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intellectual debasement”—not because they had been dispossessed and virtually segregated from civic life in their native land but because they continued to follow the tenets of a faith that was incompatible with Anglo-Protestant ideas of liberty. 10
    The classroom became a key battleground in this cultural war. A publicly funded private organization called the Kildare Place Society (KPS), named for its location in Dublin, was charged with building ostensibly nondenominational schools throughout the island. Inevitably, however, the schools became a source of cultural conflict as the evangelical movement and O’Connell’s fledgling efforts to achieve Catholic emancipation developed side by side in the early 1820s. One of O’Connell’s shrewdest political lieutenants, a middle-class Catholic lawyer named Thomas Wyse, noted that the KPS schools “were imperceptibly converted into sectarian decoys.” 11
    Wyse sought to take advantage of growing Catholic unease with the island’s Protestant evangelizers. The typical Irish Catholic, Wyse wrote, “could not conceive it possible that the same men who were so anxious to exclude him from all enjoyment of the rights of a citizen could really feel much anxiety about his education or his soul.” A countywide parliamentary election in Waterford in 1826 offered a splendid opportunity to mobilize Catholic freeholders on behalf of a candidate pledged to support Catholic Emancipation in the House of Commons. Such a candidate, of course, would have to be Protestant, because Catholics remained effectively barred from holding a seat in the Commons as long as members were required to take the anti-Catholic test oath. Wyse regarded the incumbent MP, Lord George Beresford, as “an exceedingly friendly and kind man,” but he nevertheless recruited another landlord, Henry Villiers Stuart, to run an insurgent campaign as the candidate of the Catholic Emancipation movement. To support the Stuart candidacy, Wyse put together the first authentic Irish political machine, built on defiance of and resistance to the dominant culture. 12
    Under Wyse’s direction, the Stuart campaign committee dispatched agents to assist dozens of freeholders with cash and other benefits in return for their electoral support, a method of operation that became familiar to reformers and voters alike in the streets of New York. While Waterford was but one election in a single Irish county, the tactics and strategies deployed there were replicated in a string of parliamentary elections throughout Ireland over the ensuing two years, transforming the Catholic Association into a powerful, grassroots political organization that taught the Catholic Irish the power of popular politics and the mechanics of mass organization. Wyse broke down the countywide election into a series of smaller elections at the barony level—roughly the equivalent of a ward in New York—recruiting two agents to work each barony and report back to the central committee about local conditions and concerns. Some agents were selected because they spoke Irish and so could converse with many freeholders in the native language.
    The mobilization inspired the Irish-Catholic peasantry as no political campaign had ever done before. Several tenants sent their landlord a petition that progressed rapidly from deference to defiance, all but announcing the group’s intention to vote as it pleased. “Tenants of a kind and considerate landlord, we are fully impressed with the duties which we owe him, and are ready at all times to fulfill these obligations with all the diligence . . . in our power,” the petition read. “But . . . if we are your Tenants, we are also the Electors of a free state, and entrusted with the Elective Franchise not for the exclusive benefit of the landlord but for our own benefit and that of our fellow Countrymen.” As Catholics, they said, they supported Emancipation. “Any candidate therefore who will not give a pledge to vote