History Spotlight 8/19

It was on this day in 1819 that the infamous Peterloo Massacre occurred at St. Peter's Field in Manchester England.

If you're in the United States, odds are when you think of "corn" you think of that delicious, starchy plant that's good in bread form or on the cob.   In Britain, when they say "corn" they mean "wheat" (when they mean "corn" they say "maize").  The Corn Laws were a series of laws in Britain that hiked the tariffs on wheat and other foods.  This was great for the wealthy landowners because their crops' value went through the roof but sucked for pretty much everyone else who had to buy the food.  They were extremely unpopular but, as those same wealthy landowners controlled Parliament, they weren't getting repealed anytime soon.

The Napoleonic Wars had also just ended a few years ago so there were thousands of demobbed soldiers with nothing to do (I can't imagine what the House of Lords of the day would have thought of the GI Bill) .   Manufacturing had also slowed down as the need for war material had dropped so so tons of people were out of work, too.

On top of that they were int he middle of a famine.  You've got thousands of out-of-work, hungry, pissed off people who feel their government isn't adequately addressing their needs.   A group, the Manchester Patriotic Union (who might be considered "Social Justice Warriors" of the day, if that's cool) decided to have a rally in favor of, among other things, a change in how things worked in Parliament. 

A crowd of up to 80,000 people showed up.  I tried to find out if this was a larger crowd than was expected, like at Woodstock, but I couldn't find anything that indicated that.  At any rate, it was a really big crowd.  The local government got nervous and asked the local military to arrest the organizers and run off the crowd.  The military took "disperse the crowd" to mean "charge into the crowd on horseback with sabres drawn hacking and slashing."  Well, it dispersed the crowd but it also killed 15 people and injured 400.

 Peterloo was one of those defining massacres of a generation, like Kent State or Amritsar.  Soldiers who had fought with Wellington at Waterloo were among the dead.