are in the two empires. This explains the diametrically opposite character which the demand for universal suffage has assumed in France and England. In France it was a demand made by politial ideologues, one that every ‘educated’ person could share to a greater or lesser extent, depending on his convictions. In England it forms the broad boundary between aristocracy and bourgeoisie on the one hand and the classes of the people on the other. There it is regarded as a political question and here, as a social one. In England agitation for universal suffrage had gone through a period of historical development before it became the catchword of the masses. In France, it was ‘first’ introduced and ‘then’ started on its historical path. In France it was the practice of universal suffrage that failed, while in England it was its ideology. In the early decades of this century, universal suffrage of Sir Francis Burdett, Major Cartwright and Cobbet still had an utterly indefinite idealistic character, which made it the pious wish of all sections of the population that did not belong directly to the ruling classes. For the bourgeoisie, it was really no more than an eccentric, generalized expression of what it had attained through the parliamentary reform of 1831. In England the demand for Universal suffrage did not assume its true, specific character even after 1838. Proof: Hume and O’Connell were amongst those who signed the Charter. In 1842 the last illusions were gone. At that time Lovett made a last but futile attempt to formulate universal suffrage as a ‘common’ demand of the so-called Radicals and the masses of the people. Since that day there has no longer been any doubt as to the meaning of universal suffrage. Nor as to its name. It is the ‘Charter’ of the classes of the people and implies the assumption of political power as a means of meeting their social requirements. That is why universal suffrage, a watchword of universal fraternization in the France of 1848, is taken as a war slogan in England. There the immediate content of the revolution was Universal suffrage; here, the immediate content of Universal Suffrage is the revolution. He who goes over the history of universal suffrage in England will see that it casts off its idealistic character as modern society with its endless contradictions develops here; contradictions born of industrial progress”. (Neue Oder-Zeitung, no. 261, June 8, 1855)