Women in the Anti-Corn Law League, 1842
Members of the Anti-Corn Law League sought to repeal the protectionist laws that prohibited foreign grain from entering the British market. The laws were seen as an interference with trade that kept bread prices artificially high, benefiting British landowners and grain producers at the expense of the working population. The campaign to repeal the Corn Laws enlisted many middle-class women in its ranks, and some later campaigned for woman suffrage. This article, hostile to the reform, deplored women's participation in the reform movement.
E find that the council of the Manchester Anti-Corn Law Association had invited the inhabitants to "an antiCorn-law tea-party, to be held on the 20th of May, 1841—gentlemen's tickets, 2s.; ladies 1s. 6d." . . . [L]adies were advertised as stewardesses of this assembly. So now the names of about 300 Ladies were pompously advertised as the Patroness and Committee of the National Bazaar We exceedingly wonder and regret that the members of the Association. . . and still more that anybody else, should have chosen to exhibit their wives and daughters in the character of political agitators; and we most regret that so many ladies—modest, excellent, and amiable persons we have no doubt in their domestic circles— should have been persuaded to allow their names to be placarded on such occasions—for be it remembered, this Bazaar and these Tea-parties did not even pretend to be for any charitable object, but entirely for the purposes of political agitation. . . .
We have before us a letter from Mrs. Secretary Woolley to one body of workmen. . . . She "appeals to them to stand forth and denounce as unholy, unjust, and cruel all restrictions on the food of the people." She acquaints them that "the ladies are resolved to perform their arduous part in the attempt to destroy a monopoly which, for selfishness and its deadly effects, has no parallel in the history of the world." "We therefore," she adds, "ask you for contributions. . . . " Now surely. . . not only should the poorer classes have been exempt from such unreasonable solicitations, but whatever subscriptions might be obtainable from the wealthier orders should have been applied, not to political agitation throughout England, but to charitable relief at home.
Source: J. Croker, "Anti-Corn Law Legislation," Quarterly Review (December 1842), as cited in Patricia Hollis, ed., Women in Public: The Women's Movement 1850-1900 (London: 1979), p. 287.
Questions for Analysis
1. Why does the article highlight the participation of women in the AntiCorn Law Association? What does this argument tell us about attitudes toward women's political activity?
2. Does the article actually mention any of the arguments in favor of repealing the Corn Laws? What alternative to repeal does the article appear to support?
The Chartist William Lovett, a cabinetmaker, was a fervent believer in self-improvement and advocated a union of educated workers that could claim its fair share of the nation’s increasing industrial wealth. The Chartist Fear-gus O’Connor appealed to the more impoverished and desperate class of workers by attacking industrialization and the resettlement of the poor on agricultural allotments. Chartist James Bronterre O’Brien shocked the crowds by openly expressing his admiration for Robespierre and attacking “the big-bellied, little-brained, numbskull aristocracy.” Chartism had many faces, but the movement’s common goal was social justice through political democracy.
In spite of the Chartists’ efforts to present massive petitions to the Parliament in 1839 and 1842, the Parliament rejected them both times. Members of the movement resorted to strikes, trade union demonstrations, and attacks on factories and manufacturers who imposed low wages and long hours or who harassed unionists. The movement peaked in April 1848. Inspired by revolutions in continental Europe (see Chapter 21), the Chartists’ leaders planned a major demonstration in London. Twenty-five thousand workers carried to Parliament a petition with 6 million signatures. Confronted with the specter of class conflict, special constables and regular army units were marshaled by the aged Duke of Wellington to resist any threat to public order. In the end, only a small delegation presented the petition, and rain and an unwillingness to do battle with the constabulary put an end to the Chartist movement. A relieved liberal observer, Harriet Martineau, observed, “From that day it was a settled matter that England was safe from revolution.”
THE POLITICS OF SLAVERY AFTER 1815
These political conflicts within nations about citizenship, sovereignty, and equality were also linked to a transnational debate about slavery and its legitimacy, which was taking place at the same time. When the age of revolution opened in the 1770s, slavery was legal everywhere in the Atlantic world. By 1848, slavery remained legal only in the southern United States, Brazil, and Cuba. (It endured, too, in most of Africa and parts of India and the Islamic world.) Given the importance of slavery to the Atlantic economy, this was a remarkable shift. The debate about slavery was fundamental, because it challenged the defenders of citizenship rights to live up to the claims of universality that had been a central part of Enlightenment political thought. If “all men” were “created equal,” how could some be enslaved?
Slavery, Enlightenment, and Revolution
In fact, the revolutions of the eighteenth century by no means brought emancipation in their wake. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers had persuaded many Europeans that slavery contradicted natural law and natural freedom (see Chapter 17). As one historian trenchantly puts it, however, “Slavery became a metaphor for everything that was bad—except the institution of slavery itself.” Thus, Virginia planters who helped lead the American Revolution angrily refused to be “slaves” to the English king while at the same time defending plantation slavery. The planters’ success in throwing off the British king expanded their power and strengthened slavery.
Likewise, the French revolutionaries denounced the tyranny of a king who would “enslave” them but refused
To admit free people of color to the revolutionary assembly for fear of alienating the planters in the lucrative colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue. Only a slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue in 1791 forced the French revolutionaries, eventually, to contend with the contradictions of revolutionary policy. Napoleon’s failure to repress that rebellion allowed for the emergence of Haiti in 1804 (see Chapter 18). The Haitian Revolution sent shock waves through the Americas, alarming slave owners and offering hope to slaves and former slaves. In the words of a free black sailmaker in Philadelphia, the Haitian nation signaled that black people “could not always be detained in their present bondage.”
Yet the revolution in Haiti had other, contradictory consequences. The “loss” of slave-based sugar production in the former Saint-Domingue created an opportunity for its expansion elsewhere, in Brazil, where slavery expanded in the production of sugar, gold, and coffee, and in the American South. Slavery remained intact in the French, British, and Spanish colonial islands in the Caribbean, backed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
An abolitionist movement did emerge, in England. The country that ruled the seas was “the world’s leading purchaser and transporter of African slaves,” and the movement aimed to abolish that trade. From the 1780s on, pamphlets and books (the best known is The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1789) detailed the horrors of the slave ships to an increasingly sympathetic audience. Abolitionist leaders like William Wilberforce believed that the slave trade was immoral and hoped that banning it would improve conditions for the enslaved, though like most abolitionists Wilberforce did not want to foment revolt. In
1807, the reform movement compelled Parliament to pass a bill declaring the “African Slave Trade to be contrary to the principles of justice, humanity and sound policy” and prohibiting British ships from participating in it, effective
1808. The United States joined in the agreement; ten years later the Portuguese agreed to a limited ban on traffic north of the equator. More treaties followed, which slowed but did not stop the trade.
What roots did abolitionism tap? Some historians argue that slavery was becoming less profitable and that its decline made humanitarian concern easier to accept. Others argue that slavery was expanding: among other things, ships carried 2.5 million slaves to markets in the Americas in the four decades after the abolition of the slave trade.
FEAR OF SLAVE VIOLENCE. This cartoon, published in Britain in 1789 in opposition to the movement to end slavery, played on public fears of the consequences of abolition. The former slaves, dressed in the fashionable attire of the landed gentry, dine at their former master's table, and beat the master in retaliation for what they have suffered. In the background, other former slave owners are stooped in labor in the cane fields. By the logic of this cartoon, such a reversal was intolerable, and given the choice between "Abolition" and "Regulation" (the two heads at the bottom) the cartoonist chose "Regulation" as the wiser course.
Some historians believe economic factors undermined slavery. Adam Smith and his followers argued that free labor, like free trade, was more efficient. This was not necessarily the case, but such arguments still had an effect. Critics claimed slavery was wasteful as well as cruel. Economic calculations, however, did less to activate abolitionism than did a belief that the slave trade and slavery itself represented the arrogance and callousness of wealthy British traders, their planter allies, and the British elite in general. In a culture with high literacy and political traditions of activism, calls for “British liberty” mobilized many.
In England, and especially in the United States, religious revivals supplied much of the energy for the abolitionist movement. The hymn “Amazing Grace” was written by a former slave trader turned minister, John Newton, to describe his conversion experience and salvation. The moral and religious dimensions of the struggle made it acceptable for women, who would move from antislavery to the Anti-Corn Law League and, later, to woman suffrage. Finally, the issue spoke to laborers whose sometimes brutal working conditions and sharply limited political rights we have discussed in the previous chapters. To oppose slavery and to insist that labor should be dignified, honorable, and minimally free resonated broadly in the social classes accustomed to being treated as “servile.” The Issue, then, cut across material interests and class politics, and antislavery petitions were signed by millions in the 1820s and 1830s.
Slave rebellions and conspiracies to rebel also shook opinion, especially after the success of the Haitian Revolution (see Chapter 19). In 1800, slaves rebelled in Virginia; in 1811, there was an uprising in Louisiana; and in 1822, an alleged conspiracy took hold in South Carolina. The British colonies saw significant rebellions in the Barbados (1816); Deme-rara, just east of Venezuela (1823); and, most important, the monthlong insurrection in Jamaica (1831). All of these were ferociously repressed.
Slave rebellions had virtually no chance of succeeding and usually erupted only when some crack in the system opened up: divisions within the white elite or the (perceived) presence of a sympathetic outsider.
Still, these rebellions had important consequences. They increased slaveholders’ sense of vulnerability and isolation. They polarized debate. Outsiders (in England or New England) often recoiled at the brutality of repression. Slave owners responded to antislavery sentiment much as Russian serf owners had responded to their critics, by insisting that slavery was vital to their survival, that emancipation of inferior peoples would sow chaos, and that abolitionists were dangerously playing with fire.
In Great Britain, the force of abolitionism wore down the defense of slavery. In the aftermath of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, Great Britain emancipated 800,000 slaves in its colonies—effective in 1838, after four years of “apprenticeship.” In France, republicans took the strongest antislavery stance, and emancipation came to the French colonies when the revolution of 1848 brought republicans, however briefly, to power (see Chapter 21).
In Latin America, slavery’s fate was determined by demographics, economics, and the politics of breaking away from the Spanish and Portuguese empires. In most of mainland Spanish America (in other words, not Cuba or Brazil), slavery had been of secondary importance, owing to the relative ease of escape and the presence of other sources of labor. As the struggles for independence escalated, nationalist leaders recruited slaves and free people of color to fight against the Spanish, promising emancipation in return. Simon Bolivar’s 1817 campaign to liberate Venezuela was fought in part by slaves, ex-slaves, and 6,000 troops from Haiti. The new nations in Spanish America passed emancipation measures in stages but had eliminated slavery by the middle of the century.
Cuba was starkly different: with 40 percent of its population enslaved, the Spanish island colony had almost as many slaves as all of mainland Spanish America together. A Cuban independence movement would have detonated a slave revolution, a fact that provided a powerful incentive for Cuba to remain under the Spanish crown. Spain, for its part, needed the immensely profitable sugar industry and could not afford to alienate Cuban planters pushing for an end to slavery. Only a combination of slave rebellion in Cuba and liberal revolution in Spain brought abolition, beginning in the 1870s. Brazil too was 40 percent enslaved and, like Cuba, had a large population of free people of color. Unlike Cuba, Brazil won national independence, breaking away from Portugal with relative ease (1822). Like the American South, Brazil came through the revolution for independence with slavery not only intact but expanding, and slavery endured in Brazil until 1888.
Early nineteenth-century politics did not have parties as we know them today. But more clearly defined groups and competing doctrines, or ideologies, took shape during this time. An ideology may be defined as a coherent system of thought that claims to represent the workings and structure of the social order and its relationship to political powers and institutions. Ideologies consciously compete with other views of how the world is or should be, and their defenders seek to establish their views as dominant. The roots of conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism lay in earlier times, but ongoing political battles about the legacy of the French Revolution brought them to the fore. The Industrial Revolution (see Chapter 19) and the social changes that accompanied it proved a tremendous spur to political and social thought and led to the development of socialism as a political and social project. Would the advance of industry yield progress or misery? What were the “rights of man,” and who would enjoy them? Did equality necessarily go hand in hand with liberty? A brief survey of the political horizon will show how different groups formulated their responses to these questions and will dramatize how the ground had shifted since the eighteenth century.
TAKING SIDES: NEW IDEOLOGIES IN POLITICS
Debates about citizenship, sovereignty, and slavery made it clear that issues raised by the French Revolution were very much alive in Europe after 1815. The Congress of Vienna was able to place the Bourbon family back on the throne in France, but it could not make debates about popular sovereignty, national independence, or the authority of conservative dynastic regimes go away. Throughout Europe, political actors increasingly understood themselves to be facing a choice. If the debate about political change after the French Revolution was one between groups holding incompatible worldviews, then winning meant imposing your vision of the world on your opponents by any means necessary. Such assumptions naturally encouraged extremists on all sides of the debate. On the other hand, if disputing groups could come to some kind of mutual understanding about the goals of political association, then some compromise or middle way might be possible. It was within this context that modern political ideologies of conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and nationalism began to come into clearer focus.
At the Congress of Vienna and in the Restoration generally, the most important guiding concept was legitimacy. Legitimacy had broad appeal as a general antirevolutionary policy. It might be best understood as a code word for a new political order that the Congress sought to impose. Conservatives aimed to make legitimate—and thus to solidify— both the monarchy’s authority and the hierarchical social order undermined by the French Revolution. The most thoughtful conservatives of the period did not believe that the old order would survive completely intact or that time could be reversed, especially after the events of the 1820s made it clear that the Restoration would be challenged. They did believe, however, that the monarchy guaranteed political stability, that the nobility were the rightful leaders of the nation, and that both needed to play active and effective roles in public life. They insisted that, as a matter of strategy, the nobility and the crown shared a common interest, despite their disagreements in the past. Conservatives believed that change had to be slow, incremental, and managed so as to strengthen rather than weaken the structures of authority. Conserving the past and cultivating tradition would ensure an orderly future.
World History
