Chartist thinking on slavery and abolition

I want to draw attention, a bit belatedly, to Tom Scriven’s excellent article on ‘Slavery and Abolition in Chartist Thought and Culture, 1838–1850’ for The Historical Journal.

This is the first comprehensive account of Chartist attitudes towards slavery and abolition, and certainly many early Chartists do not come out of it at all well. Influenced by the thinking of US president Andrew Jackson’s supporters, some adopted the view that wage labour was more exploitative than chattel slavery’, while alongside this there was a racist reaction to West Indian emancipation more extreme than has previously been acknowledged.

By 1842, however, various changes within the Chartist movement helped bring to the fore more consistently anti-slavery and even anti-racist sentiment within Chartist culture, as did growing exposure to American abolitionism, especially that of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. For this, the editor of the Northern Star, George Julian Harney, and the black Chartist William Cuffay take a great deal of credit.

The development of the anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology by American labour radicals also profoundly influenced the late Chartist position on slavery by inserting abolition into Chartist aspirations for land reform. Consequently, a core component of late Chartism was its own anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology, which informed pro-Union working-class agitation during the later American Civil War.

The full text of Dr Scriven’s article is available on open access. Download it in PDF.

Spy story: what a police informant claimed to have overheard in a Drury Lane pub on 10 April 1848

It is not every day that you find an account in the official record of an ancestor threatening to crush soldiers opposing a Chartist monster meeting “like toads” – even if, as seems likely, the evidence was a fiction concocted by a paid police spy.

So I am immensely grateful to Dave Steele, who came across a document in the National Archives making precisely this accusation and kindly sent me a copy.

The document, filed with similar reports on Chartists in Home Office records (TNA HO45/2410/531-532), claims to recount “A conversation between two Chartists which was overheard in a public house near Drury Lane Theatre on the evening of Monday April 10”. If it actually happened, the two speakers, named as Mr Stokes and Mr Anderson, had spent that Monday at the Kennington Common rally before the 1848 Chartist petition was taken to Parliament and were reflecting on the day's events.

Talking Chartism: the video is here

I recently spent a very enjoyable hour and a half chatting about all things Chartism with professional genealogist Natalie at Genealogy Stories. You can watch the first hour of our conversation below.

This was a completely unscripted and unplanned talk (at least on my part), so please excuse the ums and ahhs, and any stories I launched into before getting sidetracked.

In part two, which you can access through Natalie's website, we talked a little about what happened to Chartism after 1848, and rather more about some interesting Chartists, including William Cuffay and Susanna Inge.

On the whole, I am really pleased with how it came out - although there are so many things I didn't get round to talking about, and of course if I'd prepared an answer to every question I might well have looked at alternative interpretations of some events. 

Natalie herself did a great job, and was very easy to talk to. Do check out Genealogy Stories where she has a growing collection of interviews along with some other great family history resources.

In the Tasmanian footsteps of William Cuffay

William Cuffay

The following blog post was written after a visit to Hobart in March 2020.

Twenty-first century Hobart is a magnet for cruise ships. Tourists have only to step ashore to enjoy the vibrant outdoor market at Salamanca Place, while the historic convict sites and natural wonders of Tasmania attract vast numbers of visitors.

But 170 years ago, when Tasmania was still Van Diemen’s Land, the deep natural harbour that now makes it possible for ocean liners to dock was equally attractive to those operating a rather different type of passenger shipping.

Brief lives of the Chartist Land Company subscribers

In his third blog post about a U3A project to extract information on Londoners and women from the Chartist Land Company share registers, Peter Cox looks in more detail at some of the individual subscribers found in the records.

Previous posts in this series
Transcribing the Chartist Land Company registers.
Analysing the Chartist Land Company registers.

With a wealth of online sources now available for the family historian, and plenty of experience, we embarked with some optimism on the attempt to track down individuals. They proved much more elusive than we expected, even limiting the search to the one in ten or so with less usual names.

William Cuffay's poetic gift from the Chartists

By October 1849, the London Chartist William Cuffay was already on board the convict ship the Adelaide, heading for Australia, where he would spend the rest of his life.

Cuffay had been arrested in the wake of the Orange Tree conspiracy of August 1848, found guilty at the Central Criminal Court of “treason felony” and sentenced to 14 years in exile. In fact, he would never return to England. But his comrades in the Chartist movement did not forget him.

William Cuffay - the life and times of a Chartist leader

There can be few working men who died in the Victorian workhouse, thousands of miles from the country of their birth, yet who merited newspaper obituaries. One such was William Cuffay, the descendent of slaves, working tailor, Chartist orator and victim of repressive laws which saw him imprisoned and transported at the age of 60 half way round the world.

More than 20 years passed between Cuffay’s arrest and incarceration in the wake of the Orange Tree conspiracy of 1848, in which he was implicated, and his death in Tasmania. But even in his 80s he had been politically active, and his obituary in the local press recorded the “Death of a Chartist celebrity”. The news was even picked up and reported in the provincial press back in England.

Blue Plaque for Chartist William Cuffay

William Cuffay, among the most iconic figures in Chartism, is to get a one of London’s famous commemorative Blue Plaques.

The plaque will be placed on 409 Strand, on the site of his former central London home; and former TGWU union general secretary Lord Bill Morris has agreed to do the unveiling, which should take place, all being well, some time in the autumn of 2012.

The campaign to get the plaque has been masterminded by author and academic Martin Hoyles, whose book on Cuffay should be out soon. Here is an interview with Hoyles back in 2008, when he was still in the early stages of the project.

I am indebted to Professor Malcolm Chase for news of this event, which first appeared in his email-based Chartism Newsletter. To get on the circulation list, Google Malcolm Chase in the School of History at Leeds University and drop him an email (I’m not publishing his email address here to spare him the inevitable spamming).

On the subject of Cuffay (whose name also appears as Cuffey and Cuffy in contemporary sources), I also came across this excellent William Cuffay website.

Cuffay was  black London radical who was arrested in 1848 and transported to Australia when police foiled the Orange Tree plot to seize the centre of the capital and spark a general revolution.