The strong radical traditions of the North East had seen off all attempts to enclose the Town Moor in 1773 in a unique political campaign that anticipated the Charter by fifty years in pressing for progressive electoral reform. Key figures included James Murray and Thomas Spence. Later on, the Town Moor protest against Peterloo in 1819 was one of the largest political gatherings anywhere in Britain at this time.
The Charter of 1838 produced by the political movement now known by its name contained a number of demands including manhood suffrage, vote by ballot and payment of members of parliament. Most members of the Hepburn union of 1830-32 turned to Chartist activity after they had given up hope of re-forming their shattered association. According to the Northern Liberator of 28 December 1838, 'Hepburn travelled long distances on many a dreary night, and addressed meetings to advocate the political rights of the people, advising his hearers to get knowledge. He taught and illustrated the great truth that if the people, of England once demanded their rights, no government could withhold them.'
The North East was not only one of the best-organised regions of the Chartist movement, but it was dominated by the advocates of physical force Chartism. One prominent figure was Robert Blakey (1795-1878), the Morpeth philosopher and furrier. Blakey purchased the Newcastle Liberator which merged with the London paper Champion. In 1840 the Northern Liberator and Champion was on sale in both Newcastle and London. Blakey was prosecuted and bound over because he had advocated the natural right to resist constituted authority. Augustus Beaumont published his Northern Liberator from Newcastle and regularly denounced the moderates:

'Those men are well fed, and therefore they relied on moral force; but let them labour for one week, and be ill-fed and ill-clothed, and it would soon convert them to physical force,'

Extremists like George Julian Harney (arrested at Bedlington in July 1839 for sedition) were exhilarated by the atmosphere of 1838-39. In his red hat he would wave daggers before his audiences and compare himself to Marat: Your country, your posterity, your God demand of you to ARM! ARM! ARM!' Arms indeed were openly assembled in the outlying villages - fowling pieces, small cannon and stoneware grenades. 'Craa's feet' or caltrops, four-spiked irons to disable cavalry horses, were turned out in numbers. Chartist meetings were well-attended. At the rally on the Town Moor on 28 June 1838, the soap manufacturer Thomas Doubleday presided, and speakers included the crippled South Shields tailor and newsagent Robert Lowery, who wanted to 'use every means - not every legal means, mark! - but every means for the attainment of universal suffrage and the abolition of the monarchy. The men of Newcastle would dare to defend with their arms what they utter with their tongues.'
The repeal of the Corn Laws helped Chartist support to subside, but there was another flare-up at the time of the continental revolutions of 1848. Harney's Red Republican of 1850, with its sub-heading of 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity', and its publication of the first English version of the Communist Manifesto, was too strong for most newsagents and readers and was soon suppressed. Harney replaced it with the Marat-inspired title The Friend of the People.
Many Chartists emigrated. Harney, with the Newcastle druggist John Rewcastle, went to Boston in the 1850s and was much impressed by the public library, the first, and then the largest in the USA. His articles on the subject in the Newcastle Chronicle prompted a campaign for a public library in Newcastle. When it opened, its first books were a gift from Boston Library. Joseph Cowen (q.v.) took out the first book, apparently a copy of Mill's Essay on Liberty.