With workers concentrated into new factories and
industrial centers, it became easier to organize and riot. By
the 1820s, the political exclusion of the new manufacturers
and manufacturing centers was becoming untenable. On
August 16, 1819, a meeting to protest the political system
and the policies of the government was planned to be held
in St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester. The organizer was
Joseph Johnson, a local brush manufacturer and one of the
founders of the radical newspaper the Manchester
Observer . Other organizers included John Knight, a cotton
manufacturer and reformer, and John Thacker Saxton,
editor of the Manchester Observer . Sixty thousand
protestors gathered, many holding banners such as “No
Corn Laws,” “Universal Suffrage,” and “Vote by Ballot”
(meaning voting should take place secretly, not openly, as it
did in 1819). The authorities were very nervous about the
meeting, and a force of six hundred cavalry of the Fifteenth
Hussars had been assembled. As the speeches began, a
local magistrate decided to issue a warrant for the arrest of
the speakers. As police tried to enforce the warrant, they
met with the opposition of the crowd, and fighting broke out.
At this point the Hussars charged the crowd. Within a few
chaotic minutes, eleven people were dead and probably six
hundred wounded. The Manchester Observer called it the
Peterloo Massacre.
But given the changes that had already taken place in
economic and political institutions, long-run repression was
not a solution in England. The Peterloo Massacre would
remain an isolated incident. Following the riot, the political
institutions in England gave way to the pressure, and the
destabilizing threat of much wider social unrest, particularly
after the 1830 revolution in France against Charles X, who
had tried to restore the absolutism destroyed by the French
Revolution of 1789. In 1832 the government passed the
First Reform Act. It enfranchised Birmingham, Leeds,
Manchester, and Sheffield, and broadened the base of
voting so that manufacturers could be represented in
Parliament. The consequent shift in political power moved
policy in the direction favored by these newly represented
interests; in 1846 they managed to get the hated Corn
Laws repealed, demonstrating again that creative
destruction meant a redistribution not just of income, but