The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  1840 saw Chartism at its lowest ebb. With every single one of its leading lights in jail except Harney and the Scottish leaders, James Leach, a Manchester mill-owner and trade union activist assumed command. In the spring of 1840 he helped to found the National Charter Association (NCA), which aimed to build on branch organisations rather than mass meetings. This represented ‘right-wing’ Chartism, dedicated to achieving the Six Points by peaceful means, reformist rather than revolutionary in character, to Harney’s disgust. However, he accepted that it was probably the right stopgap solution for the times; he still believed in physical force, but recognised that a long period of reorganisation and preparation was now necessary before violence could again be considered.101 By some indices the NCA could be considered the first modern political party and from 1840 to 1842 at the organisational level it achieved great success. By December 1841 it had 282 branches and 13,000 card-carrying members; a year later this had increased to 401 branches and 50,000 members. Its great achievement was to emphasise Chartism’s protean character and to demonstrate to the government that mere repression could not bring it to an end, that the movement was bigger than its famous leaders and could not be extirpated or even intimidated by prison or transportation. Yet if at this level it flourished, with O’Connor, O’Brien and Harney all removed from centre-stage, its ideological and intellectual content was scarcely glittering. Impressive-sounding debates were held, for instance, as to whether Chartism should target the big bourgeoisie as their principal enemy rather than the landed aristocracy, the gentry and the Church, or it should ally itself with the bourgeoisie initially to smash the aristocracy. One such debate ended with the limp conclusion that the working class should deprive both of power but, as in the old fable about belling the cat, nobody had any real idea how this could be done.102 Another debate concerned itself with whether Chartism should declare itself overtly republican or find a place in its ideal arrangements for the monarchy and the House of Lords. There was something deeply pathetic about the way right-wing Chartists clung to the idea that the queen and her husband were secretly on their side, when the reality was that both Victoria and Albert loathed and detested the Chartists. More clear-sighted analysts, from Left and Right, from Engels to Bagehot, saw clearly that the monarchy was simply a sham institution whose aim was mystification and the bamboozlement of the working classes.103 The other weakness about Chartism in 1840–1 was that it began to splinter into factions: so-called ‘Knowledge Chartism’, trying to ground the movement in reason; Christian Chartism, attempting to align it with organised religion; and ‘Teetotal Chartism’ arguing, to the disgust of O’Connor and other hedonists, that abstinence from alcohol was a core aspect of the workers’ struggle.104 Also, as part of its movement away from radicalism in general, the NCA started to softpedal on the feministic aspects of its agenda. It granted women the same voting rights as men within the movement but campaigned only for universal male suffrage, on the grounds that public opinion was not yet ready for female emancipation. The feminist view is that this not only betrayed women but condemned them to more than a century of impotence. Women’s support for and interest in Chartism began to fade, not only because of these disappointed hopes but because of the considerable impact on the female population of ‘Teetotal Chartism’ and the temperance movement in general.105 However, not all women were natural converts for temperance, non-violence and sweetness and light. One female Chartist, Elizabeth Creswell of Mansfield, was arrested for carrying a loaded revolver and a spare clip of bullets.

  To set against these losses in 1840–1 all Chartism had on the credit side were encouraging signs that the movement was beginning to make inroads in rural areas and to recruit supporters in the countryside.106 In his cell in York Castle O’Connor chafed at some of the developments. Lovett, who had won admirers through his refusal to be bound over for good behaviour in order to secure an early release – on the grounds that this would be an admission of guilt – split definitively with both O’Connor and the NCA, published his own manifesto and threatened to start his own national movement. Lovett had by then become disillusioned with the old politics of campaigning and saw the future as the steady education of the working class, in particular weaning them off drinking and gambling. Not only did this make Lovett a de facto supporter of Teetotal Chartism but, as O’Connor pointed out, Lovett’s programme was in effect a return to Bentham’s idea of intellectual qualifications for the franchise.107 Yet O’Connor had even more pressing problems in his own backyard. The jewel of his northern political empire was Leeds, more broadly based economically than Manchester or Sheffield, less inclined to boom and bust, and more politically sophisticated. Removed from the Irishman’s aegis, Leeds Chartists grew increasingly attracted to Samuel Smiles and his doctrine of self-help and gravitated to a new body that was Smilesian in outlook. Smiles, editor of the Leeds Times from 1838 to 1842, had not yet fully developed the influential ideas that would make him famous and, theoretically, accepted the Six Points, but from the moment of his joining the Leeds Parliamentary Reform Association (LPRA), his deviationism into ‘Knowledge Chartism’ was evident, as in one of his 1840s pronouncements: ‘Knowledge is of itself one of the highest enjoyments. The ignorant man passes through life dead to all pleasures, save those of his senses.’108 The LPRA was a classic of trans-class coalition, containing as it did disillusioned Chartists, textile magnates and Anti-Corn Law activists. Under the banner of class cooperation the LPRA proposed jettisoning the Charter and universal suffrage and working instead for household suffrage (where the male head of the household alone had the vote) and triennial parliaments. O’Connor was right to be suspicious of the ‘transforming’ effect of middle-class culture in the LPRA, for after 1850 Smiles totally abandoned all his previous political beliefs and became, in effect, a propagandist for capitalism. One of his statements in an 1875 volume shows how far he eventually travelled from the Chartists: he described the infamous 1834 Poor Law as ‘one of the most valuable that has been put on the statute book in modern times’.109 Not surprisingly, one of O’Connor’s first objectives when released from jail was to destroy this cuckoo in his nest (that is, the LPRA, not Smiles) – something he achieved remarkably quickly. With the winter of 1840–1 spent largely by the NCA in preparing a second petition and supporting the families of their imprisoned brethren, O’Connor set the tone for the new year by announcing (to O’Brien’s furious protests) that the Chartists should vote tactically and support the Tories in the forthcoming election, since the Tories had a certain tradition of radicalism exemplified by men like Disraeli – who in 1839–40 was sympathetic to their aims while voting against the petition in the house. If he expected the favour to be returned, O’Connor was soon disappointed, for in an address in 1841 Disraeli lumped together ‘Jesuits and infidels’ with ‘Chartists and socialists’ as revolutionary dangers to the State.110

  A new chapter in Chartism opened when O’Connor was freed from jail on health grounds slightly before his term ended, on 30 August 1841. He struck the right note by emerging from prison dressed in a fustian jacket, the classic symbol of the nineteenth-century working man and, as such, ‘a statement of class without words’. A younger radical Chartist, Ernest Jones, hailed the almost simultaneous release of O’Connor and O’Brien as the return of the movement’s lions.111 O’Connor’s first task was to arrest the rightward drift of the movement which he, somewhat speciously, claimed to have founded. Lovett had faded, but a new threat appeared on the horizon in the shape of Joseph Sturge and the Complete Suffrage Movement. Sturge, a Quaker banker, grain merchant and importer, advocated an alliance with the Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL), the flagship of the industrial bourgeoisie and thus wanted to head the Labour movement in exactly the opposite direction from that proposed by O’Connor in the general election of 1841 (tactical support for the Tories). Given that the Tory Party under Sir Robert Peel went on to win a great victory, with 56.94 per cent of the votes, as against the Whigs’ 41.08 per cent,112 O’Connor
’s strategy seemed vindicated, but it was highly controversial. Sturge’s movement, renamed the National Complete Suffrage Union (NCSU), tried to steal Chartist thunder by adopting the Six Points and did indeed win over large numbers of right-wing Chartists and those who, like Lovett, simply hated O’Connor.113 The fallacy of the NCSU, for O’Connor, was, first, the alliance with the ACLL and, secondly, its proposal to turn Chartism into a more narrowly focused pressure group for electoral reform instead of a mass movement with a polygon of aims and intentions. Additionally, it became clear that Sturge was not interested so much in a genuine trans-class coalition as in cajoling Chartists away from O’Connor and into his own movement.114 Even at a personal level most Chartists and NCSU men did not get on, with the Chartist perception that they were at root despised by the Suffragists, and the Suffragists clearly viewing the Chartists as wild men and crypto-revolutionaries. Possibly a handful of men might have been able to bridge the gap but they were all, like Lovett, individuals who loathed O’Connor and had (real or imaginary) scores to settle with him.

  Accordingly 1842, which saw Chartism engaged in a titanic struggle with Peel’s government, also saw the movement rending itself apart in a battle between the NCA and the NCSU. In answer to those right-wing Chartists who parroted the perennially popular mantra ‘there is no alternative’ (to support for the NCSU), O’Connor tried to build up the Celtic fringes as a countervailing source of support. This proved extremely difficult. In these years before the Great Famine in Ireland, a political alliance with John Bull’s Other Island might have been very effective, but in his hatred of O’Connor O’Connell was second only to Lovett. O’Connor made a valiant appeal to the Irish, committing Chartism to repeal of the Act of Union, but there was no reply nor any form of reciprocity from O’Connell.115 In any case, O’Connor’s overture was not popular in England, where the attitude, among all but the most sophisticated Chartists, was that Ireland was a thing apart, in a separate sphere; the Irish should stick to Irish affairs and the English to English. Scottish Presbyterians, in particular, seemed likely to lose their taste for Chartism if there was an ‘intrusion’ by large numbers of Irish Catholics. One must never forget the deep-running anti-Irish bigotry among all classes in England in this era. Richard Carlile, a radical publisher from the Peterloo era who had courageously supported Orator Hunt then, made an unhelpful intervention in 1839, fuelled by his suspicions about O’Connor:

  I dislike the sound of these Irish O’s, in connection with the question of English reform, and look upon an Irish Protestant as a base and bastard Irishman, a traitor to his persecuted country, without the apology of philosophical dissent from the Romish Church. If this be a unsound prejudice of mine, I feel, express and submit it to correction. I count such men obstacles to the public good of this country, and that the temper of an Irishman is best suited to the state of Ireland. I wish them all at home and happy, reforming themselves and Ireland. They are not solid and steady enough, not sufficiently philosophical, for the necessities of English reform. I dislike the mixture and think it does not work well.116

  As for the other Celtic enclaves, Wales had never recovered from the trauma of Newport in 1839, while Scotland, particularly in the west, had been particularly badly hit by economic depression. The price of bread was an urgent issue, and for this reason the Anti-Corn Law League, with its promise of lower wheat prices in the event of repeal, had an obvious attraction. All O’Connor’s vociferous opposition to the ACLL did there was to alienate Scottish Chartists.

  There was nothing for it then but to engage the NCSU on ground of its own choosing. Four hundred delegates assembled in Birmingham in April 1842 for the annual conference of the NCSU. O’Connor denounced Sturge and his followers as the running dogs of the ACLL, but sent O’Brien to the conference as the official Chartist delegate; Lovett was also there as a peevish presence, in full support of Sturge. Meanwhile O’Connor staged his own official Chartist conference simultaneously in the same city.117 When this failed to halt the Suffragists in their tracks, O’Connor decided he would have to lend a hand himself. He travelled through the north of England on another whirlwind tour, denouncing both the NCSU and the ACLL and pointing up the fallacies in their programmes. He had often boasted of his prowess in fistic encounters and this time he had to be as good as his word, for there was a violent confrontation in Manchester between supporters of the ACLL and O’Connor’s supporters; the ‘lion’ of Chartism had his mane tugged, was knocked down in a brawl and sustained seven wounds.118 He and Sturge momentarily collaborated to highlight the farce of the English electoral system when they ‘contested’ the Nottingham by-election in 1842. Sturge and his Chartist allies won a clear victory at the hustings by a show of hands, but were disqualified from voting in the ‘real’ election. In fury at this demonstration of their fraudulent position, the Tories hired bully boys to beat up the opposition. Sturge and his Suffragists prudently fled but O’Connor and Thomas Cooper, the Chartist poet and the flower of Midlands Chartism, remained to face the thugs and gave as good as they got. Cooper related O’Connor’s pugilistic talents with awe and described him as fighting like a dragon: ‘it was no trifle to receive a blow from O’Connor’s fists’.119 It is worth noting that O’Connor had to use his fists on several occasions in 1842, both against the Tories and the ACLL. He was thus under attack on two fronts even within one of the two larger fronts he was fighting on during this one year (the other is described below). For all that he enhanced his personal reputation, however, O’Connor’s fine rhetoric scarcely made a dent in the solid support for the ACLL. But, in December, he managed to give the coup de grâce to the struggling NCSU. A second conference was held, at which Sturge made the tactical mistake of trying to hijack the conference into adopting a reformist, middle-class programme. Even Lovett was alienated by this and swung his support over to mainline Chartism. When O’Connor won a cleverly timed motion to retain the Charter as an integral part of the NCSU, Sturge and his faction stormed out in dudgeon, leaving the field clear for O’Connor. Little more was heard from Sturge. The only setback for O’Connor at the ideological and organisational level was that O’Brien decided he had had enough and quit to plough his own furrow.120

  Some of the stress O’Connor was under can be appreciated when it is realised that while all this was going on, Chartism was engaged in a deadly struggle with the government. Some historians regard 1842 as the most dangerous conjuncture of all, when revolution might have happened.121 The Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth thought 1842 especially dangerous for the English elite, since it faced crises in China, Afghanistan and the Indies as well as potential conflict with both France and the USA at the very time Chartism again asserted itself at maximum force.122 The Chartists collected signatures for a second national petition against an ominous background of economic depression; the ‘hungry forties’ became a byword for an era when factory workers had to choose between employment on any terms and starvation.123 Many anxious observers used the image of an erupting volcano to convey the desperate state of affairs in the nation. Lord Francis Egerton, a Lancashire landowner, had this to say about his county: ‘In living in it all, I always feel as if I were toasting muffins at a volcano.’124 The atmosphere of crisis was exacerbated by the murder of Peel’s private secretary (though not by Chartists) and three separate attempts on Queen Victoria’s life. Such was the ambience in which the Chartists produced the new petition. 3,317,752 people signed it – two and a half times the signatures on the first petition of 1839 – or roughly one-third of the adult population in a nation of about 18.5 million souls. The Chartist leviathan presented to Parliament contained six miles of paper and represented a stupendous feat of organisation by O’Connor. It would have been deeply impressive if he had been doing nothing else, instead of battling with Sturge and the NCSU, Cobden and Bright and the Anti-Corn Law League, and the sullen O’Connell and his Irish party. Peel’s government responded to the clearly expressed will of the people with the contempt that habitua
lly characterises British governments when faced with real democracy; they like to prate about it rhetorically and even to try to export it, but never accept it. Hopes had been expressed, after the narrowness of defeat of the petition for pardon of the Newport rioters, that Parliament was getting closer to embracing the Six Points, but a rejection by 287 votes to 49 showed that the gap between the people and its so-called representatives was as wide as ever.125 Particularly unsavoury was the intervention in the house by the historian Lord Macaulay, who served up the following galimaufry of nonsense, in which he chose to ignore the content of the Six Points and entered a dystopia of his own imagination:

  The government would rest upon spoliation … What must be the effect of such a sweeping confiscation of property? No experience enables us to guess at it. All I can say is, that it seems to me to be something more horrid than can be imagined. A great community of human beings – a vast people would be called into existence in a new position; there would be a depression, if not an utter stoppage of trade, and of all those vast engagements of the country by which our people were supported, and how is it possible to doubt that famine and pestilence would come before long to wind up the effects of such a state of things? The best thing which I can expect, and which I think everyone must see as a result, is, that in some of the desperate struggles which must take place in such a state of things, some strong military despot must arise, and give some sort of protection – some security to the property which may remain.126

  The result of the rejection of the second petition was a wave of strikes in June–July 1842, beginning in Manchester and spreading across the Pennines to Yorkshire and thence to Scotland. Most of these seem to have been spontaneous outbursts of anger and frustration, but some local Chartists fomented and encouraged them. Coal miners and textile workers were especially prominent, with serious strikes in coalfields and mills in Staffordshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, the East Midlands, Tyneside, Yorkshire, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands, especially Lanarkshire. Altogether there were strikes in fourteen English counties, eight Scottish and one Welsh.127 The movement was in chaos, with the leadership caught off balance and unable to give a lead, and local activists the real decision-makers. The NCA, taken unawares, did no more than express vague sympathy for the strikers. Caught between a visceral desire to support the strikers and a secret fear that matters would get out of hand, producing mass violence and bloodshed, O’Connor dithered before finally denouncing them to demonstrate his ‘soundness’ to the authorities.128 He and the other Chartist grandees lost caste by their ineffectual stance and seeming paralysis. Confusion was the order of the day. Local Chartist leaders did not know whether to concentrate on encouraging the unrest or keeping it peaceful. The gap between the leadership and the rank and file was strikingly evinced by the enrolment of some right-wing Chartists as special constables to contain the violence, thus acting as a fifth column against the movement’s shock troops.129 Other Chartists urged circumspection, on the grounds that the strikes were being manipulated by the hated ACLL – allegedly encouraging the strikes to give their friends the mill-owners the excuse to close the mills down; this seems to have been a mere canard.130 Ominously, the industrial unrest of June–July 1842 produced much greater violence than the wave of strikes in 1839, largely because the government decided to make extensive use of the military to crack down hard. There was a nasty incident at Salterhebble in Yorkshire when workers attacked a troop of cavalry that had arrested some of their comrades. At Halifax on 16 August soldiers fixed bayonets and fired rounds to disperse a crowd; there were three deaths, including one of the troops. Manchester was the epicentre of the troubles, but most media attention went to Yorkshire, where gangs of striking workers pulled out the boiler plugs to put out furnaces and bring factories to a halt. The ‘Plug Riots’ seemed at first successful. By mid-August more than a 100 cotton factories, many machine shops, dyeworks and other installations had been closed down and at least 50,000 workers had downed tools.131