The Quiet Before, page 5
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O’CONNOR HAD MANICALLY traveled the country making the case for signing. In the year before the petition was presented to Parliament, he gave 147 major speeches and spent 123 days on the road. Britain in the 1830s, even with its lengthening rail lines and proliferating national newspapers, was still a vast collection of atomized regions—culturally, economically, even linguistically isolated from one another. The man himself became an attraction—“brawny muscular figure, the big round shoulders, the red curly tresses overhanging the collar of his coat, the cajoling smirk, the insinuating manner, and the fluent tongue,” as one of his fellow agitators described him. He was a born orator with natural charisma, scion of a family of wealthy Protestant landowners from County Cork, gentlemen radicals like his father and uncle who had suffered prison and forced exile for their embrace of Irish independence. O’Connor had trained as a lawyer and won a surprise election to the House of Commons in 1832, running on a platform of representing the unrepresented. But his tenure didn’t last long. He had to leave his seat three years later when those in Parliament opposed to his radicalism successfully ousted him, claiming he didn’t own the minimum amount of property to qualify as a member. Once out of Parliament, he took to the road promoting universal suffrage and other radical causes.
The push to organize a national petition was first proposed by a group of artisans and craftsmen in London, led by William Lovett, a cabinetmaker who was as coolheaded and cerebral as O’Connor was fiery and impulsive. At a mass meeting in February 1837 at the Crown and Anchor pub, Lovett presented a list of demands that, if met, would wrench away the entitled classes’ monopoly on political power. In addition to universal male suffrage, they wanted to abolish the requirement that members of Parliament own property, to offer salaries for those who were elected, and to allow citizens to vote privately for their representatives. But the artisans of London were an elite among the working classes, and London too scattered a community—with four hundred different trades—to lead the cause. For this petition to live up to its ambition, it had to draw on the anger that pulsed most incessantly in the industrial north.
This is what Feargus O’Connor intuited. And he threw himself into promoting what became known as the People’s Charter. He owned it, so much so that Lovett right away resented him, writing to O’Connor, “You carry your fame about with you on all occasions to sink all other topics in the shade—you are the great ‘I AM’ of politics, the great personification of Radicalism.”
If O’Connor saw himself as “a sort of uncrowned king of the working classes,” as one early historian of the movement put it, it was also because he was able to channel their frustrations. He knew their recent embittered history. Seven years before the petition, in 1832, Parliament had indeed passed a law to widen the franchise, but the promise of change raised hopes, only to quash them (“so generally popular a measure, so soon creating disgust,” wrote O’Connor). The Reform Bill that passed still put heavy limitations on who was entitled to vote, keeping privilege in the hands of property owners and the landed class. In a nation of 13 million, the bill increased the electorate from around 400,000 to 653,000—still only one in six men. In Ireland the gulf was even more dramatic. Out of 7.8 million, only 90,000 could vote.
And this newly reformed Parliament, controlled by the ostensibly liberal Whig Party, continued to be blind to the realities of working people. In 1834, a new Poor Law created workhouses for the unemployed—humiliating institutions that shaved the heads of those who entered them, forcibly separated families, and then paid the lowest possible wages for manual labor. Some preferred starving to death. Trade unions came under attack, and some were branded illegal. In an infamous case, six farmworkers from Dorset were sent off to an Australian penal colony simply for swearing an oath to their local agricultural society. Any effort to lighten the lives of workers never made it past Parliament’s doors. A campaign to limit the workday to ten hours equally went nowhere.
Industrialization, meanwhile, continued apace. More and more weavers found themselves displaced by mechanized looms. The bonds of family and community unraveled as women and children, in demand as cheap labor, went to work in the textile mills. In his study of Manchester from this period, Friedrich Engels, who would eventually become Karl Marx’s collaborator, said he felt he was witnessing a slow form of “murder.” Living conditions were abysmal. People were crammed together, “as many as a dozen workers into a single room, so that at night the air becomes so foul that they are nearly suffocated.” They spent their days in damp, poorly ventilated dwellings that were themselves surrounded by piles of decaying animal carcasses and rotting vegetables. “They are goaded like wild beasts and never have a chance of enjoying a quiet life,” Engels wrote. Even slaves and serfs seemed better off, he concluded. And in 1837 things got even worse when a transatlantic depression raised the price of grain and other basic goods. Increasingly, this working class had less and less to lose.
The cause grew through the late summer and into the fall of 1838, punctuated by massive gatherings. One in August in Birmingham drew 200,000 people. O’Connor was always the featured speaker and was dressed like a gentleman—dark waistcoat, cravat, and wide-brimmed top hat—but his words were aimed, as he once said, at those with “fustian jackets, blistered hands and unshorn chins.” They came in droves. One meeting, in September, took over Kersal Moor, a green expanse just outside Manchester long ago trodden to a dusty brown by the weekly horse races. “By twelve o’clock,” one newspaper reported, “one half of the ground was occupied, and the immense multitude even at that time presented a truly awful appearance.” Vendors sold jellied eel and pea soup, baked potatoes and sheep’s trotters. There were coffee carts and men clinking mugs of ginger beer and hot wine while the city was a silhouette in the distance—cylindrical smokestacks, puffing exhaust and poking up into the sky like organ pipes, feeding a thick black hovering cloud.
Sometimes the violence seemed only barely restrained in those last months of 1838. There were nighttime torchlit marches for men and women whose only free time was after the workday. An observer from Northampton captured a scene from one of these processions as it made its way through the city’s streets, banners held aloft, “making the heavens echo with the loud thunder of their cheers.” What he saw left an extraordinary impression: “The uncouth appearance of thousands of artisans who had not time from leaving the factory to go home and…whose faces were therefore begrimed with sweat and dirt, added to the strange aspect of the scene. The processions were frequently of immense length, sometimes containing as many as fifty thousand people; and along the whole line there blazed a stream of light, illuminating the lofty sky, like the reflection from a large city in a general conflagration.” Soon, the sound of pistol shots could be heard as well.
As much as it excited him, O’Connor feared these bursts of emotion, worried that they could easily transform into recklessness and self-destruction. This all had to build to something. If not, where would this energy go? In December, Parliament outlawed what the local broadsheets had taken to calling “monster” demonstrations. O’Connor pleaded that now was the time to focus their anger and not let it dissipate into shouting. The goal was to add as many names as possible to the petition. The mass gatherings swept people up with such a feeling of strength that many failed to see the point of a plodding petition campaign. But O’Connor argued that this collective act was radically new and that it was their final gamble. “It is the last, the very last,” he told one audience after another. “To silence them, give it to them: let every man, woman and child sign the Petition; disarm all your enemies at once. If it can be done by a dash of the pen, it is worth the experiment.”
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THE ANGER THAT was feeding the movement had been intensifying for a while. But it was disgruntlement without any organizing principle. In 1838 there were more than six hundred associations that had developed in response to the disappointing Reform Bill or had more recently been set up in support of the Charter. O’Connor himself had been seeding many of these groups in his years out of Parliament, like the Great Northern Union that he had helped establish—a collection of radical groups clustered around the manufacturing centers of Birmingham and Manchester. It was only now, though, that their cause became united enough to merit a name: Chartism.
In his memoirs, John Bates, who had been a Chartist in his youth, remembered the jolt that the petition provided: “There were associations all over the country, but there was a great lack of cohesion….The radicals were without unity of aim and method, and there was but little hope of accomplishing anything. When, however, the People’s Charter was drawn up…clearly defining the urgent demands of the working classes, we felt we had a real bond of union; and so transformed our Radical Associations into local Chartist centres.”
For O’Connor, the petition was more than just a performance of grievance, a rock to throw against the windows of an aloof and disconnected Parliament. Rather, he saw its real value in the actual, physical work of gathering the signatures—the need to go door-to-door, to convince others, to mark in ink one’s allegiance to a cause. This would bind the disparate parts of the working class together, would allow them to see themselves as a distinct class. He tried to explain this at a Dewsbury meeting in April 1838, saying that what was important—what the People’s Charter would help achieve—was “a union based on such principles as would not only enable Radicals to think alike, but also to know that they did think alike. Nothing was so necessary as that they should know how each other thought and with that knowledge they might almost attain any object upon which they set their wishes.” The petition would allow them to recognize each other as bearers of the same burden, a community of the excluded.
But it did not have an easy start. In the spring of 1839, Chartist delegates from every corner of the United Kingdom converged on London to create a representative body, a national convention tasked with collecting and delivering the finished petition. And they right away encountered an unexpected problem. The numbers of signatures weren’t quite adding up, nothing close to the hundreds of thousands they had hoped for. It certainly didn’t reflect the enormous crowds who joined the demonstrations. The problem was in part logistical. There were only so many hours in a day to reach workers who toiled in factories from dawn to past dusk. In some cases, it was the National Rent, a small donation meant to support the convention, that proved prohibitive. But there was a mental barrier as well. This kind of proactive, aggressive push for full political rights was new and nothing like the local petitions people were familiar with. “Such is the enslaved state of the county of Gloucester that the people dare not sign a Petition,” one Chartist wrote after trying to gather names from the Forest of Dean. Even in a county like Warwickshire, a center of radical activism, fewer than six thousand names had been collected from a population of seventy-seven thousand. “I am quite unequal to the task,” the dejected local organizer wrote. “We can no longer call it a ‘National Petition.’ The assumption on which we proceeded has proved false.”
O’Connor was deployed by the convention to persuade the reluctant, and it was while on these trips in the spring of 1839 that he saw with his own eyes the purpose the petition served, what it could do for working people despite its current difficulties. It was a medium with almost zero cost. “Wherever there is a halfpenny sheet of paper, a pen and a few drops of ink, there are the materials for a petition,” wrote one Chartist. But the act of picking up these materials inspired solidarity—among those who worked with rulers to draw up the sheets by hand, went door-to-door to canvass, snuck onto factory floors, or set up tables in busy marketplaces. When a Chartist activist had to argue his case, he was reinforcing his own beliefs, talking himself into deeper commitment while convincing others. And for the deliberating worker who finally signed, this was a pledge taken, a contract entered into, an act more official and solemn than almost any other in these impoverished people’s lives. The petition arrived at a moment when a largely oral culture was becoming more literate. The petition lay at this intersection. Half the job was to convince neighbors and friends and fellow citizens with words; the other half was to get them to sign their names. It was through signing that they felt consecrated in the cause.
According to Malcolm Chase, the scholar of Chartism, gathering signatures was an “educational process central to building political awareness.” In much the same way that Peiresc’s letters opened up new channels of conversation and thinking for his correspondents, the petition was a knock on the door, but it also did something else: as quickly as it brought new ideas and feelings to the surface, it also provided a unitary outlet, a way for all this talk to have a point. In his autobiography, William Lovett, the London cabinetmaker who had first dreamed up the petition, described it as “the most efficient means of creating, guiding, and ascertaining public opinion.” The more they engaged in it, the more signatures they gathered, the more they identified themselves as a class with imagined rights. To put your name on a petition was, in a sense, to vote—the only kind of voting the working class was allowed. “Petitions parade Chartism in open day,” observed O’Connor, “and bring us under the eye of the heretofore blind.”
Communities constituted themselves around this activity. It gave them form and purpose. In a town like Kidderminster, not far from Birmingham, when local workers heard of the petition, they established what they called a “provisional committee” to organize a “preliminary meeting of the Working Classes.” There they read the petition aloud and then held another meeting to formally adopt it, the group of these 150 initial petition signers now calling themselves the Kidderminster Working Men’s Association. Each member pledged to collect even more signatures. Over the next eight weeks they managed to gather twenty-five hundred.
A whole culture spun out from this central, intimate act carried out one person at a time. When the Charter was in trouble for lack of names, yet more associations and canvassing groups formed. Because the Chartists conceived of this petition as expressing the will of “the people” writ large, it also made room for children and women, who were previously excluded from political activity of this sort. Earlier, smaller-scale petitions had explicitly barred women. What was happening now was an unprecedented shift. “Wherever I have been, I have got women to sign it,” one activist told a Midlands crowd. “They are more interested than the men.” And they did more than sign. They started their own committees and pulled in their friends and neighbors, even though any new electoral reforms were bound to apply to men alone. Of the 1.2 million names that would eventually be collected, 200,000 were estimated to be from working women.
Newly formed Chartist newspapers reported on this massive effort, with no publication more important than O’Connor’s own Northern Star. Started in 1837 and run out of an office in Leeds, it had within a year become the most read newspaper in Britain, surpassing The Times, with a weekly circulation that hit fifty thousand. Besides elevating O’Connor, who wrote a regular column filled with Irish jokes and poetry and whose profile appeared in the fifth issue in a steel engraving meant for cutting out and hanging in Chartist homes, the paper reported in detail the goings-on in every Chartist enclave, listing tallies of collected signatures, setting targets, and creating a sense of momentum.
By the spring of 1839, the convention in London started sounding more positive reports. In Glasgow, twenty thousand signatures were collected in four days. And in the town of Hayle in Cornwall, Chartist representatives found people waiting in line until ten at night to sign. “There is now more of a political feeling in this country than ever existed, perhaps, in any nation in the world,” declared one editorial in a radical newspaper. “It would seem that every man has become a politician.”
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THE LAUGHTER IN PARLIAMENT was followed, unsurprisingly, by rejection. On July 12, a month after the petition was presented in all its bulk, a vote was called over whether the petition should be considered. The debate over this question lasted only a few hours and, with the exception of speeches from a handful of passionate radical members, was largely dismissive. Dejected Chartists stood in the gallery watching as an overwhelming majority voted against even discussing the petition, 235 to 46.
And then came the crackdown. “As the object of the Chartists was to knock us on the head and rob us of our property,” an influential Whig cabinet member, Lord Broughton, recalled telling the prime minister around this time, “we might as well arrive at that catastrophe after a struggle as without it; we could only fail and we might succeed.” Arms and soldiers began flowing across the country. A shipment from the Royal Armouries arrived, for example, in the small Lancashire town of Leigh, with 150 swords, 300 long sea pistols, 300 flintlock pistols, and 6,000 rounds of ammunition.
Even in those summer weeks after the petition was wheeled into Parliament but before it had been voted on, there were signs of where things were headed. On July 4, a few hundred Chartists milled around the Bull Ring, a square at the center of Birmingham, dominated by a bronze statue of Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, one hand resting on a giant anchor and the other tucked into his vest. There were banners and flags, including a skull and crossbones. And then, suddenly, there was chaos. Sixty officers with the London Metropolitan Police, wielding truncheons and led by the mayor on horseback, had been dispatched by the Home Office and empowered to arrest any Chartist caught addressing a crowd. For half an hour, until a local military unit, the Fourth Dragoon, arrived and took control, the Chartists threw rocks and were beaten bloody. Three police officers were stabbed. And by the end of the night, eighty Chartists had been arrested, forced to empty their pockets of stones, and marched to jail.
