Justice Huddleston, the judge who presided over the original trial of the cabin boy case last week, had a long career spanning the greater part of the 19th century. Before he was a judge, Huddleston worked as a barrister and in 1848 he defended a man named William Cuffey. Cuffey was born aboard a ship in the West Indies in 1788, and his family went on to settle in Chatham in Kent, where William Cuffey trained as a tailor. He was of mixed heritage, his father being a formerly-enslaved man from the Caribbean, and his paternal grandfather having been kidnapped from Africa. In the mid 1830s, Cuffey became politically radicalised when he lost his job and eventually moved up within the ranks of the Chartist Movement to become president of the London Chartists.
Chartism was the first truly working-class movement for political change that the country had seen. The 1832 Reform Act had extended voting rights, but still only gave political franchise to about 14% of the male population (women, of course, still had a fair while to wait to get any voting rights at all). For many working-class men, the voting reform was not good enough and the rest of the 1830s saw increased activism around the issue of suffrage. In 1838, the People's Charter was drafted, which demanded among other things, the right to vote for all men over the age of 21 who were of sound mind and not in prison, as well as payment of MPs to allow ordinary men to stand for election and still support themselves and their families. Those who stood behind the Charter became known as Chartists and if you would like a tea towel of the Charter, you may buy one here.
Between 1839 and 1848, three petitions were presented to Parliament and each one was rejected. The final petition, in 1848, is said to have contained six million signatures and it is true that support for Chartism was sometimes very strong, though it generally peaked at times of economic hardship. The authorities were suspicious of Chartism, not least because they did not want to share power. They were also concerned that the Chartists were bent on causing complete social breakdown and, ultimately, revolution. In 1848, Cuffey and other Chartist leaders began meeting at a pub in Red Lion Square called the Orange Tree. According to witnesses who would later testify against Cuffey and others, the men were gathering weapons and intended armed conflict with the police and, potentially, the army. On 18th August, Cuffey was arrested and in the September he stood trial at the Old Bailey, along with two others. The charge against the men was that they
"feloniously did compass, imagine, devise, and intend, to levy war against the Queen, in order by force and constraint to compel her to change her councils, and that they did evidence that compassing, &c., by divers overt acts set forth in the indictment: -2nd Count, for the like compassing, with intent to depose the Queen from the style, honour, and dignity of the Imperial Crown"
Treason! The trial transcript can be found here, once again at the amazing Old Bailey Online, but it is very long so I have not included it. Cuffey pleaded not guilty and even attempted to argue that he ought to be tried by a jury of his own peers - in other words, working-class men. At the end of the trial, at aged 60, William Cuffey was found guilty and sentenced to transportation for life. He endured the horrendous journey to Australia and eventually landed in Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land) at the end of 1849. He was pardoned in 1856, but chose not to return to England, instead continuing his political activism in his new homeland. He died there at the age of 72.
While the Chartist movement ultimately failed in its objectives (further electoral reform would eventually come in the 1860s), the fear that their activism had engendered in the ruling classes remained. William Cuffey, meanwhile, was a biracial man who fought for the rights of working class people and he should be better remembered. He was described by one newspaper in 1850 as
"Loved by his own order, who knew him and appreciated his virtues, ridiculed and denounced by a press that knew him not, and had no sympathy with his class, and banished by a government that feared him [...] Cradled in the vast Atlantic, he became by birth a citizen of the world, a character of the world"
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