THE COMPLETE SUFFRAGE UNION of 1842 by PETER C. BAILEY M.A
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THE COMPLETE SUFFRAGE UNION OF 1842 by PETER C. BAILEY M.A., OXFORD UNIVERSITY, 1966 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF 'MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of HISTORY We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard. THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA September, 1967 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and Study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by h.i;s representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Vancouver 8, Canada ABSTRACT The Complete Suffrage Union of 1842 was a brief and unsuccessful attempt to combine the middle and working classes behind a solid, well-ordered agitation for the classic programme of Parliamentary reform, at a time when economic distress was sharpening reform demands in Britain and class relations had turned sour in the penumbra of the Great Reform Bill. What were the circumstances which favoured the new movement? Firstly, the existing popular reform move• ments were temporarily spent; the Chartist leadership was badly fragmented and the lessons of its 1839 agitation discouraging, the Anti-Corn Law League had lost momentum after the 1841 election and Richard Cobden was searching for some 'new move' to ginger up his flagging organisation Secondly, the C.S.U. was led by the Birmingham Quaker, Joseph Sturge, who seemed to combine the necessary organisational ability, derived from his experience with the anti-slavery movement, with complete freedom from the stigma of class partiality. Thirdly, the C.S.U. was conceived in Birmingham, a city well known for its reform record and harmony between the classes, thus an ideal base for the national projection of such a movement. iii Given such initial advantages, why did the Complete Suffrage movement fail? It failed because it never won an effective following in its Birmingham base, as the League did in Manchester. The political thermometer in Birmingham rose and fell with economic fortunes and its citizens thought of political reform as a means to some such economic palliative as, for example, currency reform. Sturge offered no attractive economic nostrum to follow on from suffrage reform, only a sort of moral catharsis. As the moral conscience of the city he won dutiful plaudits from all and the particular affection of the shopocracy, but such pleasing breezes of approval hardly constituted a wind of change. Sturge had only a contingent relationship with the vital centres of business leadership in the city and was at best a reluctant agitator of the people at large. The old harmony and dynamic of the Birmingham reform front had been severely mauled by the disturbances of 1839 and the C.S.U. failed to attract the full reform energies of the middle class, who were regrouping between the campaign for municipal incorporation and their later battle against the Corn Laws. Neither could it attract those of the working class who shared Feargus O'Connor's misgivings that it harbored a selfish bourgeois plot. iv Sturge himself was an ineffective leader and the very probity which constituted a major propaganda appeal for the C.S.U. cut short the use of those tactics necessary to survival, let alone success, in contemporary politics. At the Nottingham bye-election of August, 1842, Sturge refused to sanction the normal electioneering skulduggery which would have brought the Union victory. In Birmingham and in the country as a whole, the C.S.U. failed to shut out hostile representatives to its major national conference in December, 1842. Finally the movement fell victim to the class discords it sought to allay, a defeat prefigured in the previous conference in April, and made obvious in December after the explosion of the Plug Plots, which heightened bourgeois fears of working class insurrection and confirmed the workers in their belief that the middle class sought to use them as a catspaw. The Complete Suffrage movement collapsed because it failed to establish an effective grip on its home territory; it would not use the tactics which the tough political milieu demanded; and it proved unable to survive the corrosive mutual suspicion between the classes. These defects were compounded by inadequate leadership. V The C.S.U.'s failure seems incontestable but there is also a modest and significant success to be salvaged from its history. Its raison d'etre meant the occupation of a marginal position which brought it under heavy attack from both classes, but in Birmingham at least the C.S.U. contrived to restore valuable contact between the middle and working classes. The first chapter examines the industrial and political complexion of Birmingham in the 1830s, and the convulsions of 1838 and T39 which severely damaged the traditional harmony of the classes in the city. Chapter II introduces Joseph Sturge and considers his early moves to repair this damage in the context of both local and national reform politics. The third chapter examines the Complete Suffrage Union in action in the national conference held in Birmingham in April, 1842, and in Sturge's candidacy at the Nottingham bye-election in August of that year. It also looks at the composition and organisation of the Union's membership. The final chapter deals with the last conference of the movement, again in Birmingham, in December 1842, examining its failure in the light of the serious disturbances in the previous summer months and their effects on the climate of opinion. vi There is much good secondary material on this particular period in British history. This material was made available through the facilities of the Library of the University of British Columbia, and the Inter-Library Loans service. Some newspaper files were available on microfilm through the same services but the bulk of research on original sources was done in England in the summer of 1966. Private papers were disappointing but the British Museum Newspaper Collection proved invaluable, together with the pamphlet and newspaper materials in the Birmingham Reference Library. vii Table of Contents The Breakdown of the Birmingham Reform Front; Traditional Harmonies Suspended Sturge and Reconciliation; a Promising Alternative to Chartism and the League 53 The Complete Suffrage Union in Action; a National Conference and an Electoral Apprenticeship 93 The Testing of the Alliance; the Final Birmingham Conference and the Collapse of the Union 142 Conclusions 185 Bibliography 199 Appendix 211 1 CHAPTER 1 THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BIRMINGHAM REFORM FRONT; TRADITIONAL HARMONIES SUSPENDED In the fierce fight for the Great Reform Bill of 1832 the greatest single force in the popular agitation for the measure was undoubtedly that of the Birmingham Political Union. Sustained by the solid unity of interests of both the middle and working classes within the city, the Union also recruited from the many elements of discontent in its industrial hinterland of the West Midlands."'" The famous Union meetings on Newhall Hill were impressive parades of strength and Thomas Attwood, as leader of the Birming• ham reformers, could well make play with the threat of a citizen army of some twenty thousand men, sprung 2 up overnight from the determined Midlanders. Attwood delighted in rehearsing his battalions and he relished the exhilarating receptions he received as a popular champion, but his volatile politicking would always stop short of revolution. The leaders of the Birming• ham Political Union had the ear of the Grey cabinet and there was about their posturings an air of calculated intimidation rather than unyielding Jacobin 3 resolve. The Union's motto was Peace, Law and Order 2 and under this rubric, Attwood and his lieutenants were concerned with containing the turbulent discontent among the lower orders' thus Attwood's achievement in 1832 was as much one of discipline as of mobilization 4 in the field of popular agitation. During the crisis John Stuart Mill spoke of the Birmingham leaders as, ... acting under the most intense consciousness of moral responsibility; (they were) very careful neither to do nor say anything without the most care• ful deliberation. We are indebted for the preservation of tranquillity to the organization of the people in political unions.5 Among other telling tributes Lord Durham maintained that, "The country owed Reform to Birmingham, and its salvation from revolution." The success of the B.P.U. rested upon the remarkable identity of interests which existed between the masters and men in this great expanding manufacturing city. This harmony sustained the reform endeavours of Attwood in the 1830s, of John Bright in the fight for the second Reform Bill in the 1860s and of Joseph Chamberlain in his campaigns, first for municipal reform and then for Protection, -in—the -last—quarter—of—t-he—century. The foundations of this Birmingham reform front proved enduring but since the dynamic of reform was always discontent so was there a combustible element in the 3 popular forces of reform within Birmingham which could not always be contained by the traditional leadership of the middle class. Attwood recognized the brawling forces among his followers. They were, he said, "a most unruly flock." In the late 1830s came the aggravation of economic distress and the spread of a more desperate popular agitation which would in part push home its threats of an e*meute in the face of governmental and middle class intransigence. The auto• nomy as well as the unity of the Birmingham reform front was to be temporarily broken and historians have noted that by 1839 "a new spirit of internal tension 7 had come into Birmingham politics." In examining this hiatus we can see at work those forces of disruption which helped to kill the Complete Suffrage Union, a movement whose avowed mission it was to meet with and check such forces.