Feargus Edward O'Connor (18 July 1796 – 30 August 1855) was an Irish Chartist leader, MP and advocate of the Land Plan, which sought to provide smallholdings for the labouring classes. A highly charismatic figure, O'Connor was admired for his energy and oratory, but was criticised for alleged egotism. His newspaper Northern Star (1837–1852) was widely read among workers (and read aloud in taverns), becoming the voice of the Chartist movement.James Epstein, "Feargus O’Connor and the Northern Star", International Review of Social History 21 (1976)
After the failure of his Land Plan, O'Connor's behaviour became increasingly erratic, culminating in an assault on three MPs and a mental breakdown, from which he did not recover. After his death three years later at the age of 59, 40,000 people witnessed the funeral procession.
Early life Feargus O'Connor was born on 18 July 1796 in Connorville house, near Castletown-Kinneigh in west County Cork, into a prominent Irish Protestant family. He was originally christened Edward Bowen O'Connor, but his father chose to call him Feargus.The United Irishmen : Their Lives and Times, p.611. His father was Irish nationalist politician Roger O'Connor, who like his uncle Arthur O'Connor was active in the United Irishmen. His elder brother Francis became a general in Simón Bolívar's army of liberation in South America. Much of his early life was spent on his family's estates in Ireland, which included Dangan Castle, the childhood home of the Duke of Wellington.G.D.H. Cole, Chartist Portraits (London, 1941), p. 308 He was educated mainly at Portarlington Grammar School and had some elementary schooling in England.Thomas Frost, Forty Years of Recollection (London, 1880)
O'Connor's father Roger was notorious for his eccentric lifestyle. At one point Feargus and Francis decided to leave, stealing horses from their brother Roderic, travelling to London and asking to be taken in by family friend M.P. Francis Burdett. Burdett looked after them, and financed Feargus to run a farm in Ireland, but it was unsuccessful. He studied law at Trinity College, Dublin, before inheriting his uncle's estate in 1820. He took no degree, but was called to the Irish bar about 1820. Since he had to take an oath of allegiance to the crown to become a member of the Bar, his father disinherited him because he regarded it as inconsistent with the dignity of a descendant of the Kings of Ireland.
Political career O'Connor's first known public speech was made in 1822 at Enniskeen, County Cork, denouncing landlords and the Protestant clergy. During that year he composed a pamphlet State of Ireland. Around this time he was wounded in a fight with soldiers, perhaps as a member of the Whiteboys covert agrarian organisation. Going to London to escape arrest, he tried to make a living by writing. He produced five manuscripts at this time, but none were ever published.
In 1831 O'Connor agitated for the Reform Bill in County Cork, and, after its passage in 1832, he travelled about the county organising registration of the new electorate. During the 1830s he emerged as an advocate for Irish rights and democratic political reform, and a critic of the British Whig government's policies on Ireland. In 1832, he was elected to the British House of Commons as Member of Parliament for County Cork, as a Repeal candidate rather than a Whig.
Feargus O'Connor came into Parliament as a follower of Daniel O'Connell, and his speeches during this time were devoted mainly to the Irish question. He was sarcastically described by Fraser's Magazine as active, bustling, violent, a ready speaker, and the model of an Irish patriot,Fraser's Magazine, Vol. 37, 1848, p. 173. but as one who did nothing, suggested nothing, and found fault with everything. He voted with the radicals: for tax on property; for Thomas Attwood's motion for an inquiry into the conditions that prevailed in England; and in support of Lord Ashley's 1847 Factory Bill. He quarrelled with O'Connell, repudiating him for his practice of yielding to the Whigs,F. Rosenblatt, The Chartist Movement (New York, 1916), p.105. and came out in favour of a more aggressive Repeal policy.
In the general election of 1835 O'Connor was re-elected, but disqualified from being seated because he lacked sufficient property to qualify. However, it appears that he did have property valued at £300 a year.Cork Southern Reporter, 4 June 1835. O'Connor next planned to raise a volunteer brigade for Isabella II of Spain in the First Carlist War, but when William Cobbett died in April 1835, he decided to run for Cobbett's seat at Oldham. Oldham was a two-member constituency and Cobbett's colleague John Fielden strongly advocated that Cobbett's son John Morgan Cobbett should be the Radical candidate to replace his father. O'Connor presented himself as an alternative Radical candidate, but eventually withdrew, alleging Fielden had not been straightforward with him: whether because of the controversy over the selection of the candidate or the refusal of J M Cobbett to support disestablishment, Cobbett lost narrowly to a local 'Liberal Conservative'.
In the 1837 general election he was nominated at Preston, but with no intention of taking votes from John Crawfurd, the only other anti-Tory candidate. Having been nominated and made his hustings speech, he withdrew once he and Crawfurd had won the show of hands traditionally called for before any polling took place
Radicalism and Chartism
From 1833 O'Connor had spoken to working men's organisations and agitated in factory areas for the "Five Cardinal Points of Radicalism," which were five of the six points later embodied in the People's Charter.The six points of the Charter In 1837 he founded at Leeds, Yorkshire, a radical newspaper, the Northern Star, and worked with others for a radical Chartism through the London Democratic Association. O'Connor was the Leeds representative of the London Working Men's Association (LWMA). He travelled Britain speaking at meetings, and was one of the most popular Chartist orators; some Chartists named their children after him.See Chartist website List of children's names. He was at various points arrested, tried and imprisoned for his views, receiving an 18-month sentence in 1840. He also became involved in internal struggles within the movement.
When the first wave of Chartism ebbed, O'Connor founded the Chartist Cooperative Land Company in 1845. It aimed to buy agricultural estates and subdivide the land into smallholdings which could be let to individuals. The impossibility of all subscribers acquiring one of the plots meant it was considered a lottery, and the company was declared illegal in 1851.Hansard, 30 May 1851
When Chartism again gained momentum O'Connor was elected in 1847 MP for Nottingham, and he organised the Chartist meeting on Kennington Common, London, in 1848. This meeting on 10 April proved a turning point: it was supposed to be followed by a procession. When the procession was ruled illegal, O'Connor asked the crowd to disperse, a decision contested by other radicals such as William Cuffay.
Chartist Movement
As early as 1833, while MP for Cork, O'Connor had delivered an address to the National Union of the Working Classes, a political society of London working men, expressing radical sentiments.Poor Man's Guardian, 1833, p.91. However O'Connor truly came into his own not when addressing audiences of London artisans or in the House of Commons, but when he went north as a public speaker.
He began to spend a large part of his time travelling through the north of England, addressing huge meetings, in which he denounced the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and advocated manhood suffrage. Only by securing the vote, O'Connor argued, could working people be rid of the hated New Poor Law.Cole, p. 304.
O'Connor was a public speaker. He expressed defiance, determination and hope, and flavoured these speeches with comic similes and anecdotes.Mark Hovell, The Chartist Movement (London, 1918), p. 94. He looked the part of a popular leader, too. His physique was to his advantage: over six feet, muscular and massive, the "model of a Phoenician Hercules".Frazer's, p. 175.
The voice of the organization was O'Connor's newspaper, the Northern Star, which first appeared on 18 November 1837 in Leeds. It met with immediate success and was soon the most widely bought provincial newspaper in Britain. Its editor was William Hill, a former Swedenborgian minister; Joshua Hobson was its publisher; and Bronterre O'Brien, former editor of the Poor Man's Guardian, became the principal leader-writer. Perhaps the most popular part of the paper was Feargus' weekly front page letter, often read aloud at meetings; but the inclusion of reports of Chartist meetings from around the country and of readers' poetry were also vital sections of a paper made it a very important instrument in unifying and promoting the Chartist cause.
When the London Working Men's Association published the People's Charter in 1838, O'Connor and the Star endorsed it but not the London leadership. O'Connor was not ready to accept the political leadership of the London Working Men's Association. He knew that the workers wanted something more immediate than political education. He became the "constant travelling, dominant leader of the movement"Place, p. 135. He, not William Lovett, became the voice of Chartism.
Physical Force vs. Moral Force From the beginning O'Connor was attacked by Lovett and other leaders of the London Working Men's Association. They did not like his assertive leadership or the confrontational style of politics he represented. O'Connor, who had seen at first hand the embittered relations between workers and capitalists in the north of England, did not like the strategy of reasonable argument advocated by men like Lovett. He considered the situation was too urgent for that. O'Connor was not an insurrectionist but, like O’Connell in Ireland, he was not adverse to intimidating the authorities by a show of numbers. This was his thinking behind the organisation of monster meetings and mass petitions. On the question of moral force vs physical force, he chose his words carefully:
I have always been a man of peace. I have always denounced the man who strove to tamper with an oppressed people by any appeal to physical force. I have always said that moral force was the degree of deliberation in each man's mind which told him when submission was a duty or resistance not a crime; and that a true application of moral force would effect every change, but in case it should fail, physical force would come to its aid like an electric shock — and no man could prevent it; but that he who advised or attempted to marshal it would be the first to desert it at the moment of danger. God forbid that I should wish to see my country plunged into horrors of physical revolution. I wish her to win her liberties by peaceful means.
When the Chartist petition with 1,283,000 signatures was rejected by Parliament in summer 1839, tension grew, culminating in the Newport Rising. O'Connor was not involved in the planning of this event, though he must have known that there was a mood for rebellion among Chartists. He was a dangerous man to the authorities, and a sentence of 18 months in York Castle was passed on him in May 1840. In his farewell message, he made clear what he had done for the movement:
Before we part, let us commune fairly together. See how I met you, what I found you, how I part from you, and what I leave you. I found you a weak and unconnected party, having to grace the triumphs of the Whigs. I found you weak as the mountain heather bending before the gentle breeze. I am leaving you strong as the oak that stands the raging storms. I found you knowing your country but on the map. I leave you with its position engraven upon your hearts.