Read Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics for Free Online Page B

campaign tactics, and an organization that threatened the established order from within.
    Two years after the Catholic Association’s victories in 1826, O’Connell offered himself as a candidate for Parliament from County Clare. The Catholic Association’s political machine geared up for a potentially historic election, spending thousands of pounds and deploying agents and organizers to Clare to rally the Catholic freeholders. One of the association’s more enthusiastic agents, James O’Gorman Mahon, reportedly roused people from their beds to deliver late-night appeals on O’Connell’s behalf. O’Connell himself left Dublin for Clare in late June amid a spectacle worthy of Tammany at its most theatrical. Clad in green and riding in a fine coach, O’Connell made the two-day journey from the Anglicized East to the Gaelic West to the cheers of thousands along the way. Nearly forty thousand banner-waving supporters watched O’Connell’s formal nomination for the House of Commons seat during a ceremony in the town of Ennis. 19
    After five days of polling, O’Connell received slightly more than two thousand votes, while his opponent, a moderate Protestant landlord named William Vesey Fitzgerald, polled fewer than a thousand. O’Connell became the first Catholic elected to the House of Commons since the Reformation.
    The British government grudgingly agreed to remove the hated test oath, to the dismay of many British and Irish conservatives who fervently believed in Anglo-Protestant supremacy. The Irish on both sides of the Atlantic greeted news of Catholic Emancipation with celebrations. The New York Irish Shield praised O’Connell for having “snatched the rusty key of the temple of Liberty from the tenacious grasp of gloomy Intolerance, without slaying her guards.” But the O’Connell victory was by no means complete—the grasp of the powerful was strong indeed. O’Connell did not so much as snatch the key to the temple of liberty as he did borrow it. 20
    In return for granting Catholic Emancipation, the British administration changed the rules and rewrote the law. O’Connell’s most ardent supporters, the forty-shilling freeholders, were stripped of their franchise as part of the price of Emancipation. The property qualification for voting was raised to ten pounds sterling, reducing the number of Irish freeholders from two hundred sixteen thousand to thirty-seven thousand. O’Connell had said he would not accept Emancipation if it were “coupled with any conditions that would tend to deprive the forty-shilling freeholders of the elective franchise.” Faced with a choice between principled idealism and a practical path to power, however, O’Connell agreed to a political deal rather than remain on the outside. 21
    The British government manipulated the rules in another way before allowing O’Connell to take his seat. It insisted that O’Connell take the test oath before entering the Commons because he was elected before the oath was abolished. It was a particularly vindictive maneuver, one that surely did little to inspire reverence for the rule of law among the Irish. Rather than take the oath, O’Connell submitted himself to voters again and was elected without opposition on July 29, 1829.
    Many in Britain believed that the Catholic Association’s victory would lead to revolution in Ireland, but that was not the intention of the movement’s leaders. Like so many Irish politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, Thomas Wyse sought to achieve practical change from within rather than pursue abstract ideals from outside. “My principles are already before you,” he told a crowd in County Tipperary when he stood for election himself in 1830. “I am an enemy to revolution, and therefore a friend to reform; opposed to anarchy and confusion, therefore hostile to abuses of all kinds.” To that end, Wyse created a network of local political organizations, called Liberal Clubs, that would create, in his