36.1 KT2 - Chartism, c1838-c1850

The Enquiry Frame

Chartism grew out of a sharp political disappointment. The 1832 Reform Act had
redistributed seats and widened the electorate, but it mainly enfranchised
property-owning men. Working men who had supported reform could argue that the
new Parliament still represented property, not "the people". Chartism turned that
frustration into a national campaign for democratic reform.

For this topic, keep three linked questions in view:

Use the chronology as an argument:

Paper 3 depth topics can appear in source-value questions as well as essays. A source
on Chartism might be a petition, a Chartist newspaper article, a government report, a
hostile middle-class newspaper account, a trial document or an illustration of a mass
meeting. Always ask whose anxieties or hopes the source reveals: Chartist organisers,
working-class supporters, magistrates, MPs, police, soldiers, middle-class observers or
opponents of reform.

Aims and Methods

The People's Charter was drawn up in 1838 for the London Working Men's
Association, with William Lovett and Francis Place especially important in its
drafting. Its six points were not random reforms. Together they attacked the
foundations of an unreformed and partially reformed political system: restricted
voting, open voting, unequal constituencies, long parliaments, unpaid MPs and
property qualifications for MPs.

The six points mattered because they turned a mass protest movement into a
constitutional programme. Chartists did not merely complain about poverty, wages,
the New Poor Law or industrial distress. They argued that those grievances could not
be solved fairly while working men were excluded from Parliament.

Chartist actions were varied:

The most important tactical divide was between moral force and physical force.

The divide is easy to exaggerate because many Chartists shifted language
according to circumstances. Still, it mattered because it affected middle-class support,
government fear and the movement's unity.

William Lovett represented the moral-force tradition most clearly. He was a skilled
cabinet-maker, a self-educated radical and secretary of the London Working Men's
Association. His importance was that he helped give Chartism its programme and its
language of disciplined political improvement. He wanted working people to prove
their fitness for citizenship through education, organisation and rational argument.

Feargus O'Connor represented a different kind of leadership. An Irish radical, MP for
Cork earlier in his career, editor of the Northern Star and later MP for Nottingham,
he turned Chartism into a louder national movement. He could reach northern and
midland working-class audiences more effectively than London moral-force radicals.
His strength was mobilisation; his weakness was that his rhetoric and personal
dominance deepened distrust among moderates and rival leaders.

The First Wave, 1838-39

Chartism's first great wave developed quickly. In 1838, large meetings across the
country adopted the Charter. Support was especially strong where political exclusion
met industrial hardship: northern textile towns, parts of the Midlands, the Staffordshire
Potteries, South Wales, some Scottish towns, and London radical circles. The movement
was national in ambition, but its local bases were not identical. A South Wales ironworker,
a London artisan and a Lancashire handloom weaver might all support the Charter for
different immediate reasons.

The National Convention of 1839 was important because it tried to turn this
patchwork of local activism into national pressure. It met first in London in February
1839 and was often described as the General Convention of the Industrious Classes. Its
delegates helped coordinate the first national petition and debated what should happen
if Parliament refused. Some talked of a "sacred month", a general strike or national
holiday. Others feared that such language would alienate supporters and invite
repression.

The Convention's importance can be judged in three ways:

The first petition was presented to the House of Commons by Thomas Attwood on
14 June 1839. It had about 1.28 million signatures and was physically enormous. On
12 July 1839, Attwood's motion that the petition should be considered was defeated by
235 votes to 46. This rejection mattered because it showed that mass petitioning alone
did not compel Parliament. MPs could acknowledge that many people had signed and
still insist that universal manhood suffrage was too dangerous.

The rejection produced anger. In Birmingham, conflict around the Bull Ring and the use
of police hardened Chartist resentment. Lovett and John Collins were arrested after the
Convention issued a placard condemning police action; both were imprisoned for
seditious libel. Their imprisonment weakened moral-force leadership and became part
of the wider Chartist argument that the state defended property and authority more
readily than liberty.

The most serious consequence of the first wave was the Newport Rising of
4 November 1839. John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones led thousands
of men from the industrialised valleys of Monmouthshire towards Newport. At the
Westgate Hotel, where the authorities had gathered special constables and soldiers from
the 45th Regiment, a brief and bloody clash took place. Around 22 Chartists were killed
and more than 50 were injured. Frost, Williams and Jones were convicted of high treason;
their death sentences were commuted to transportation.

Newport was important, but be precise about why. It did not prove that all Chartists were
revolutionaries. Many Chartists were horrified by violence or saw Newport as a local
desperation rather than a national plan. But it gave opponents a powerful example of
what "physical force" might mean. It also exposed Chartism's weakness: if there had been
hopes of coordinated risings elsewhere, they did not materialise. The state could isolate,
defeat and punish a local armed challenge.

In exam terms, 1839 was both Chartism's breakthrough and its first failure. The movement
proved that democratic reform could mobilise more than a million petitioners, but it also
showed that Parliament would not surrender to numbers, and that violent pressure could
divide Chartists while strengthening government resolve.

Support and the Second Petition

Chartist support fluctuated because Chartism was a political movement fed by social and
economic conditions. It was strongest when people could connect political exclusion with
daily suffering: unemployment, wage cuts, hunger, insecurity, resentment of the New Poor
Law and anger at employers or local magistrates. It was weaker when trade improved, when
middle-class reformers feared disorder, or when local grievances did not fit easily into the
six-point programme.