ABSTRACT
The echoes of Chartism had barely died away before a new movement for political reform began to develop. The effect of the re-emergence of the Reform movement under middle-class Radical leadership was to rouse the leaders of the working class to a sense of the need for re-asserting their claims. Meanwhile, for a time, the distress caused by the ‘Cotton Famine’ during the American Civil War impeded the growth of the movement in the North of England; but by 1864 a further conference of the Northern Reform societies was able to meet and establish the National Reform Union. The National Reform Union, with a hundred and thirty branches, chiefly in the North and Midlands, was under the predominant influence of John Bright and the middle-class advocates of compromise. The ‘Amalgamated’ leaders, for their part, did not want to quarrel with the rest of the movement, provided that they could get their own way.
