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for that measure must in our minds be considered an unfit person to sit in Parliament.” 13
    Not everybody was so brave. “Patriotism may fill a man’s heart but [it] can not fill the belly,” one freeholder told a Stuart supporter named Henry Winston Barron. Many freeholders feared the consequences of voting against the interests of their landlords, and some asked for money or favors in return for voting for Stuart. One such freeholder, a man named Anthony Heale, told the committee that after he announced his intention to vote for Stuart, he no longer received work “from the merchants who always employed him.” A publican named John Power told Wyse that agents from the Stuart committee promised him “the profit of two barrels of Beer every week” if he allowed the agents to meet in the pub. But now, he said, “my Landlord threatens to turn me out of my house” and he was “reduced to Extreme Poverty.” He asked Wyse, as “an Honourable Gentleman,” to “do something on my behalf.” Illiterate, Power signed the letter with his mark after dictating it to a friend or associate. 14
    Wyse’s agents traveled the county ceaselessly, delivering correspondence to and from the central committee, traveling with prominent supporters to attend meetings with freeholders, and keeping tabs on public opinion. Writers churned out propaganda in the form of broadsides and poetry, much of which presented Ireland’s Catholics not simply as oppressed but as slaves, a constant theme in Irish and Irish-American discourse. 15
    The freeholders of County Waterford went to the polls beginning on June 22, 1826. It was a colorful and raucous event but remarkably free of violence. Freeholders from at least three estates presented themselves at the courthouse in Waterford City wearing pink-and-green cockades, a visible sign of support for Stuart. The pro-Emancipation Stuart was declared the winner on June 28, polling 1,357 votes to Beresford’s 527. 16
    The liberal Dublin Evening Post cheered: “The county has risen as one man, and intolerance has been beaten to the ground and trodden into extinction.” Beresford himself was bewildered, the victim of forces beyond his control and his comprehension. “When I was a boy,” he wrote, “the Irish people meant the Protestants; now it means the Roman Catholics.” 17
    Success in Waterford led to a string of similar victories for pro-Emancipation candidates throughout the island, deeply unsettling Britain’s Protestant establishment. The Catholic Association expanded its mission beyond the nuts and bolts of political organizations. Its relief committee took on the functions of an unofficial social-welfare agency for the island’s majority population. For example, it authorized payment of six pounds, ten shillings, to the widow of a man killed by a police officer and fifteen pounds for a Westmeath man named James Connell who claimed to be “without house or home” after voting for a pro-Emancipation candidate. An agent in Waterford named Pat Hayden proposed that supporters “be placed at permanent employment” instead of receiving cash payments. Finding jobs, Hayden argued, was a more efficient method of protecting O’Connell’s supporters than simply supplying them with relief payments. 18
    The O’Connell movement’s successes taught the Irish that political power could be seized through organization and mobilization. It also showed that institutions like the Catholic Association could be a source of relief and protection. In Ireland before the late 1820s, the Catholic peasantry usually turned not to middle-class politicians like O’Connell and Wyse for relief and protection but to violent secret societies whose members assaulted and even murdered landlords, crippled livestock, and carried out other resistance against the Anglo-Protestant social and political structure. The association offered an alternative means of resisting injustice through democratic mobilization, shrewd