How likely was revolution in 1842?

 

The Chartist movement that imprisoned Chartists rejoined on their release from gaol between 1840 and 1842 was superficially the same as in 1838 and 1839 but in important respects it was quite different.  The broad alliance of reforming movements and leaders that had come together in 1838 was now shattered. Some early leaders, like Oastler and Stephens had never been Chartists as such. The same can be said of Thomas Attwood and the BPU contingent that had left the Convention over ulterior measures. Moderates like John Collins and William Lovett increasingly followed their own ‘moral force’ route away from the mainstream and were joined by former extremists such as Robert Lowery and Henry Vincent. Others, like John Frost were in Australia, while others such as Peter Bussey were in voluntary exile in the United States.  Mainstream Chartism was more closely than ever identified with Feargus O’Connor and the Northern Star. As such it was likely to be demagogic but peaceful, appealing to the moral force of peaceful mass support, constitutional methods and, if armed, then constitutionally armed.  It was also better organised with the formation of the NCA in Manchester in July 1840. Increasingly Chartism looked like a modern mass political party with a membership, a bureaucracy and a certain amount of internal discipline. Meetings were more like party rallies and the annual Convention a regulated party conference at which policy was developed and dissidents expelled.

If the lesson of 1839-40 had been the futility of physical force, that lesson had been learned.  The release of prisoners and the general election of 1841 led to a new and better-organised drive for a second National Petition. Signatures were collected against a background of poor economic conditions, increasing unemployment and rising bread prices. Middle class radicals offered an alternative in the Anti-Corn Law League and, in 1842 the Complete Suffrage Union. Again, as in 1839, a National Convention met in London and on 2^nd May again the House of Commons rejected the Petition. The next few months saw protests on an unprecedented scale, far exceeding those of 1839. Were these strikes political as well as economic and how far was this activity connected with Chartism?

One problem is the meanings that can be attached to the different terms used to describe these protests. The ‘Plug Plot’ suggests a conspiracy while ‘General Strike’ describes widespread industrial action perhaps also with a political purpose. ‘Riot’ suggests localised and undirected violence while to one contemporary in Accrington[1], the disturbances of 1842 seemed “more like a revolution than anything else”. Certainly the strike came closer to the ideal of a simultaneous rising than any other disturbances in the 1830s and 1840s: within a few weeks, fifteen English and eight Scottish counties were affected and London experienced disturbances at the same time. Local forces for maintaining order were unable to cope and the deployment of troops was stretched by the geographical scale of the protest.

Initially both the Chartist leadership and the government believed the strikes were an Anti-Corn Law League plot, consistent with the way middle class reformers had used the threat of working class violence to further their own ends in 1832. This was plausible at least superficially. Most factories in the textile districts at the heart of the strike were already working short-time and there would have been little to lose economically by a shut-down. The manufacturers and the newspapers that supported them, however, thought it was a Chartist plot. The Leeds Mercury referred to events on 20^th August 1842 as both ‘The Holiday Insurrection’ and ‘The Chartist Insurrection’. However, the Chartist leaders meeting in Manchester to commemorate the Peterloo massacre on 16^th August appeared surprised by events that they followed rather than led. What is clear is that local Chartists were closely involved in the strikes, that there was some co-ordinated leadership and that there was a groundswell of local Chartism that used its position within the striking communities to turn industrial action into a strike for the Charter.

The strikes of 1842 were more than just industrial actions and the riots were not only spontaneous outbursts of popular anger or distress, though they doubtless were for some of the participants. There was a conspiracy to the extent that local Chartist leaders provided organisation and co-ordination and directed the strikes to a political end. This degree of co-ordination and organisation combined with the controlled use of violence posed a very real threat to the authorities. This was particularly the case when there appeared to be a real prospect of the strikes spreading to London. A large open-air meeting was held in the capital on 16^th August and further meetings followed on Clerkenwell Green, Bethnal Green, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and other open spaces. Meetings on 22^nd August at Kennington Common and Paddington Green were dispersed by large numbers of police supported by troops.

To the authorities, whether locally or nationally, the danger from the strikers seemed real enough while the protests lasted. In retrospect, historians recognise that the authorities could hold out longer than the strikers and in that sense a strike until the Charter was granted was unrealistic. In many respects, the act of striking for the Charter was a constitutional rather than revolutionary one. The paradox of the strikes of 1842, as an editorial in the Leeds Mercury pointed out, was that the cause of their success was also the reason for their failure[2]: “Their entire want of cohesion; their going without weapons and their abstinence from all but one act of violence at each mill, enable them often to elude the soldiery and the police, and to get into towns and into mills unaware; they also prevent the masters from having any great apparent interest in resisting the further; they blind the workmen to the real danger of this lawless movement. But that same want of cohesion, that want of any tangible and visible forms of insurrection, render their operations as evanescent as they were surprising…If the turn-outs were to change in their character, and to form a rebel army, no sooner would they be thus brought to a head than they would be utterly demolished…for the masters who submit quietly to the driving in of a boiler plug, would act in a very different manner if their property was threatened with serious and extensive mischief.”

The editor may here have been trying to allay the fears of his, largely middle class readers but he was right to emphasise the unusually peaceful nature of the ‘insurrection’. The Chartists had learned how to use organised and peaceful mass protest to put pressure on the authorities. This made the movement more, not less of a challenge to the established order and represented an important development in the character of working class politics.

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[1] W. Hutchinson of Accrington to W.L. Mabberley, 17^th August 1842, Public Record Office, HO45/249.

[2] Leeds Mercury, 20^th August 1842.

Aspects of Chartism: The strikes of 1842 -- Chartist involvement and historians

 There was little agreement among contemporaries and subsequently between historians. It is clear that many of those who spoke at the NCA Manchester meeting in August were Chartists who had no connection with the textile trades but at local level much of the leadership of the strike was Chartist. In Lancashire, for example, it was local Chartist leaders such as Richard Pilling[1] and William Aitken[2] who linked the call for fair wages to demands for a general strike to achieve the Charter. Nationally, Chartist leaders seem to have been caught unawares by the strikes but soon exploited the situation for their own ends. O’Connor supported extending the strikes but deplored the use of violent language and the belief that they were the forerunners of revolution. The series of regional trade conferences in August gave an opportunity for Chartist intervention and there was a widespread adoption of the Charter as one of the strike’s main aims. In Manchester, Glasgow and London, there was some convergence of Chartist and trade union activity. The extent to which Chartists were involved varied regionally. In Yorkshire, for example, where trade unions were weaker and less widespread than in Lancashire, local Chartists exercised strong influence over tactics but generally Chartist leaders were too divided to take full advantage of the strike movement.

The unions themselves had little central machinery capable of co-ordinating the strikes and the different attitudes of Chartists prevented the NCA from taking on this role. Chartists were reacting to a situation rather than playing a central part in determining that situation. Tension eased in September partly as a result of improving economic conditions. The 1842 harvest was good and trade was already reviving leading to employers agreeing to cancel wage reductions. However, the strike movement had two negative effects on the Chartists. First, the effort made by some to organise the strikes for their own ends allowed Peel and his Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, to blame them for the strikes. There was a wave of arrests in September. Perhaps 1,500 people were brought before the lower courts and special commissions. Harsh sentences were handed out: in Staffordshire, for example, of 274 cases tried, 154 men were imprisoned and five men transported for life. In addition, the government planned a show trial for treasonable conspiracy aiming to catch O’Connor and the trade union leaders in the same net. Significantly, it then retreated from this position, trying O’Connor and fifty-eight others (including several members of the NCA executive) on the lesser charge of seditious conspiracy at Lancaster in March 1843. The thirty-one people found guilty on one or two of the five counts in the indictment were released without sentence because of a mistake in drawing up the charges. By early 1843, there was less need for harsh treatment, as the strikes were over and unrest had quietened. Peel and Graham recognised, as Russell had done in 1839-40, that pushing repression too far was counterproductive, alienating public opinion and creating public sympathy. Secondly, though this was by no means a universal reaction, trade union disillusion with Chartism probably increased. To trade unionists the issue was primarily economic rather than political and, for them, the strikes were not entirely unsuccessful. Wage cuts were restored and in some places increased to the 1840 levels and in the cotton districts trade unionism emerged on a more organised and confident basis.

There is convincing evidence that the strike was well-organised, with well-defined targets and a clear agenda, especially in the Manchester area. Although older forms of protest, like pulling down houses, were current in the Staffordshire area, in and around Manchester magistrates testified to the orderliness of the crowds and most factory workers joined voluntarily. Simply to emphasis the strike as the ‘Plug Plot’ tends to trivialise what was a serious movement that was sustained for nearly two months in the face of severe economic hardship and that the political nature of support for the Charter was there from the outset. Many of the organisers were both trade unionists and Chartists and it was where the strike was most ‘political’ that it was most orderly. It marked, perhaps, the high watermark of active popular support for the Charter.

Historiographical debate

The earlier accounts (Peel, Hovell, Ward) tend to see the movement as essentially a response to wage-reductions which then gets caught up in politics, either by the attempted exploitation by the Anti-Corn Law League or, more importantly, by the Chartists. This political direction is seen (Peel) as misguided. Hovell is critical of the Chartist leadership, especially Feargus O’Connor who is seen as someone who allows, through his bluster, a political build-up but then backs off from the challenge. At the other end of the spectrum Jenkins sees the general strike as a class-conscious political action which fails partly because of defects of leadership and in the face of repression. Mather occupies a rather different position stressing (like Jenkins) the scale and significance of the actions and the involvement of Chartists from an early stage, though he argues that the demand for the Charter was only central at the brief high-point of the movement in mid-August. Thompson goes a bit further towards Jenkins, arguing that demands for the Charter already were important at the beginning of the movement. Stedman-Jones also stresses the way in which radical/Chartist leaders could only see strike action in political terms - above all because they thought that only political change could really secure workers’ interests. In this sense, making the strike general and political was not regarded as subverting its original objectives but directing the strike into the only course of action which gave it a chance of realising those objectives. Thompson and Stedman-Jones also think that the middle-classes and the government did not respond as quickly or effectively as they might have done. When they did respond, most agree that it was in terms of repression rather than offering any concessions.

The trend amongst historians has been to take political ideas and objectives more and more seriously and also the role of local leaders. The two things go together. The focus on local leadership shows that many were Chartists and often came from outside the major industries in which strikes had begun. This suggests a political element from the outset. On the other hand, local Chartists may well have had different views from national leaders such as O’Connor, the kind of figure on whom Hovell concentrates. And it may well be that these local Chartist leaders were turned to less because they were Chartists and more because they were the people best fitted to lead. Only a more detailed look at local action can show us the role of Chartist demands in this popular action.

The distinction between spontaneous and planned action does not seem very helpful. From a very early stage, local leaders, many of them Chartists, were making plans to spread the protest beyond their particular locality. But they “planned” as local leaders; when a procession of strikers reached another place, their impact mainly depended upon workers in that place, and their leaders, deciding to join in. From a national point of view there was no overall plan; from a local point of view there was a good deal of organising and planning.

Clearly there is a difference between seeking to reverse a wage-reduction and demanding the implementation of the People’s Charter. However, that does not make them completely separate issues. Many of those who led and participated in the general strike made a close connection between the two. In bad economic times, following on from earlier strike failures, it was plausible to argue that only a general strike (both in the sense of geographical spread and of engaging a large range of occupations) had any chance of success. Chartists themselves had argued that workers had to act together to get what they wanted. So for many local leaders who were also Chartists it was quite natural to think in terms of spreading the strike beyond particular wage-grievances. Once one did that, then political issues were bound to be raised. More important, though very difficult to judge, is how far people raised those political issues mainly as a way of advancing wage-demands.

The local studies and documents reveal many other facets of the subject. The idea, for example, that national Chartist leaders may well have been thinking in more cautious and reformist terms than local leaders who helped organise the general strike (Sykes) provides a different explanation of the equivocation of O'Connor than that offered by Hovell. It also shows us that we must be alert to problems with our evidence. Sykes argues that at an early stage of the strike it may have been calculated that raising Chartist demands would push employers into economic concessions. Thompson points out that once the movement was collapsing, and especially in the period of repression, it was natural for participants to deny that they had been pursuing political change. These claims cannot be taken at face value. One thing makes Britain stand out at this time. That was that it was the industrial districts and workers who formed the heart of a lower-class popular action. This is not the case in many parts of Europe.

The collapse of the Plug Plot riots brought to a temporary end both concerted economic or political protest in mainland Britain. Chartist leaders turned to the build-up of organisation and emphasised other ways forward such as land schemes or educational reform. The authorities contemplated ways in which, without granting the demands of the Chartists, reforms of some benefit to workers could be made, such as the Ten Hours Act. The Irish famine of 1845-6 demonstrated that desperate situations inhibit rather than promote mass political protest. However, it also changed the political framework by helping usher in the repeal of the Corn Laws and the break-up of the Conservative party. Arguably all these things weakened the kind of unified challenge workers could pose to the authorities. There would be no formidable mass movement to challenge authority in Britain in 1848, even if in 1842 Britain had demonstrated that popular politics were far better and more extensively organised than on the continent.

Confrontational tactics had failed in 1839-40 and in 1842. Mass arrests and imprisonment sapped the strength of the movement and the relative economic prosperity of the years between 1842 and 1848 helped to dampen the enthusiasm of the rank and file. The agreement between Lovett and O’Connor in late 1842 over the CSU proposals was short-lived. He had no intention of working with O’Connor and gradually he and others of like mind withdrew to pursue their objectives by non-confrontational agitation. O’Connor emerged firmly in control of the formal Chartist movement which he promptly led off in entirely new directions.

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[1] J. Bellamy and J. Saville (ed.) Dictionary of Labour History, volume vi, London, 1982, pages 216-223 is a useful biography.

[2] William Aitken (1814?-69) was a schoolmaster active in the militant ‘physical force’ centre of Ashton-under-Lyne. He spent most of 1840 in prison and, after the collapse of the strikes of 1842 emigrated briefly to America. He published verse and later became an uneasy supporter of the Liberal Party. He committed suicide during the writing of his autobiography. R.G. Hall and S. Roberts (eds.) William Aitken: The Writings of a Nineteenth century Working Man, Tameside, 1996 reprints his major works.