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Making the Millennium: the Mid-Nineteenth Century Peace Movement1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Alexander Tyrrell
Alexander Tyrrell
Affiliation:
La Trobe University
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Extract

On 22 August 1849 a privately sponsored peace congress opened in the Salle de Sainte Cécile in Paris. In the chair was Victor Hugo, assisted as vice presidents and secretaries by a team of men from Britain, the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Several of these men, such as Richard Cobden, were members of the legislatures of their respective countries: others were prominent clergymen and philanthropists. Seated before them were delegates from a slightly wider range of countries which in that blissfully Eurocentric era were deemed to represent the world. They had been brought together by an invitation sent by the London-based Peace Congress Committee to well-known individual sympathizers, peace societies, religious bodies, philanthropic and other civic groups. The business before them consisted of a series of propositions advocating international arbitration, general and simultaneous disarmament, a congress of nations, an international court, and various measures designed to facilitate international communication. This peace congress was the second in a series of four convened between 1848 and 1851 in Brussels, Paris, Frankfort and London to co-ordinate and develop various pressure-group activities which had gained momentum during the late 1840s in Britain and the United States.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 75 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

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26 The American experience was similar. ‘The campaigns for Sabbath reform, temperance, and anti-slavery were all part of the program to prepare the nation for the advent of the great millennial age.’ Marsden, G. M., The evangelical mind and the new school presbyterian experience (New Haven, U.S.A., 1970), p. 186.Google Scholar

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36 The London offices of the Anti-Slavery and Peace Societies were in the same street.

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38 Public Record Office, H.O. 45 OS/260, fos. 35, 67; H.O. 45/261, fos. 17, 39, 45, 47, 48; H.O. 65/10 Police Letter Book (Birmingham) 20 May and 23 May 1842. Sturge's part in this provoked The Times (23 May 1842) to denounce ‘an organized conspiracy amongst the Chartists, assisted by certain “Friends”, to prevent the enlistment of recruits’.

39 Minute book of the general committee of the London Peace Society (1847–52), 13 June 1849. Working-class support was courted with some success in the 1840s. At a Birmingham Town Hall meeting called in opposition to the government militia scheme ‘the great gallery and floor were crowded chiefly by working-men.’ Pilot (24 January 1846). Henry Vincent introduced 15 Paris workmen to the 1851 peace congress (Reports of the peace congresses, London report, p. 55). The lib-lab alliance is described in Harrison, Brian and Hollis, Patricia, ‘Chartism, liberalism and the life of Robert Lowery’, English Historical Review, lxxxii (1967), 503–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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45 Herald of Peace (09 1846), pp. 139–41Google Scholar; Friend (1 10 1852), pp. 193–6Google Scholar, and (1 November 1852), pp. 212–14. Burritt also agitated for an ocean penny post. The antienlistment campaign continued. For example, a tract entitled Military flogging was circulated, which contained an engraving over the accuracy of which ‘great pains’ were taken. Herald of Peace (01 1845), p. 219Google Scholar; (July 1847), pp. 317–18. According to the latter report this helped to rout the recruiting parties sent to Rochdale.

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52 The 1853 addresses from Edinburgh and Glasgow, for example, were signed by the lord provosts, magistrates and councillors. Friend (1 10 1852), pp. 193–6Google Scholar. Indian corn-meal recipes from an ‘Olive Leaf’ were printed in the New Monthly Belle Assemblée (09 1846), pp. 188–99.Google Scholar

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56 Dymond attached ‘peculiar importance’ to ‘the prophecies of the Old Testament respecting the arrival of a period of universal peace’. This would be effected, he insisted, ‘by Christianity, by the influence of its present Principles’. Dymond, Jonathan, Essays on the principles of morality, and on the private and political rights and obligations of mankind (London, 1830), pp. 436, 466.Google Scholar

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83 British Museum, Cobden papers, Add. MSS 43657, fos. 209–11, Richard Cobden to Henry Richard, 20 August 1853. See also British Museum Cobden papers, Add. MSS 43659, fos. 3–4, Richard Cobden to Henry Richard, 8 January 1858.

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85 The Peace Society's financial predicament was described in these terms in Herald of Peace (02 1861), p. 2.Google Scholar

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