The Road Not Taken
Page 41
In view of O’Connor’s advice in the 1841 general election, it was ironic that the Peel administration proved even more repressive and hard line than the widely hated Whigs had in 1839. Not only was Sir James Graham at the Home Office much more of a ‘hawk’ than Russell had been, but there are signs that he panicked seriously.132 He fulminated at the ‘weak and supine’ posture of local magistrates, but the truth was that many of them supported the ACLL and were quite happy to exploit industrial discontent for their own purposes; in any case, until August they did not have enough troops.133 Graham committed the army extensively in August but this was dangerous, for this time there was no solomonic General Napier to restrain the excesses of gung-ho young officers. Peel’s government decided to risk all on a no-holds-barred policy of repression, and the strategy worked.134 By the end of August the strike wave was losing its pulse and ebbing; a steady drift back to work was evident.
There were many reasons for the failure of what some have termed a ‘general strike’, but the most important was the element of hunger: the strikers were starving and could afford only a short-term effort, whereas the government could play the long game. Moreover, the strike failed to be general, as the important centres of London, Tyneside, Birmingham and Monmouthshire were untouched by it; for a general strike a much more vigorous and organised NCA would have been needed. Once the government recovered from its initial dismay, the military preparations were highly efficient and organised.135 Trans-class coalition revealed itself as the illusion O’Connor had always claimed it was when shopkeepers refused to extend credit to the strikers and the middle classes refused to contribute to the strike fund. Finally, once again in the realm of luck or contingency, the summer harvest of 1842 was the most abundant for a decade and grain prices began to fall rapidly. Not to be discounted either is the sheer scale and extent of government repression. There were mass arrests – 174 in Staffordshire alone – followed by trials and draconian punishment. Whereas in 1839 only 10 men had been transported to the Australian penal colonies, this time 100 were, including 54 from Staffordshire.136 The government wanted to charge the Chartist leaders with conspiracy and high treason after the wave of strikes (Graham was convinced the seemingly ‘spontaneous’ industrial outbreaks were really part of a cunning conspiracy) but simply could not obtain the necessary evidence. He postponed the trials of the leaders to the spring of 1843, but to no avail. O’Connor was tried for sedition but acquitted, causing fury in elite circles.137 But, as O’Connor himself realised, this was a pyrrhic victory. The Chartist movement had been more comprehensively routed even than in 1839, and the only question now was whether it could survive at all.
11
Chartism’s Decline and Fall
BY 1843 CHARTISM was at its nadir, seemingly in a political cul-de-sac. Increasingly the movement splintered into factions no longer controlled by the NCA. Many Chartists gave up the wider struggle and concentrated on special-interest activities: trade unions, friendly societies, local solidarity committees. In some quarters this was greeted with relief: Joseph Sturge told his friends that the final breach with the Chartists meant he no longer had to deal with such uncongenial bedfellows.1 Others concluded that a purely political and constitutional movement was no longer adequate to deal with the blatantly class-based politics of early Victorian England. Typical was George Julian Harney, who in 1844 founded the Democratic Friends of All Nations, stressing international socialism and with Marx and Engels as members. Curiously, as Chartist fortunes dipped, Engels became more and more certain that revolution was imminent. He based this on his perception that capitalists were blind to the lurking danger to their position from the wretched of the earth in their slums and hovels. In remarkably upbeat mood he declared that the Six Points looked like meek and mild reformism but were actually dynamite, since the clear implication that the monarchy and House of Lords would be abolished would start an unstoppable momentum towards the euthanasia of the bourgeoisie.2 In so arguing, of course, he reinforced the prejudices of the Russells, Disraelis and Macaulays who had long prophesied precisely that outcome. O’Brien, meanwhile, after his split with O’Connor, was thought likely to form a new party, but instead drifted to the margins of Chartism and went to live on the Isle of Man. There he made a scornful and splenetic attack on O’Connor’s ideas for land reform, precipitating a virulent riposte, in which O’Connor accused his erstwhile lieutenant of malice, dishonesty, cowardice and desertion in the face of the enemy.3 Some reformists continued to place their faith in constitutionalism and looked to the American constitution for guidance, arguing, for example, that since the British government was as much a tyranny as it had been in 1775–83, it should likewise be opposed by a citizen militia, as prescribed in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.4 O’Connor was increasingly preoccupied with land reform (see here). In what seemed to be a new reformist mood he persuaded the NCA to jettison parts of the Charter when it published its new constitution in 1843, so that the manifesto referred merely to general hopes for social amelioration. He seemed to lose interest in the NCA, though he continued to finance it from his own pocket when it ran into financial difficulties. There are clear signs of the great leader losing his touch in the middle 1840s. In one flurry of intemperate activity he sacked the reliable editor of the Northern Star, William Hill, adding yet another disgruntled opponent to the long list of men who hated him.5 The NCA itself, without O’Connor at the helm, was riven by personal and ideological factionalism at the highest levels and no longer had national authority, with local Chartist organisations operating virtually independently from it; the breach with Scotland was almost total. As a gesture of its own autonomy from O’Connor, in 1844 it reintroduced the Charter as a centrepiece in its constitution. Embattled on all fronts, O’Connor came under further pressure when mainstream newspapers began attacking him for his womanising. In a signal instance of tu quoque, O’Connor hit back by suggesting that the real reason the Reverend Joseph Rayner Stephens left the Chartist movement was to save himself from the details of a sexual scandal the media were about to divulge.6 One of O’Connor’s few consolations in the dreary period 1843–4 was the knowledge that, whereas he and fifty-eight others had been tried for treason at Lancaster in March 1843, not a single one of the accused had been found guilty.
Chartism was in the doldrums and, to add to its woes, its support was being nibbled away by the more dynamic and successful Anti-Corn Law League. Originating at roughly the same time as Chartism, the Anti-Corn Law League was fortunate to have as its leaders two distinguished politicians who were also friends, Richard Cobden and John Bright, and thus avoided the personal feuds and vendettas that disfigured Chartism. The ACLL was the elite corps in the struggle of the English bourgeoisie against the landed aristocracy. Cobden and Bright understood that international trade had its own modalities, that the British manufacturing interests could increase their exports, and thus their profits, only if the primary producers to whom they exported factory articles had a tariff-free market for their goods – and this was prevented by the Corn Laws.7 The ACLL was eager to recruit working-class support for its cause, but strictly on its own terms, without any quid pro quo. For the wider aims of Chartism the ACLL had only contempt, which was reciprocated. From the very earliest days the two sides had broken up each other’s meetings, and this process came to a head in 1842.8 In that year the tensions between the two sides peaked, especially on the issue of the famous ‘Plug Riots’ (when workers put out the fires beneath boilers and drew out the plugs to make factory work impossible). Many Chartists not in Yorkshire believed that the Plug Riots had been fomented and engineered by the ACLL simply to discredit the workers. This belief probably derived from the known fact that at one time Cobden and Bright had threatened to get all ACLL members to refuse taxes and close down workshops and factories to force repeal of the Corn Laws.9 The National Complete Suffrage Movement of 1842, in its attempt to build a bridge between the middle and working classes, originally tried to fuse t
he aims of Chartism and the ACLL but by the end of that year Cobden and Bright concluded that working-class support could not be won. One of the factors was that Sturge, originally keen on a trans-class coalition, returned from a trip to the USA radicalised in abolitionist ideas. Advocating prohibitive tariffs to keep out slave-produced goods from England, he found that this collided head-on with the ACLL demand for free trade. More particularly, Manchester depended on cotton from the slave-owing southern states for its livelihood.10
Cobden lamented that the Chartists attacked capital, machinery, manufacture and trade, the basis of democracy, while ignoring the aristocracy (largely true) and the State itself (palpably false in light of the events of 1839 and 1842). There was, in the speeches of Cobden and Bright, an unacceptable attitude of intellectual superiority towards the Chartists and also the implication that in any alliance between the two sides the Chartists would have to be the junior partners. In their wider propaganda Cobden and Bright insinuated that if the demands of the ACLL were not met, the people at large would swing left into Chartism.11 It should be clear that there was very little common ground between the two movements and that their aims were fundamentally antagonistic. The Chartists took it for granted, surely reasonably, that the interests of employers and workers were irreconcilable, whereas the ACLL raised the siren song that both would benefit from repeal. The ACLL stance was fundamentally cynical. They wanted proletarian support to scare the aristocracy and backed the Complete Suffrage Movement in 1841–2 purely on the grounds that more voters of the conservative type (under household suffrage) would mean more ACLL supporters. Some ACLL members thought courting the Chartists was always a waste of time as such people did not have the vote anyway. Moreover, the charge of snobbery is sustained, since the ACLL regarded all ‘physical force’ Chartists as hooligans.12 For their part, the Chartists were sceptical about the benefits of an alliance with the ACLL. Even those right-wing Chartists who were sympathetic to Cobden and Bright considered that their own struggle must have priority, that repeal of the Corn Laws was irrelevant as long as the working class did not have the vote. Adherents of the Ten Hour Movement were especially hostile to the ACLL. They thought that repeal would simply diminish the acreage under wheat, reduce agricultural employment and swell the numbers of those dependent on the New Poor Law. They doubted that increased exports would lead to fuller employment and thought it would simply mean greater mechanisation. Further, without the kinds of pro-working-class measures the Chartists were proposing, any decrease in food prices would simply produce corresponding wage cuts.13 Once again the perennial clash of personalities manifested itself. At a personal level Cobden detested O’Connor. In his view O’Connor had given hostages to fortune by his ill-advised recommendation that Chartists back the Tories in the 1841 general election. It was the Whigs who stood for Free Trade and the Tories for protectionism. Repeal of the Corn Laws would mean the irrevocable triumph of industrial capitalism over the aristocracy of land, and Tories derived most of their power from the land. The price of food, the principal determinant of land rents, was kept artificially high by the Corn Laws; their repeal would bring down the price of food, and thus rents, and thus the power of the Tory aristocracy.14 Cobden hammered away at these points during a famous debate with O’Connor in Northampton on 5 August 1844. Although O’Connor drew blood, he was systematically outpointed by a superior dialectician; he later grudgingly conceded that Cobden had had the better of the verbal duel. A great streetfighter but never a superb debater in closely argued exchanges, O’Connor was mainly reduced to spluttering about the impact on factories of technology and machinery.15 Cobden convinced his audience that repeal would mean greater economic prosperity, and certainly greater profits, but not that it would produce higher wages or even the same wages; on subsequent occasions neither he nor Bright could breach this adamantine part of the Chartist carapace. The charge that the grandees of the ACLL were primarily concerned with industrialists’ profits could scarcely be refuted; after all, both Cobden and Bright opposed the Ten Hour Movement, working from the generally held axiom among manufacturers that all the real profits were made from the last hour of work.16
At the deepest level any thought of cooperation between Chartism and the ACLL made no sense. Chartists could see clearly that repeal would almost certainly lead to a worsening of conditions for factory workers, since employers would use the excuse of cheaper food to cut wages. The Chartist–ACLL failure to communicate was really because the two sides represented, respectively, employees and employers. For the ACLL free trade was a fetish and laissez-faire sacrosanct, but the Chartists always believed in the primacy of politics: economic considerations should always be subject to political objectives, and this meant political control of the economy and the ‘market’.17 Some even suspected the ACLL doctrine of the market to be mere camouflage – a bourgeois device to take the steam out of the Chartist movement. Two very different thinkers on the Left, one a contemporary, the other a twentieth-century observer have underlined the fundamental incompatibility of the two movements. Here is Marx on the ACLL: ‘If the aristocracy is their vanishing opponent, the working class is their rising enemy. They prefer to compromise with the vanishing opponent rather than to strengthen the arising enemy, to whom the future belongs, by concessions of a more than apparent importance.’18 And this is G. D. H. Cole: ‘The League was embryonic liberalism, based on the collaboration of classes to get the best out of capitalism; the Chartist movement was embryonic socialism, based on class struggle, and hostile above all, to the newly dominant middle-class industrialists.’19 O’Connor and O’Brien were united on this one issue at least, for both opposed repeal until 1846, when Peel accepted its inevitability and thus consigned himself to political oblivion. In any case, after 1843, with Chartism in decline, the ACLL abandoned its attempt to recruit the working class and changed its strategy. It switched its campaign from towns to the rural districts and from the population as a whole to known electors. Moreover, the good harvests of 1842–4 made the proletariat less interested in abstract arguments about the price of bread.20 It would not be an exaggeration to say that by 1844 the mutual interest of the ACLL and Chartism was zero. One ominous development which O’Connor did not spot was that the triumph of the industrial bourgeoisie in 1846 would have other effects, such as blocking a return to the countryside or any agricultural solutions of the ‘back to the land’ kind, which by then had become of consuming interest to him.21
The middle years of Chartism (1843–7) were dominated by O’Connor’s ambitious and Promethean Land Plan. This has attracted almost more opprobrium than the author himself. Indeed some say he was not the author, and attribute this role to Bronterre O’Brien. It is true that in 1842 O’Brien adumbrated a land plan, but it was a very different animal from O’Connor’s conception, and indeed O’Brien was virtually the first critic out of the traps to condemn it as ‘a nonsense’.22 The usual line of criticism is to say that, whereas the British proletariat stood at a crossroads, desperate for an ideology that would take them forward into the future (with Harney and later Ernest Jones exhorting them to opt for Marxism), O’Brien now proposed to retreat into the past, to seek salvation in a mythical golden age of self-sufficient agricultural communities. As one historian has remarked harshly: ‘His movement was just as hopeless and retrograde a phenomenon as if a hand loom weaver had wanted to compete with the power loom.23 It is true that some of O’Connor’s thinking on this subject was bizarre, if not downright eccentric, such as his notion that his Land Plan would ease the path towards general acceptance of the Charter. This has led his harshest critics to claim that the entire Land Plan project was an early sign of the insanity that would disable him after 1850 and lead to his early death. Yet, in another sense, all that O’Connor was doing was responding to the zeitgeist. Utopian thinking and utopian thought reached their zenith in the nineteenth century. In the United States, widely regarded in the 1840s as a promised land or tabula rasa on which new ideas could be impr
inted, a number of would-be self-sufficient utopian and agricultural colonies sprang up, notably those of the Shakers, the Rappite, the Omana and the Oneida and Brook Farm communities.24 Among utopian thinkers were Charles Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Etienne Cabet, Wilhelm Weitling and, most relevantly for O’Connor’s case, Robert Owen. O’Connor was accused of repeating history, this time as farce – for the failure of the Levellers to secure manhood suffrage had been followed by the Diggers’ attempt to return to the land. Yet from the Irishman’s point of view he was filling a credibility gap that had opened up alarmingly in the Chartist movement. All the obvious options, petitioning, demonstrations, strikes and even violence had been tried without success; there was no increase of Chartist members of Parliament, Peel and the Tories had failed them. Chartist newspapers were folding, and funds were drying up. Unless he came up with something quickly, the movement would atrophy and die. It was this which lay behind the (at first sight puzzling) development whereby in 1843 the NCA dropped the Charter. The real explanation for this was in O’Connor’s simultaneous ‘talking up’ of the Land Plan.25