CHAPTER FIVE

SAMUEL FIELDEN: FORLORN CHARTIST AT HAYMARKET

Samuel Fielden, generally called “Sam,” and sometimes “Red Sam,” was born in 1847 in in England, on the rather than the Yorkshire side of the county line, which used to be determined by the River Calder, which then bisected the town (S. Fielden [1887] 1969, 131). The Local Government Act of 1888 allocated the entire municipality to Yorkshire, and under the quite extensive reorganization of 1972, Tod­ morden became part of the new metropolitan county of West Yorkshire. Today, under a more decentralized system of local authority with no county-wide level of government, the town is situated within the metro­ politan borough of Calderdale. Sam Fielden’s father was Abraham (or Abram) Fielden (1816–1886), an active devotee of , the radical political movement that emerged in the 1830s and lobbied for parliamentary and electoral reform, including extension of the vote to all sane, non-incarcerated men over 21. The name “Chartism” derives from the six-point Charter or People’s Charter, formal­ ized in 1837, that summarized their political demands (Rothstein 1929, 8, 41). Boston (1971, 96–97) says that Samuel Fielden was the “son of Abraham Fielden … who was principal spokesman” for the Todmorden Chartists. In his autobiography, Sam himself writes of his father that the latter was a follower of the Irish-born Chartist leader and member of parliament (M. P.), Feargus O’Connor (1794–1855), who edited the influential Chartist paper, the Northern Star, which campaigned for implementation of the Charter’s principles in the British Isles. Sam says that his father worked for the Ten Hour movement, a campaign to limit the number of hours employ­ ees could be obliged to work, along with his employer, the - owner John Fielden (1784–1849), who was also an M. P., and was the one who finally steered through the Ten Hour law, a man who is well-known to social historians (S. Fielden [1887] 1969, 132; D. Thompson 1986, 51)1. John Fielden wrote The Curse of the Factory System (J. Fielden [1836] 1969),

1 Harrison (1988, 1003) is surely incorrect when he writes that “[John] Fielden has been little known outside his native Todmorden.”

PG3298 PG3298 104 chapter five a work that documents the disgraceful abuse of children in English facto­ ries, which is still a valuable sourcebook. Sam had three brothers and three sisters. His father was employed as a foreman at the cotton mill, which was very large; his mother, Alice Jackson Fielden, died when he was ten. Starting at the age of eight, he worked in the cotton mill for thirteen years, and for a while, was a lay preacher and Sunday school teacher for his Methodist congregation (Avrich 1984, 100; S. Fielden [1887] 1969, 131–132, 134, 137; McLean 1888, 80, 254). Although Samuel and Abraham Fielden had the same last name as John Fielden and his family, and they lived in the same town, there is no evi­ dence of any family connection. The only researcher to discuss the possi­ bility of a tie between the two families is Weaver who, in his biography of John Fielden, M. P., writes: Abram Fielden (a distant relation?), whose son Samuel was to achieve prominence in the United States as one of the anarchists implicated in con­ nection with the Haymarket Riots, was one of the foremen at Waterside. (Weaver 1987, 29) Nonetheless, one of the purposes of this chapter is to make the argument that themes from Chartist and other revolutionary influences to which Samuel Fielden was exposed in his youth in England are highly visible in his later words and actions in the United States, where he would be sen­ tenced to death (and then pardoned) for his putative role in the Haymarket Tragedy (an event which has already been discussed to some extent in Chapter Two in connection with Voltairine de Cleyre and in Chapter Three when describing the life of Lucy Parsons, whose husband was hanged for his alleged participation in the Haymarket killings). Even if Samuel and John Fielden were not biologically related, their intellectual thought is often akin, and Sam Fielden’s radical and hardscrabble upbring­ ing in England appears to have influenced his activities as one of the Chicago anarchists. As with earlier chapters in this book, including those concerning the ideas of Benjamin Tucker and Lucy Parsons, there is here a potential dif­ ficulty with sources. In the case of Tucker, a researcher is bound to rely on material he wrote for his periodical, Liberty. With Lucy Parsons, many items have been destroyed, and there is the fact that she was less than honest concerning some aspects of her life. Although there is a myriad of data concerning the Haymarket Tragedy, Chartism, Feargus O’Connor, and John Fielden, a budding issue with Samuel Fielden, who did not write political books or articles, is the limited number of sources specifically

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