Do You Agree with the View That, in the Years 1838-48, Attempts to Enact the Charter Failed Because the Chartists Political Campaigns Were Undermined by Chartist Violence?

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Do You agree with the view that, in the years 1838-48, attempts to enact the Charter failed because the Chartists political campaigns were undermined by chartist violence? I agree with the view that violence in chartist political campaigns contributed the most to it's downfall. The government often put down chartist revolts and this created government repression towards Chartism which was a major factor in it's downfall. source 5 from an Autobiography of leading Chartist Journalist, Thomas Cooper written in 1872. In this speech he talks about the violence in Longton he says, "I warned all who had been part of it that they were not the friends, but the enemies of freedom. I told them that this strike for the Charter would bring ruin, if those who claimed to be its supports broke on law". From this source we can see that he believes the violence undermined the Chartist cause. He states that if the people involved in the violence admitted to being Chartists then they would essentially just been seen as a bunch of hooligans which is evidently not the image the Chartists were going for when they needed to be taken seriously amongst a cabinet completely full of middle to upper class Ministers. Thomas Cooper clearly believed that any violence would undermine the cause. However from this source we can clearly identify a key weakness of the Chartist movement. This is the fact that Thomas Cooper says that the violence that day was at Longton, Lancashire. This shows a key reason for the chartist downfall, that being its simple lack of National Unity and organisation. The uprising was only located in Longton, no where else in the country much like the Newport Riots before it. Without one major challenge to authority the chartists were basically hopeless. In terms of reliability, this source is a public speech designed at a specific audience, that being Strikers in

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