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Augustus Hardin Beaumont: Anglo-American Radical (1798–1838)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

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Augustus Hardin Beaumont is known as a secondary figure of English radicalism during the 1830s. He came to England from Jamaica in the spring of 1835 and by the end of January 1838 he was dead. He was briefly associated with the London Working Men's Association in its early stages and then went to the Northeast where he founded the Northern Liberator. Historians of Chartism have noted him in passing and they have recognized his almost frenzied militancy in support of democratic reform. Most agree with Francis Place's judgment that “his eccentricities sometimes bordered upon insanity”, but beyond that they tell us little more about him.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1969

References

page 237 note 1 Francis Place Manuscript Collection, British Museum, London, Additional Manuscripts 27819, f. 32. Place Collection cited hereafter by Add. Mss. number.

page 238 note 1 Northern Liberator, April 21, 28, and May 5, 1838. In part the details of these articles can be corroborated from testimony by Beaumont to SirGrey's, Georgeselect committee on Negro apprenticeship in 1836 (Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1836, XV, pp. 224–79).Google Scholar

page 238 note 2 Foster, Joseph, Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886 (London, 18871888), I, p. 83.Google Scholar

page 238 note 3 Letter from the Keeper of Manuscripts, Edinburgh University Library, January 16, 1969. Edmund appears later to have become a tailor and a printer. He has been discovered in a directory listing for 1830–33 as “Beaumont & Holt, tailors, clothiers, outfitters”, and in 1831 he declared a printing press at St Michael's Alley, Cornhill. Augustus Beaumont witnessed the declaration. (I am indebted to Professor William B. Todd, Department of English, The University of Texas at Austin for this information.) Several of the later pamphlets of Arthur and Augustus Beaumont carried a printer's mark which read “Edmund Beaumont, Printer, St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill”.

page 239 note 1 Northern Liberator, April 21, 1838.

page 240 note 1 Compensation to Slave Owners Fairly Considered in an Appeal to the Common Sense of the People of England, 4th ed. (London, 1826), p. 5.Google Scholar

page 240 note 2 The Consolidated Slave Law Passed the 22d December 1826 …, 2nd ed. (Kingston, Jamaica, 1827).Google Scholar

page 241 note 1 Slave Law of Jamaica with Proceedings and Documents Relative Thereto (London, 1828), pp. ix–x.Google Scholar

page 241 note 2 Curtin, Philip D., Two Jamaicas: the Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 5758;Google ScholarBurn, William Laurence, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (London, 1937), pp. 9495.Google Scholar

page 242 note 1 Northern Liberator, April 28, 1838.

page 242 note 2 Adventures of Two Americans in the Siege of Paris, September 1830 (London, 1830), p. 3.Google Scholar The precise authorship of this pamphlet is not clear since the title page says only “by one of them”.

page 242 note 3 The Jamaica Petition for Representation in the British House of Commons or Independence (London, 1831).Google Scholar For the Jamaican Assembly subsidy of the pamphlet, see Curtin, p. 63, n. 4.

page 243 note 1 Mathieson, William Law, British. Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823–1838 (London, 1926), p. 208.Google Scholar

page 243 note 2 Ibid., p. 214; Northern Liberator, April 28, 1838.

page 243 note 3 Northern Liberator, April 28, 1838.

page 244 note 1 Beaumont lost this prosecution, which involved contempt for the colonial Assembly, on appeal to the Privy Council in London. The Privy Council decided against Beaumont without costs and upheld the Assembly in punishing a contempt by publication of a libel (Burn, p. 190, n. 3).

page 244 note 2 Northern Liberator, October 27, November 25, 1837.

page 244 note 3 (Paris, 1831).

page 244 note 4 (London, 1831.)

page 245 note 1 For details see Augustus H. Beaumont, Ambassadors: What Do We Pay Them For? A Question for the People (London, 1836). See also Add. Mss. 27819, ff. 218–19.

page 245 note 2 Add. Mss. 27820, f. 12. The paper published from March 13 to July 17, 1836. Beaumont's ability to sustain this loss but to continue to maintain a London residence and his political activities, as well as start another newspaper in 1837, suggests that he brought considerable resources with him from Jamaica despite his losses there.

page 245 note 3 Add. Mss. 27819, f. 32. The chief source for this period of Beaumont's life is Francis Place's narrative account of the period. It is not completely satisfactory for despite his approval of Beaumont's motives, Place thought him unbalanced and was often harshly critical.

page 246 note 1 Add. Mss. 27819, ff. 33–34. Place suggested they made two attempts at rival organization, one called the Universal Suffrage Club and the other the Central Committee of the Metropolitan Radical Unions. In fact, the Central Committee was a device for calling a meeting which resulted in the formation of the Universal Suffrage Club. The Club then continued to meet into the autumn (The Radical, June 12, 1836; London Mercury, September 18, 1836).

page 246 note 2 Add. Mss. 27819, f. 45.

page 246 note 3 Add. Mss. 27819, ff. 218–19.

page 246 note 4 Add. Mss. 27820, ff. 11–12.

page 246 note 5 Ibid.

page 247 note 1 Newcastle Chronicle, July 29, 1837.

page 247 note 2 Newcastle Courant, July 28, 1837. Beaumont also had developed ideas for land nationalization in a June newspaper article but he returned to neither of these ideas later. Place noted at the bottom of the June article “Poor Crazy A. H. Beaumont” (Place Newscutting Collection, British Museum, Set #56, ff. 90–92).

page 247 note 3 Newcastle Chronicle, July 29, 1837.

page 248 note 1 Northern Liberator, November 4, 1837.

page 248 note 2 The paper combined with The Champion of London as the Northern Liberator and Champion beginning May 30, 1840.

page 248 note 3 Northern Liberator, October 28, 1837.

page 248 note 4 Ibid., December 9, 1837.

page 249 note 1 Thomas Ainge Devyr, Odd Book of the Nineteenth Century (Greenpoint, N. Y., 1882), p. 159.Google Scholar

page 249 note 2 Henry Miller, ed., The Memoirs of Dr. Robert Blakey (London, 1879), p. 108. Place claimed that by this time Beaumont was in severe financial straits and accounts for the sale in that way (Add. Mss. 27820, f. 13).

page 249 note 3 Add. Mss. 27820, ff. 20–22.

page 250 note 1 Neale, R. S., “Class and Class-Consciousness in Early Nineteenth Century England: Three Classes or Five?”, in: Victorian Studies, XII (19681969), pp. 432.Google Scholar