# Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.
BIRMINGHAM: ITS NAME, POSITION, POLITICAL HISTORY, AND MEN.
BIRMINGHAM is the capital, manufacturing centre, and growth of the The Black Country. Every acre of the district has given it rootage and riches; and in every way it represents, measures, and honours the mineral and mental production of this velvet-bound area of fire and smoke. The antiquities of the town are rather dubious and obscure. Of course its physical site is as old as any part of the island. So much may be conceded to the zealous antiquarian who is eager to make the most of its history. Some have gone so far as to argue or believe that the lineage of its iron and copper workers runs back to Tubal Cain without a break, and that they here made and sharpened pickaxes and other tools for the Cornish tin-miners in the days of the Phœnician traders; that here also the scythes were made and bolted to the chariots! ​of the ancient Britons for cutting swaths through the Roman infantry. The data are rather thin and feeble for this theory; but there may be good basis of probability for it to rest upon. Whatever tools of labour or weapons of war were made of iron or copper by the ancient Britons they might as well have been made at Birmingham and vicinity as anywhere in the kingdom.
Those who affect this antiquity naturally ascribe its name to a Briton or Roman origin, but it is evidently made up of good, homely Saxon syllables, each with its rural and domestic meaning. Some one, it is said, has traced out over one hundred variations in the spelling of the name, but Hutton's idea is the most genial, Broom-wych-ham, or "Broom-village-home." To make Birmingham or Brummagem out of this pleasant Saxon appellation would be as natural and easy as half the transformations that mark the nomenclature of English towns. There is a beautiful volume of history and human character in that good old Teutonic word, heim, or ham. It never lost its charm or power by expansion of meaning and application. It kept both when it signified the residence of a large community as well as the birth-place or living-place of a single family. How many heims and hams the different families of the Teutonic race have planted in England and all over Germany and Scandinavia! No word in ​all the classic languages of the old world ever had such living power as, this Teutonic noun-heim, ham, or home. In all the history of the world not another such a word can be found that has moved the heart of so many millions. What a heim England has become to more millions than peopled the earth in Homer's day! Go to the furthest sheepcote in Australia, or woodcutter's cabin in Canada, and the youngest child of the family, that has read an English picture book, or has understood its father's stories about the land of his youth, will call England, home. Home-bound is a term first used when the whole English-speaking race in both hemispheres had but one centre, and but one home in sentiment. Home-bound meant then nothing more nor less than England-bound.
Birmingham, of course, is built on the same historical strata as all other large towns in England. As to the old British layer there is the usual thickness of variegated conjecture. Then succeeds the Roman, of which a few indices and relics have been discovered. With the Saxon period a little written history commences, and it is recorded that the township was given to a family named Ulwine, and afterwards Allen, but which, on taking possession of the property, affected the old Norman custom, and assumed the name of De Bermingham. It is quite probable that this Saxon family changed their name in this way at the conquest, in order to ​keep their property by pretending a Norman descent or connexion. What it was in population or occupation up to the time of Henry VII the scant history of the period does not indicate. The first credible account of it is given by rare old Leland, who visited it in 1538. He says, "There be many smithes in the towne that used to make knives and all mannour of cuttinge tooles, and many lorimers that make bittes, and a great many naylors, &c." Thus it is quite probable that the leading manufactures of Birmingham have distinguished it for at least 300 years. In Leland's day it ranked among the small towns of the kingdom. It was then built chiefly on one street, only a quarter of a mile long, with one parish church and a market. And yet the old traveller seems to have been much impressed with the character and capacity of the town. Since his day, the one street "a quarter of a mile long," has threaded out into streets that count up an aggregate mileage of about 100 miles in length, while the number of dwelling houses increases at the rate of 4,000 per annum; and it is probable every month adds to the population a greater number of inhabitants than the town contained in 1538. Still, for a long time after Leland's visit, the very locale of the town was connected with others in the vicinity better known. The memories of two or three generations when linked together, can reach ​the time when letters were directed to Birmingham, near King's Norton, or, "near Wednesbury." It must have been "The Black Country" that built Birmingham, and supplied it with the raw material of its manufactures 300 years ago; so that these wares indicate how far back this mineral district was worked for coal and iron.
Birmingham, in its mechanical industries and productions, has followed the fashions and customs of the world very closely, and supplied every art and occupation with all the working tools and appliances it needed. It has worked to order" without asking questions for conscience sake in regard to the uses made of its articles of iron and brass. It has made all kinds of cheap and showy jewels for the noses and ears of African beaux and belles, and stouter bracelets of iron for the hands and feet of slaves driven in coffles to the sea-board. In the same shops and on the same benches, gilt and silver buckles were made by the million for the shoes of the nobility and gentry when Charles II came back to the throne and brought with him the court fashions and moralities of the continent. That was what archæologists would call the bronze period, when articles of brass slightly gilt or washed with silver were in high fashion in the upper ranks of society. Buckles and metal buttons then began to compete with iron wares in the business of the town; and from ​that to the present day, the workers in brass have steadily increased, until they now number about 10,000 persons employed in that department. But the manufacture of firearms may be considered to have been the great distinctive industry of the town for more than 200 years. Up to the middle of the seventeenth century London monopolized the fabrication of these weapons of war, when it was transferred to Birmingham. Indeed, its skill and labour all the way back to the morning twilight of written history have wrought upon the scythes, sickles, and reaping hooks of war "for home and exportation." On the battle grounds of Hastings, Lewes, Evesham, Tewkesbury, and Flodden Field, hundreds of these tools bearing the Birmingham brand lay scattered about with hacked edges or broken points. Perhaps thousands of the tomahawks lifted by North American Indians against "the pale faces" of New England and Canada wore the same mark. And since firearms superseded these weapons of hand-to-hand fight, it is doubtful if a single battle has taken place in the civilized or uncivilized world in which muskets and rifles manufactured here have not played their part in the work of slaughter. Ill-natured persons of a suspicious turn of mind, might infer or expect that the people of Birmingham would delight in foul weather and ill winds to other communities, and would cry with Ephesian ​zeal at the prospect of war—"Great is Mars!" Although it is true that they have "an anchor to the windward" in these storms that visit and desolate nations; although it is true that if these offences must come, they make a fortune if not a virtue out of necessity; still they have a larger pecuniary interest in Peace than many are disposed to believe. It is said, as one of the best axioms of wisdom and experience, that Peace has its victories as well as War: it also has its implements, tools, and tactics for the winning of its victories; and this, its implemental machinery, is almost infinite in extent and variety; and Birmingham must have £10 invested in its production where it has £1 in the direct service of war. Nor can it be said that, in their manufacture of these weapons of war, they have been indifferent to the cause in which they have been used at home or abroad; or that they have always supplied them to a friend or foe simply in reference to the best pay. In the struggle between Charles and the Parliament they sided with the people and furnished them with arms, which they refused to the King's forces either for love or money. Nor was this all: when Prince Rupert appeared before the town at the head of 2,000 men, the inhabitants encountered him boldly with their train-bands at Camp Hill, and fought against him with their own muskets, though they were worsted and the town punished for both its acts ​of resistance, in refusing the arms to the royal cause, and in raising them against it. Birmingham, also, has had a little political revolution of its own, which produced a severe scrimmage between its domestic parliamentarians and royalists. At the time of the great upturning in France," politics ran high," as they say, in England. It stirred the fountains of public sentiment to the very bottom, lees and all. Had not the drops of blood that dripped from the severed neck of Marie Antoinette drowned more than half the fire of English popular enthusiasm in behalf of the French revolutionists. Napoleon and Wellington might never have fought at Waterloo. Birmingham was just the town to be moved intensely by the great ground swell of the French revolution; but in this movement it was sharply divided against itself. Two years after the taking of the Bastile, the liberals of the town assembled at a dinner party to commemorate that event or what it signified. A counter demonstration was incited by this expression of sympathy with the French cause, and it seemed to have been intensified by a religious element. In the first place a wide and deep impression had been produced upon the public mind that no one could favour that cause without sympathizing with the utter atheism and infidelity of which the French revolutionists were accused. Then there was a bitter theological odium attaching to Dr. Priestley, who was not only the most distinguished ​Unitarian minister at the time, but virtually the father and founder of the sect in England. Thus, strong and impulsive religious as well as political prejudices called together and inflamed a great mob, which first burst upon the house in which the liberals were assembled. The Unitarian chapel was next set on fire; then the residence of Dr. Priestley was burnt down, and all its contents consumed, including his valuable books and manuscripts, and all his chemical instruments and philosophical apparatus, by which he had attained the highest position and reputation as a man of science. The mob made an eager hunt after the doctor himself, and had he not escaped their hands, he would probably have fallen a victim to their fury. The mob, numbering from 8,000 to 10,000 men, really held possession of the town for two or three days, and burned several places of worship and many private residences; nor were they put down without bloodshed, by several regiments of cavalry that were summoned to subdue the reign of terror or of frenzy. The blinding fanaticism of religious bigotry, fanned to a flame among the ignorant but honest masses by the apostles of intolerance, produced this bloody and terrible riot. But Birmingham, notwithstanding this outburst of popular violence, is distinguished above any other town in Christendom for organizing a political force, which had hitherto acted like the ​lightning, the tornado, or earthquake, in sudden, wasting or wasteful explosions. Under the leader ship or inspiration of Thomas Attwood public opinion won the greatest victory it had ever achieved without blood. Under him it was raised from an impulsive brute force to a moral power which the mightiest wrong could not resist. It was a perilous crisis for England. In almost every town or village there was the sharp crack of fiery sparks, showing how the very air the people breathed was charged with the electricity of their passionate sentiment. The approaching tempest gathered blackness, and its thunder-clouds revealed the bolts that were heating and hissing for their work of wrath and ruin. Very few thoughtful men of the nation can now doubt that the storm would have burst upon the country with all the desolation of civil war, if Thomas Attwood and the men of Birmingham had not drawn the lightning out of the impending tempest by the rod of moral force, which was grasped and wielded by his steady hand. From the central hill of the town he lifted up his revolutionary standard, with this new device: "Peace, Law, and Order!" This white flag, and not the bloody banner of brute force and brute passion which had been raised in other times, at home and abroad, to right political wrongs, was the drapeau of the Political Union, which he formed and headed ​in the metropolis of the Black Country. To this rallied men of all ranks and professions and occupations—members of Parliament, peers of the realm, clergy and ministers of all denominations, and the rank and file of the foundries, factories, and workshops of the district. The means were not only worthy the end but of equal worth in moral value. On that grand march to political right and power, the masses stood shoulder to shoulder with their leaders. It was a great copartnership and fraternization of the classes. They showed to European Christendom a spectacle it never saw or conceived before; what had never been seen or imagined in England before. That was a mighty mass meeting of the people, which could be counted by ten thousands, and nine in ten belonging to the working classes—a waving sea of faces, with 100,000 eager, listening eyes turned towards the speaker; gazing at principles and resolutions which no human voice could utter in the heaving of the vast multitude, but which were raised in great letters on standard boards, one to each half acre of men. That was about the grandest sight ever witnessed. It is computed that full 100,000 men—and three-fourths of them stalwart men of the hammer and pick, spade and file—were numbered in some of these outdoor meetings, who were swayed with indignant emotion, and listened with wrathful eyes and clenched ​fists to the story of their political wrongs, till they looked like an army massed for battle. But the small hand of one of their fellow-townsmen waving above the surging host, with the other "grasping the banner of strange device"—"Peace, Law, and Order"—curbed and kept down the brute force of the mighty sentiment, and held the people back from violence. The white folds of that unstained flag, as it waved over Constitution Hill, seemed to shed outward on the breeze an influence that reached and moved and moulded the common mind of the nation. The motto and motive principles of the Birmingham banner of reform were not happy-worded theories which were easy to utter and as costless to practise. At that time the town numbered full 100,000 inhabitants, and no population of equal census in the kingdom was more intelligent and vigorous-minded. Their mechanical industries and occupations, involving and exercising so much science, thought, and skill, tended to quicken and expand the political conceptions and sensibilities of the artisans. No town in the realm could have felt more keenly the aggravated disparities to which it was subjected. Small villages, and even hamlets, in the south and west of England, had each its member of Parliament; and some of them two apiece. There were boroughs possessing thirty seats in the House of Commons whose ​whole population put together did not equal that of Birmingham. And, what aggravated this disparity, many of these were "pocket boroughs," and the pockets that held them belonged to peers of the realm, who had and exercised the right to do what they would with their own. Thus, the House of Commons was at the risk if not in the condition of being a mere apanage to the House of Lords, and the creature and agent of its will and interest.
These were some of the political wrongs which Thomas Attwood and other orators of the Birmingham Political Union put in fervid and graphic exposition before the swaying, heaving masses of the town and district; thousands of them being the sons of the rioters of 1791, who burned out Priestley and mobbed the liberals for their sympathy with the French revolutionists. It is said that at some of these monster gatherings of strong-willed and strong-handed men, with fierce faces begrimed with the grease and coal-dust of their factories, forges, and mines. Attwood's face would pale at the thought of the deluge that would follow the outburst of all that brute power, should it break the holding of his hand and trample upon his banner of new device—"Peace, Law, and Order." But it held them fast to the end. Even when the town elected two members and sent them to Parliament without a license from the ​Government, and when both were thrown into prison for their presumption, and into a prison within a few hours march from Newhall Hill, the masses who felt it with indignant emotion moved not a foot beyond the shadow of their peaceful banner. If they had burst forth into violence under the pressure, and had been followed by thousands in other towns, the powerful and determined opponents of reform, who had all the military resources of the nation at their command, would have been able and willing to crush the movement by sword, bomb, and bayonet. But here was a force arrayed and engaged in close action, which neither Wellington nor Napoleon ever encountered on the field of battle. The Iron Duke could not withstand it nor delay its triumph. It carried the Reform Bill of 1832 against all the resistance that could be organized against it.
Thus, Birmingham was not merely the accidental scene of one of the greatest political events in English history. It organized the force that produced the event, that has governed the governments and guided the people of the kingdom from that day to this. It erected public opinion into a mighty power and enginery for the public good; a power ever ready to be worked against any evil that legislation could remove, or the enlightened mind and conscience of the people could abolish by moral action. It was ​worked to a glorious victory against slavery in the British West Indies, and to an illustrious triumph at home against the Corn Laws. From the time, to use the old threadworn figure, that "victory perched upon the standard" of the Birmingham Political Union, "Peace. Law, and Order," no other flag has been reared, and no other force than it represented has been contemplated by any party or part of the English people with a view to political or social change. The ends for which the Political Union, the Anti-Slavery Society, and the Anti-Corn-Law League laboured, and the triumphs they won, were of immeasurable value in themselves; but the educational means they employed in enlightening the mind of the masses, in teaching them to think, reflect, compare, and observe for themselves, produced results of equal importance. Nor was this organization of the moral forces of a nation's mind limited in its benefits to England. Like the development and application of some new mechanical or natural force, it extended to other countries, where its operation is even more needed than it was in England. The Birmingham banner, "Peace, Law, and Order," as Lamartine said of the tricolour, will yet make the tour of the world, sweeping away with its white folds all the red flags of brute force, and rallying aggrieved populations to the platform instead of the barricade.