| Book Review | Law and History Review, 21.3

Book Review

Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. viii + 372. $60.00 (ISBN 0-8047-3451-8).

Ownership of arable land brings the farmer more than bucolic pleasures. The means to produce one's food supply yields autonomy along with the vegetables; it brings a measure of economic and political independence. The Diggers of the English Revolution had clearly understood this as they fought against enclosures of the common land and American Thomas Jefferson preached it in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, industrial workers organized to secure access to land. The British Chartist movement had been defeated and looked for a new strategy to win the franchise and to escape the nightmare of factory life. Simultaneously in New York, workers with the right to vote argued that the trend toward land monopolization by the wealthy was undermining the republican ideal as outlined by Jefferson. True political independence demanded economic independence from an industrialist employer. In both nations, it seemed, only freehold guaranteed freedom.

Bronstein's exhaustively researched book examines three organizations' attempts to win land for workers. The Chartist Land Company and the Potters Joint-Stock Emigration Society in Britain and the National Reformers of the United States all sought to counteract the miseries of industrial life by the purchase or granting of land. This thematic study looks at the philosophers and theorists, the backdrop of reform in a more general sense in the period, the experience of organizing and the responses of the powerful in the two nations and at the interconnectedness of the English-speaking Atlantic world.

Feargus O'Connor, the charismatic Chartist leader, had realized in 1843 that his movement was coming undone, having achieved none of its goals. Despite massive efforts, the British power structure had held firm against democratic change. It was time for a change in tactics. Using his paper, the Northern Star, and the organizational structure of the Chartists, O'Connor publicized a scheme whereby small allotments of two to four acres, including a cottage, would be made available by lottery to a selection of the participants who bought shares in the cooperative Land Company. Enormously popular, the company bought three estates in 1846 and parceled them out among the lottery winners of the almost 250 branches of the company. Immediately the government and the press perceived the democratic threat of any movement with O'Connor at the head and unleashed their power against it. The company had problems of its own, too: the business naivete of its directors and the farming inexperience of the allotees. But it was when Parliament turned its attention to shutting the company down that the project was doomed.

This is clearly demonstrated by the lack of attention paid to the Potters Society, which began in Staffordshire. Their aim was to buy land in Wisconsin, rather than England. That society foundered only upon its own innocence. The land purchased in Wisconsin was neither surveyed nor empty. Some was still occupied by Native Americans. And even for the rest, life on the United States frontier was hardly an idyllic retreat for the inexperienced farmer, and much less so for the farmer's wife.

On the other hand, the American efforts met with some success. The Homestead Act of 1862 was the direct result of the grass-roots organizing of the National Reform movement of the 1840s. Employing traditional rather than radical rhetoric that harked back to the Jeffersonian republic and a Christian revival morality, the constituency seemed less revolutionary than its counterpart in Britain. The goal of offering Western public lands, especially to deserving married men in their forties, became a major plank of the Republican Party by the 1850s.

One of Bronstein's most important contributions comes in the trans-Atlantic context in which she ties these movements together. "The American and British land-reform movements began communicating early and communicated often" (152). That they shared so much philosophically is all the more interesting given their differences: the British workers had no vote and no vast public domain. But even in America, industrialism widened the disparity in wealth, and as O'Connor pointed out to his readership, the American workers were "fast learning the secret of their deliverance; that it is to the LAND they look as Nature's resource, to which they must betake themselves as a refuge from man's oppression" (52). She emphasizes the hugely important role of the press in both countries, both the movement newspapers and the attitudes of the mainstream press. It was hostile in Britain, but Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune adopted the land reform movement and promoted it as part of a Manifest Destiny idea.

While the American movement is set to some extent against the backdrop of plantation slavery and the abolitionist movement (freehold meaning freedom, wage-earning often called wage-slavery in the land-reform rhetoric), Bronstein pays scant attention to the British equivalent. O'Connor was an Irishman, and the 1840s witnessed the Irish Famine when millions of starving Irish tenants died or emigrated to Britain and the United States. The helplessness of the tenant farmer—as opposed to the proprietor—could not have been lost on the cotton-factory workers of Lancashire.

Crucially, however, this book validates the dreams of nineteenth-century workers. Neither romantic nor backward looking, the land-reform movements of Chartists, Potters, and National Reformers alike sought independence. Class consciousness did not preclude farmers from politics, as the Populists were to highlight again later. "On both sides of the Atlantic, land reform was portrayed as an international movement of the industrious classes; Chartists and National Reformers had a responsibility to make land reform succeed, not just to benefit their own families or their own nations but because they were in the forefront of a movement which could benefit working people everywhere" (158).

Noeleen McIlvena

Duke University

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