Aspects of Chartism: The Land Plan

The Chartist Land Plan formed a central plank of Chartist activities during the mid and late 1840s. However, it has attracted little attention from recent historians[1]. The Land Plan appears to have passed revisionist historians by. Epstein’s biography stopped short of considering it though his discussion of O’Connor’s agrarian ideas is, according to Chase[2] “a notable exception in a historiographical pattern that has generally alternated between condescension and hostility”. Much modern thinking on the Land Plan has been coloured by contemporary hostility to O’Connor. The Select Committee on the National Land Company concluded in 1847-8 that it would have taken 115 years to settle the full membership on land. Gammage was damning in his critique of the Land Plan[3] and subsequent historians were quick to view it either as an irrelevance or as an unwarranted diversion from campaigning for the Charter[4]. Recent historians have scarcely been less charitable dismissing it as ‘unquestionably reactionary’ and ‘harebrained’[5], ‘utopian’, ‘nostalgic’ and ‘escapist’[6]. It is ironic that the only two considered accounts of the Plan were published abroad[7]. Chase rightly argues that the Land Plan has been the victim of the tendency to ‘Whig interpretation’. The Plan is dismissed as a cul-de-sac, a wrong turning that may have impaired the relentless forward march of labour.

One aspect of the Land Plan has, however, been subject to considerable revision in the last twenty years. O’Connor is now taken more seriously and viewed less critically[8]. While it is possible to look at Chartism without O’Connor, his role in the Land Plan was so fundamental that without him, as Chase[9] says, “the Land Plan would be inconceivable”. The Land Question had been at the heart of the radical critique since the late eighteenth century[10]. There were differences in radical emphasis. Some wanted the nationalisation of land, while others sought small, private ownership. The 1830s and 1840s saw a widespread interest in schemes designed to settle workers on the land. O’Connor consciously built on this. As early as 1839 he told Rochdale Chartists that “The labourers ought to possess the earth”[11]. O’Connor’s recognition of the importance of land contained two in part contradictory analyses. First, he wanted to re-establish a balance between industry and agriculture. In doing so, like William Cobbett, he drew an idealised and highly moralised portrait of a rural ‘golden age’ with its ‘cottage economy’. He was not opposed to machinery as such but to the consequence of their use in factories especially the displacement of workers and the unequal distribution of the wealth created[12].

“Formerly society was divided into small rural communities, so closely allied in interest, and so mutually dependent upon each other for companionship, as to make them resemble a large family…There were masters and men reciprocally depending upon each other for everything…Thus did the machinery work well and harmoniously and the little community was happy…”

More important than this pseudo-paternalist viewpoint, however, was O’Connor’s desire to establish communities based upon the independence of the worker. He saw the land as providing comfort and security for working people. This was based on a more general Chartist political critique of excessive wealth that was seen as the primary cause of economic and political inequalities. This went to the heart of Chartist demands and gave the movement renewed momentum after the debacle of 1842. The widening divisions in society, many believed, were driving it to the brink of disaster. O’Connor, as Epstein says[13], was not advancing any original economic or social ideas. They were found in Owenism. However, he did capture an “artisan consciousness concerned with the values of independence and self-reliance”. Whether Epstein is right that this was a “‘backward-looking’ ideal in the sense that it implied an arresting of the full development of the emergent forces of industrial capitalism” is, however, more debatable.

Local Chartists readily took up O’Connor’s call for ‘Chartist Land Associations’ as early as August 1840. Cirencester, a decaying textile centre, was the first locality to consider forming a land association. Local Chartists, who came from the radical agrarian tradition of the pre-Chartist years, like the Spencean and socialist Allen Davenport from London’s East End and William Beesley from north Lancashire, played a formative role in the development of O’Connor’s ideas. Two provincial leaders, both of whom were Owenites – James Hobson of Leeds and Thomas Martin Wheeler[14] of west London – were critical to O’Connor in the genesis of the Land Plan. Provincial support finally secured approval for the Land Plan at the Birmingham Convention in 1843. Certainly, the Land Plan revitalised the movement and O’Connor had provided detailed proposals in 1843 with the publication of his cheap The management of small farms that expounded his ideas on labour-intensive farming. Much of the success in mobilising in 1848 came from the underlying structure of the Plan that had taken off nationally the previous year. O’Connor recognised this. The 1848 Petition, symbolically, was carried on a wagon made from wood felled on the company’s estates.

The Land Plan provided a major outlet for frustrated Chartists. It proved immensely popular as well as an opportunity for further ridicule from their opponents. The idea was to raise capital for a land company from the purchase of shares at 3d or more a week. Land would then be bought and made into smallholdings. Shareholders, chosen by ballot, then rented the land. This income would allow further estates to be purchased. What marked the Land Plan out was its size. This had never been anticipated and helps explain its ultimate failure. At its peak, it attracted some 70,000 weekly subscribers. Initial support came from the industrial north and Midlands but enthusiasm soon spread south. The national list of subscribers for 1847-8 is an invaluable but neglected source on later Chartism. A sample of 171 Liverpool subscribers[15] shows that skilled workers, tailors and stonemasons, made up sixty per cent of that number with an almost complete absence of unskilled or semi-skilled workers like dockers, warehousemen and seamen.

Momentum gathered once O’Connor purchased his first site near Watford and on May Day 1847 the first tenants moved into O’Connorville. Subscriptions soared and the re-named National Co-operative Land Company bought further estates at Lowbands, Snigs End, Minster Lovell and Great Dodford. Over £100,000 was raised, though only 250 of the 70,000 subscribers ever settled on the two-acre allotments. However, the Company and its associated Land Bank were plagued by legal difficulties[16]. In May 1848, Parliament appointed a select committee to investigate the Land Company. Though there was no evidence for the rumours of fraud, the accounts were confused and inaccurate and this further weakened confidence in the scheme. O’Connor found that the flow of share capital was drying up and, after exploring alternative means of saving the scheme, he finally took the route recommended by the select committee and wound the company up in 1851.

It is not enough to blame the breakdown of O’Connor’s health and personal finances and his declining authority in the movement after 1848 for the collapse of the Land Plan. Government obstruction and the sheer impracticality of the scheme played their part. The collapse of the Land Plan may have marked the end of agrarian fundamentalism but the appeal of ‘back to the land’ remained strong[17]. Interest in the land question continued into the 1850s. The Chartist Convention of 1851 accepted land nationalisation as a central plank of its political programme. Ernest Jones[18] and his supporters embraced agrarian reform in the Labour Parliament of 1853-4. Popular belief in land reform as a way of ensuring the prosperity of the working class endured.

---

[1] Joy MacAskill ‘The Chartist Land Plan’, in Briggs (ed.) Chartist Studies, pages 304-341 and A.M. Hadfield The Chartist Land Company, Newton Abbot, 1970 remains the only extended discussion. Malcolm Chase ‘We Wish only to Work for Ourselves’: the Chartist Land Plan’ in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds.) Living and Learning. Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison, Aldershot, 1996, pages 133-148 is invaluable in bringing them up-to-date.

[2] Chase ‘We Wish only to Work for Ourselves: the Chartist Land Plan’, in Chase and Dyck (eds.) Living and Learning, page 133.

[3] Gammage History of the Chartist Movement, pages 249, 268, 276-8, 375.

[4] Mark Hovell The Chartist Movement, Manchester 1918 thought it was “not a real Chartist scheme” while A.L. Morton A People’s History of England, London, 1938 thought it “took up energy that might have been better spent”.

[5] R.K. Webb Modern England, London, 1980, page 262.

[6] Malcolm I. Thomis The Town Labourer and the Industrial Revolution, London, 1974, pages 99-100.

[7] Edouard Dolleans Le Chartisme, two volumes, Paris, 1912-13 and Fritz Bachmann Die Agrarreform in de Chartistenbewegung, Bern, 1928.

[8] James Epstein The Lion of Freedom, London, 1982, pages 249-257 provides an invaluable discussion of O’Connor’s attitude to the Land Question.

[9] Chase ‘We Wish only to Work for Ourselves: the Chartist Land Plan’, in Chase and Dyck (eds.) Living and Learning, page 135.

[10] Malcolm Chase ‘The People’s Farm’: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775-1840, Oxford, 1988 is the best general survey of this issue. More specific consideration of the issue can be found in Ian Dyck William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, Cambridge, 1992, especially pages 107-152 and P.M. Ashraf The Life and Times of Thomas Spence, Gateshead, 1983, pages 120-145.

[11] Northern Star 13^th July 1839.

[12] Northern Star, 16^th May 1840.

[13] Epstein The Lion of Freedom, pages 256-7.

[14] Thomas Martin Wheeler (1811-62) worked closely with O’Connor and attended every Chartist convention between 1839 and 1851. He also served as secretary of the Land Company. Wheeler was probably responsible for a considerable share of O’Connor’s book Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms published London, 1843. On Wheeler, see J. Bellamy and J. Saville (eds.) Dictionary of Labour Biography, volume vi, London, 1982, pages 266-269.

[15] Alan Little ‘Liverpool Chartists: Subscribers to the National Land Company, 1847-8’ in John Belchem (ed.) Popular Politics, Riot and Labour. Essays in Liverpool History 1790-1940, Liverpool, 1992, pages 247-251.

[16] E. Yeo ‘Some Problems and Practices of Chartist Democracy’, in J. Epstein and D. Thompson The Chartist Experience, London, 1982, pages 368-372 provides an invaluable examination of the crippling legal obstacles to the registration of the Land Company as either a joint stock company or a Friendly Society.

[17] The Land Plan and its posthumous history is discussed in greater detail in volume 2, chapter 8.

[18] On Jones, see John Saville Ernest Jones, Chartist, London, 1952.

Aspects of Chartism: The Anti-Corn Law League 2

The Anti-Corn Law League was the first modern and national-level political pressure group to emerge in Britain. It began in London in 1836 as the Anti-Corn Law Association, but by 1838 had found its natural base in Manchester. The leaders of the League were manufacturers and professionals engaged in export trade, most of whom were concentrated in the county of Lancashire. Foremost among its leaders were two cotton textile manufacturers, Richard Cobden and John Bright. In the course of the struggle against the Corn Laws, both were to become Members of Parliament, Cobden for Stockport and Bright for Rochdale. Another key MP in the Corn Law struggle was Charles Villiers, Member for Wolverhampton who became famous for his annual motions for repeal of the Corn Laws that began in 1838 and continued through 1846. Historians refer to the League as “the most impressive of nineteenth-century pressure groups, which exercised a distinct influence on the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.”[1]

It was called the ‘league machine’, whose organisation “presents one of the first examples of a recurring feature of modern political life, the highly organised political pressure group with its centralised administration and its formidable propaganda apparatus.”[2] The Times even led with an article announcing the League as “a great fact”.[3]  The two key features of the League’s operational strategy were its nationwide propaganda and electoral registration campaigns. First, the League raised substantial subscriptions to finance its propaganda campaign. It maintained a small army of workers and speakers, who toured the country distributing numerous tracts (most notably, the famous Anti-Corn Law Circular[4]) and giving thousands of speeches on the virtues of free trade and the evils of protection.

Secondly, the registration campaign was the League’s tool for replacing protectionist landowners in Parliament with free trade supporters. After electoral losses in 1841-2, the League focused its energy and resources on returning a free trade majority in the anticipated general election of 1848. In order to achieve this, its leaders adopted a tactical strategy that included manipulating the voter registers and employing propaganda devices on existing voters. Looking toward the 1848 election, the League sought to add as many free traders and delete as many protectionists from these registers as possible. The latter they accomplished by making objections against thousands of protectionists at the annual revisions of the registers. The former required a different tactic: it exploited a loophole in the 1832 Electoral Reform Act. This loophole was the forty-shilling county property qualification that Bright referred to as “the great constitutional weapon which we intend to wield”. While the 40s qualification had been a feature of the system since 1430, the increase in county seats from 188 to 253 (an increase from roughly 29% to 38% of the total seats) magnified the importance of this overlooked loophole in the 1832 Reform Act[5].

The League used the 40s qualification to create several thousand new free trade voters in county constituencies with large urban electorates, constituencies whose representation was increased by the Reform Act. Leaguers went so far as to urge parents, wanting to create a nest-egg for a son, to make him a freeholder: in Cobden’s words, “it is an act of duty, for you make him thereby an independent freeman, and put it in his power to defend himself and his children from political oppression”. In spite of an Appeal Court ruling in February 1845 and January 1846 that votes created by the 40s freehold qualification were valid, protectionists continued to challenge the constitutionality of the League’s registration campaign and Leaguers continued to defend their activities.

The propaganda and registration campaigns, moreover, were brought together to further the political success of the League. As its agents distributed propaganda tracts to every elector in 24 county divisions and 187 boroughs, they submitted to the League headquarters consistent and complete reports on the electorate in their districts. These reports provided the League with a comprehensive picture of the electoral scene throughout England, thereby allowing it much greater knowledge of, and control over, electoral districts than either the Conservatives or Liberals possessed “with their more limited and local organisation.” The earlier distribution of propaganda tracts therefore provided the League with an extensive data base from which they could inflict political pressure on Members of Parliament, who were concerned with their bids for re-election in the anticipated 1848 election.

In 1844, as the League’s success particularly that of its registration campaign in the counties became more conspicuous, a defensive Anti-League (or, Agricultural Protection Society) emerged. This group of protectionist landowners and farmers did not, however, obtain the momentum or backing of the League. According to W.H. Chaloner[6], the Anti-League “failed to make an impression on British agricultural policy because Conservative politicians were reluctant to speak or vote against Sir Robert Peel until 1846, and it cannot be said that its literary contribution was as solid or as logical as that of the Free Traders.” In financial terms, while the League grew from a £5000 annual fund in 1839 to one of £250,000 in 1845, the latter year saw the core of the Anti-League (the Essex Agricultural Protection Society) scraping together the paltry sum of £2000 to fund its campaign[7].

A second challenge to the League was the Chartist movement. The Chartists were an organised working class movement that sought Parliamentary reform, arguing that reform must encompass the entire social and political horizon. In contrast, the League chose a single-issue strategy: to gain repeal. Clashes between the Chartists and the League often erupted in open hostility and violence, as Chartists viewed Leaguers as traitors to the reform movement, and conversely, Leaguers criticised Chartists for pushing unrealistic reforms and thereby threatening to sabotage their focused strategy.

Repeal

The stimulus for repeal came not from extra-parliamentary agitation but inside the Cabinet and Parliament as a result of the Irish crisis of 1845-6. The League can perhaps take credit for the conversion of the Whig leader in his ‘Edinburgh Letter’ of November 1845. However, it doubtful whether the same can be said of Peel’s decision. Peel had accepted the arguments in favour of free trade in the 1820s and by 1841 recognised that the Corn Laws eventually had to be repealed. The moves to free trade in the 1842 and 1845 budgets made the continuance of the Corn Laws increasingly untenable. Yet Peel did not announce his conversion to repeal until the end of 1845.

Peel may have not been prepared to repeal the Corn Laws if this could be seen as surrendering to external pressure but, by 1845, there were powerful practical arguments that repeal was in the national interest. The Corn Laws were designed to protect farmers against the corn surpluses, and hence cheap imports, of European producers. However, by the mid-1840s there was a widespread shortage of corn in Europe. Peel reasoned that British farmers had nothing to fear from repeal because there were no surpluses to flood the British market. The nation would benefit, the widespread criticism of the aristocracy would be removed and the land-owning classes were unlikely to suffer. This was too sophisticated for the Protectionists. Their case can be seen, in retrospect, as narrow but contemporaries did not have that advantage. For small landowners and tenant farmers, the most vocal supporters of protection, repeal meant ruin. Peel’s argument that free trade would offer new opportunities for efficient farmers made little impact.

He had come to the conclusion that the Corn Laws could not be defended before the Irish crisis but for reasons which were more complex than the League’s. He saw the Corn Laws as divisive and that retreat by the aristocracy was necessary. But it was an ordered, strategic retreat, a sacrifice in order to keep intact the main strongholds of aristocratic power made by a Prime Minister and Parliament and not as the result of an electoral contest or ‘pressure from without’. Peel’s first reading of the repeal legislation reflects the competing arguments for repeal in the 1846 debates. Peel argued that the principle of free trade was welfare-enhancing because it would:

• Allow Britain to retain its pre-eminence in world trade (thereby staving off foreign competition).
• Be a winning strategy, regardless of whether or not other countries reciprocated with lower duties.
• Not result in a loss to public revenue, as the trade and industrial prosperity combined with the new income tax would offset the lost income from duties.

Quoting League sources, Peel explained why he believed that the prosperity following the 1842 reduction of duties could not continue without further liberalisation.  At the heart of Peel’s speech was a plea to the opposing manufacturing and agricultural interests to accept a policy of mutual concessions. He urged manufacturers to forfeit their remaining protective duties on woollens, linen, silks, and other manufactured goods, in order to adhere to the general rule that no duty should exceed 10% (15% for silks). He introduced a further simplification of the tariff code and reduced tariffs on a number of other items (shoes, spirits, and sugar). His greatest hurdle, however, was to gain the support of the agriculturists. Duties on certain foods (butter, cheese, hops and fish) would be reduced while those on others (meat, beef, port, potatoes, vegetables, bacon, and other non-grains) would be abolished. And, of course, grain protection would be abolished as of 1849. After discounting the link between bread prices and wages, Peel sought to address two issues associated with the clash of interests.  First, in regard to class conflict, Peel argued that agitation had grown to such an extent that the government had no option but to act to appease the industrial and working classes.  Secondly, the “heavy” financial burden of the landowning classes was lessened by a number of incentives to agriculturists: a consolidation of the highways system, relief to rural districts from pauperism, a number of expenses shifted from the counties to the Consolidated Fund, and finally loans for agricultural improvements at moderate interest rates

Peel told his cabinet in late 1845 that he proposed repealing the Corn Laws. Only Viscount Stanley and the Duke of Buccleuch resigned on the issue. Peel nonetheless felt that this was sufficient for him to resign. He hoped that Lord John Russell and the Whigs would form a government, pass repeal through Parliament and perhaps allow him to keep the Conservative Party together. Lord John Russell may have recently announced his conversion to repeal but he was unenthusiastic about forming a minority administration. The ‘poisoned chalice’ was passed back. Peel returned. Predictably repeal passed its third reading in the Commons in May 1846. The Whigs voted solidly for the bill but only 106 Tories voted in favour of repeal compared to 222 against. The divisions cannot be seen simply in terms of commerce versus land. The great landowners voted solidly for repeal which, they perceived, did not threaten their economic position. It was the MPs representing the small landowners that formed the bulk of the opposition.

What was the significance of the ACLL in middle class radicalism in this period?

Both the economic and political consequences of repeal have been exaggerated. Certainly neither proved immediately disastrous to the landed interest and aristocratic government easily survived the crisis of 1846. The realities of political power remained unaltered and no further major constitutional reforms were passed until after 1865. Repeal did mean that the gospel of free trade became a central tenet of policy and thinking and it did mean the increasing recognition of the aims and interests on the urban middle classes in legislation. But these were processes that were already well underway in the 1830s. The resilience of the aristocratic elite after 1846 is a measure of the real political weakness of the ACLL and the middle classes in the 1840s.

The League claimed to act as the spokesman for the middle classes but, though it received strong support from northern manufacturers, not all members of the business community were prepared to give it unlimited support and some, like the financial elite in London, were actively hostile to free trade. It is important not to over-simplify the agitation into a straight urban/manufacturing versus rural/landed conflict. The League fought a national campaign and yet the strength of the middle classes lay in local not national politics, on their businesses and the status acquired through local office. This parochialism, and many businessmen’s support for the League reflected this parochialism, was reinforced after 1846 with the growing acceptance of free trade and the ‘entrepreneurial ideal’ and they abandoned national politics. The difficulty in providing any focus for the formation of a new united Radical party in the late 1840s and 1850s was a reflection of the League’s success in achieving its economic objective. In terms of its organisational structure, its use of propaganda and its tactics the ACLL looked forward to the radical politics of the second half of the nineteenth century. But in the late 1840s, middle class radicalism lacked, as it had in the mid- 1830s, leaders, unity and coherent policies.

---

[1] Anthony Howe The Cotton Masters, 1830-1860, Oxford University Press, 1984.

[2] Norman McCord The Anti-Corn Law League 1838-1846, George Allan & Unwin, 1958, page 187.

[3] According to Archibald Prentice History of the Corn Law League, 1853, Frank Cass, 1968, page 136, the Times ‘had an influence, for good, beyond that of any other journal’ and its leader article gave ‘fresh impulse to the agitation against the then existing Corn Laws’.

[4] The Circular was published under three titles: The Anti-Corn Law Circular, numbering from 1 to 57, Vol. II (16^th April 1839 to 8^th April 1841) and published in Manchester; secondly, The Anti-Bread Tax Circular, numbering from 58, Vol. III to 140, Vol. IV (21^st April 1841 to 26^th September 1843) also published in Manchester in a larger size; and finally, The League, numbering 1 to end (30^th September 1843 to 1846), published in London, at the League’s Fleet Street office: C.R. Fay The Corn Laws and Social England, Cambridge University Press, 1932, page 91 fn.

[5] Norman Gash Politics in the Age of Peel, Longman, 1977, page 91 explains that ‘until the Reform Act an elector claiming a vote for the county under the property qualification had to be assessed to the land tax. This necessity was abolished by the act and the way was thus thrown open for a flood of 40s freeholders from the urban and industrial areas to join the county electorate’. Upon realising this loophole’, the League encouraged and actively helped arrange purchases of 40s freehold voting qualifications for free trade supporters.

[6] W.H. Chaloner ‘The Agitation Against the Corn Laws,’ in J.T. Ward (ed.) Popular Movements 1830-1850, Macmillan, 1970.

[7] Travis L. Crosby Sir Robert Peel’s Administration 1841-1846, David & Charles Ltd., 1976.