Birmingham “unity” conference 1842

Throughout 1842, after the rejection by Parliament of the second People’s Charter petition, moves were made to try to unite the middle class reformers of Joseph Sturge’s Council of the Complete Suffrage Union and the more working class National Charter Association in a single body.

In April of that year a conference organised in Birmingham made considerable headway in bringing the two organisations together around a common programme. Despite the doubts of some CSU delegates about the value of annual Parliaments, the ballot and the payment of MPs, substantial agreement was reached on all substantive questions of aims and policy – until the question of the name of the new organisation arose.

In his The Decline of the Chartist Movement, first published in 1916, Preston William Slosson writes: “[William] Lovett and the other Chartists insisted that, having adopted all the points of the Charter, the conference should adopt the name as well; the Complete Suffragists wished some other name to be chosen, regarding the old term as too much associated with the physical-force methods of the past. The delegates could reach no agreement upon the point, and wisely determined to let the question remain unsettled until December. Some practical rules and methods of action were provisionally agreed upon, the conference adjourned, and the Chartists for the first and last time entered upon a campaign with considerable middle-class support.”

A second conference to try to determine a common programme was called to take place in the saloon of the Mechanics Institution, New Hall Street, Birmingham from 27 to 30 December 1842. Weeks of jockeying for position now ensued, with each faction trying to send the most delegates (and with the Chartists trying to ensure that their supporters were sent as delegates of the Complete Suffrage Union’s branches so that the costs would not fall on their supporters).

Things did not start well. T.Beggs, a Nottingham delegate, presented a series of resolutions, supporting the six points of the Charter, asking that the conference support “such means only for obtaining the legislative recognition of them as are of a strictly just, peaceful, legal and constitutional character” and – the principal sticking point – take as the basis for discussion a Bill of Rights prepared by the council of the Complete Suffrage Union.

Slosson reports: “The two measures were substantially identical, as both parties to the conference admitted, but there was an absolute deadlock over the term ‘Chartist’. Lovett, as leader of the Chartist faction at the conference, proposed in the interests of harmony that both bills be withdrawn or both be considered clause by clause. But all attempts at conciliation failed, and Lovett’s original motion carried by the decisive majority of 193 to 94.”

When it became clear that the Charter had the support of the majority of delegates, Joseph Sturge resigned from the chair and withdrew from the conference with many of his supporters to continue their discussions at Wilkins’s Temperance Coffee House. Further splits followed as the conference went on, and by its end the 300 to 400 delegates present at its opening had fallen to just 37.

From this date on Feargus O’Connor was to be the undisputed leader of the Chartist movement (as well as the proprietor of its main newspaper, the Northern Star).

The names below are those listed in the Northern Star of 14 January 1843 as having been delegates at the conference. The table also records their votes on two key questions before the conference. Broadly, those supporting the amendment were Chartists, and those supporting the motion were complete suffragists.

Delegates to the “second Sturge conference”, Birmingham 1842