The AWL Basic Education Programme

Second edition.

Issued 1997

HTML version issued 1998


When British workers had a mass revolutionary movement: the Chartists

The stronghold of Chartism, as of Trade Unionism, lay in the industrial North, but its origin was among the thoughtful, Radical artisans of London... The London Working-men's Association was formed in June 1836... It was Radical and Owenite in outlook... In February [1837] the Association drew up a petition to Parliament in which were embodied the six demands that afterwards became known as the People s Charter. They were:

These demands, which for [LWMA leader] Lovett and his friends were ends in themselves, were accepted with enthusiasm by hundreds of thousands of industrial workers who saw in them the means to remove their intolerable economic grievances. Engels declared that the Six Points were "sufficient to overthrow the whole English Constitution, Queen and Lords included". "Chartism," he wrote, "is of an essentially social nature, a class movement. The "Six Points which for the Radical bourgeoisie are the end of the matter... are for the proletariat a mere means to further ends. "Political power our means, social happiness our end, is now the clearly formulated war-cry of the Chartists."

In the spring of 1837 the Six Points were drafted into the form of a Parliamentary Bill, and it was this draft Bill which became the actual Charter of history. It was endorsed at gigantic meetings all over the country: 200,000 assembled at Glasgow, 80,000 at Newcastle, 250,000 at Leeds, 300,000 at Manchester. At all these meetings the Charter received emphatic approval and the tactics by which it was proposed to secure its acceptance soon took shape. These were, a campaign of great demonstrations, a mass petition to Parliament1, a national Convention... and, if the petition were rejected, a political general strike or "sacred month .

As the movement spread beyond London its character changed and sharp divisions arose among its leaders... The right wing was composed of Lovett and his London followers and those of Attwood, a Radical banker from Birmingham. They represented the more or less prosperous artisans and petty producers of their respective areas and were mainly concerned with the purely political aspects of the Chartist agitation. As the conflict between the Chartists and the ruling classes grew keener they fell back more and more on methods of education and peaceful persuasion.

Then there was a vast centre, grouped round the dynamic figure of Feargus O'Connor. From the beginning O'Connor had the support of the great majority of the industrial workers, the miners and the ruined and starving hand workers of the North... But... his conception of the better life was that of the independent producer. O'Connor was an Irishman, nephew of one of the leaders of the Rebellion of 1798, nurtured on the Irish revolutionary traditions... He was a strong opponent of Socialism and though he talked freely of insurrection he had no clear idea as to how it was to be carried out or what its objects should be. Much less definite than the right or centre was the left wing among the Chartists. Very often it did not stand out clearly, being usually driven to support O'Connor against the right wing. Its leaders, Bronterre O'Brien in the early stages and later George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones, never had anything like O'Connor's popularity. They differed from him mainly by their much clearer conception of the class struggle and by their Socialism... Both Harney and Jones held many views in common with Marx, with whom they were closely associated when the latter came to live in England after 1848.

The confusion and weaknesses of Chartism are apparent. Its strength was that while in Europe the working classes were still dragging at the tail of the industrial bourgeoisie, in England the workers were able by 1838 to appear as an independent force and were already realising that the industrial bourgeoisie were their principal enemy. Even in France this point was not reached till ten years later and then only among the workers of Paris and a few of the largest towns.

Elections for the first Chartist Convention took place in October 1838. During the winter the collection of signatures for the Petition was begun, and in February the Convention met in London, where the right wing was disproportionately represented. When Harney raised the question of what should be done in case the Petition were rejected the majority refused to allow this possibility to be discussed. The proceedings dragged on for some months, marked by repeated quarrels between right and left wing groups, while up and down the country some preparations for an armed rising appear to have been made. In July the Government struck. Meetings were forbidden, many arrests were made, and on July 4th a body of police, specially imported from London, attacked a meeting at the Bull Ring, Birmingham, with exceptional brutality. The workers rallied and drove the police out of the Bull Ring and it was not until some days later than order was restored in the town. The news of the Birmingham outrage spread rapidly and there were bloody clashes in Glasgow, Newcastle, Sunderland and a number of Lancashire towns.

On July 5th Lovett was arrested. On July 12th the Petition, which had 1,280,000 signatures2 was rejected. The Convention was now faced with the alternatives of admitting defeat or coming to a definite decision for action. A half-hearted attempt was made to call a general strike, but when it was found that there was no organisation for making the decision effective, the strike appeals were withdrawn. The Convention dissolved on September 14th.

More arrests followed quickly and a decline began that was only made more rapid by the rising in South Wales... Some thousands of partly-armed miners led by John Frost marched down on Newport through torrents of rain on the night of Sunday, November 3rd, 1839. Other contingents which should have joined them failed to arrive, and when the drenched and weary column reached Newport they were fired on by troops concealed in the Westgate Hotel. Ten were killed and about fifty wounded. The rest dispersed and Frost and the other leaders were arrested and sentenced to death, the sentence being afterwards commuted to one of transportation.

This gave the Government the opportunity they wanted. In a few months about 450 arrests were made, the victims including O'Connor, O'Brien and almost all the outstanding figures. During the first half of 1840 the movement was forced underground and appeared to have been beheaded and destroyed. As the leaders one by one came out of gaol a slow revival began. In this revival the formation of the National Chartist Association in July was the most important event. At this time any national party was illegal, and the movement had consisted of only local organisations with no real central leadership or co-ordinating force. The NCA, in spite of its illegality, was thus the first real political party in the modern sense, a party with an elected executive, dues-paying membership and about 400 local sections. By 1842 it had a membership of 40,000 and through it the movement as a whole reached its highest point of influence and activity... The NCA went far to remove one of the main weaknesses of Chartism, and efforts were now made to overcome another, the isolation of the Chartists from the Trade Unions, by building up Chartist groups inside them. This attempt was only partially successful.

O'Connor was released in August 1841, and preparations were made for a second Petition. This was a very different document from the first, the language of which had been respectful and its demands purely political. The second bluntly contrasted the luxury of the rich with the poverty of the masses and included demands for higher wages, shorter hours and factory legislation. The Chartist paper The Northern Star reached a circulation of 50,000 and the movement received a valuable political education in its struggle against the Anti-Corn Law League.

The economic crisis, which had eased somewhat after the bad year of 1838, suddenly intensified, bringing unemployment to hundreds of thousands and general wage reductions to the working population. Chartism spread like wildfire and the second Petition was signed by no fewer than 3,315,000 - well over half the adult male population of Great Britain. Nevertheless it was scornfully rejected by Parliament in May, 1842. Once more the crucial question of the next step arose. The Association was just as hesitant as the Convention had been, but the decision was taken out of their hands by the spontaneous action of the workers.

Strikes against wage reductions broke out all over Lancashire... In August... the strike... spread swiftly all over Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the Midlands. London and the South, however, failed to respond. Troops were sent into the strike areas and by September a combination of repression and hunger had forced the strikers back to work. There were over 1,500 arrests, and by the end of the year the movement had once again dwindled to small proportions. A revival of trade between 1843 and 1846 came to the rescue of the authorities.

As Chartism declined, O'Connor, who was now without a serious rival, turned his energies to grandiose and crack-brained schemes for the establishment of a chain of land colonies. Thousands of workers and small tradesmen took shares with which two estates were bought and divided among selected colonists, chosen apparently for their political convictions than for their skill as farmers. It was hoped to buy further estates from the profits of the first and so continue to extend the scheme indefinitely. Economically the idea was absurd and doomed to failure from the start, and it took up energy that might have been better spent, but on the other hand it served to hold the movement together at a low level till the crisis of 1846, accompanied by the great famine in Ireland, brought Chartism into its third period of activity. The first sign of this revival was the election of O'Connor as MP for Nottingham in 1847.

On the surface this revival had all the vitality of the agitations of 1839 and 1842. There were the same demonstrations, the same enthusiasm and the same terrible background of misery and starvation. But in reality there was a profound difference. The employed had not fully recovered from the defeat of 1842 and had meanwhile been pacified by the passing of the Ten Hour Day Act. The movement was therefore confined mainly to the unemployed. In Glasgow there were severe bread riots in April 1848 and many people were killed and wounded. The Government made the most ostentatious military preparations and raised a large number of special constables from the upper and middle classes...

When the Convention met it had to discuss the certainty that the Petition would be rejected. The younger leaders, Jones and Reynolds, pressed for an immediate resurrection. The older hands, including O'Connor and O'Brien, who had more means for comparing the situation with that of previous years, judged, and judged rightly, that an insurrection would not receive sufficient support to have any chance of success. Not even the stimulus of the revolutions taking place all over Europe could bring the movement back to anything like the levels previously reached.

The Petition, when presented, was found to have only 1,975,000 signatures against the five million O'Connor had claimed, and of these many were fraudulent. The great meeting which was to have accompanied the presentation of the Petition on April 10th was dwarfed by the forces which the Government had called out to deal with a "revolution" they knew would not take place. Some 30,000 people assembled at Kennington Green and O'Connor decided to abandon his plans for a march to Westminster.

Hereafter the story is one of unbroken decline. O'Connor's Land Company became insolvent and had to be wound up, and in 1852 he became insane. After 1853 the Association's death was formally recognised by a decision to discontinue the election of an Executive Committee.

In 1848, though few people were probably aware of it, Britain was just on the verge of a long spell of trade expansion and prosperity, and even if little of this prosperity reached the workers there was still improvement enough to turn them from thoughts of revolution. Politically, the next twenty years are almost a blank in the history of the working class.

  1. Political petitions were a long-recognised method of agitation. They had been employed freely by the Wilkesites and on a much larger scale against the Corn Laws in 1815. Back to text

  2. The total number of electors at this time was only 839,000.Back to text

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