Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (5 page)

The Catholic Association was transformed from pressure group to disciplined political movement through the ingenious use of subscriptions, which offered even the poorest tenant farmer an opportunity to become invested in the association. For a mere penny a month, ordinary Irish people could become associate members of the Catholic association, run for and by fellow Catholics. By 1828, the association had three million associate memberships, while some fifteen thousand more affluent Catholics paid an annual fee of one pound sterling.
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Many of those who joined the movement brought more than their pennies—they brought their votes, because Irish-Catholic men who owned or leased property worth forty shillings or more had been given the franchise in 1793. Traditionally, freeholders who leased property voted for their landlords or their agents, because they declared their votes publicly—there was no secret ballot at the time—and it was hardly prudent to cast a public vote against the landlord’s interest. Tenants were expected to vote as their landlords directed them. The democratic process in Ireland was little more than an empty ritual for some two hundred thousand Irish Catholic freeholders in the 1820s. Contested elections were rare, but when they took place, they often became violent or corrupt.
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O’Connell’s mobilization in the 1820s did more than change the dynamics of electoral politics in Ireland. It sought to create a place for Catholics in public life in the United Kingdom, undermining the state’s self-image as a Protestant nation. “In Ireland, where a little while ago a Protestant shoeblack would have grinned with contempt at the titled head of the most ancient Catholic family, the tables are completely turned,” lamented
The Times
of London.
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Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association provided a foundational experience for hundreds of thousands of Irish people who were destined to flee their starving homeland in the 1840s and cross the Atlantic to find a political climate not unlike the one they had left behind. Equally important, the Catholic Emancipation movement unfolded in the face of an aggressive Protestant evangelization effort that spanned the Atlantic Ocean. Even as the Catholic Association began its campaign for equal rights, evangelical Irish Protestants mobilized the rhetoric of reform and education in an effort to convert the island’s Catholics to Protestantism, which would have made the very notion of Catholic Emancipation moot.

The evangelizers in Ireland wanted to change flaws in the Irish character—perceived to be laziness, ignorance, superstition, dependence, and fondness for alcohol—which they attributed to Catholicism. “If [the Irish] people were Protestants, they would be free from spiritual tyranny; they would be accessible to instruction and civilization,” wrote an anonymous writer in
Blackwood’s Magazine
.
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Because they were not free of “spiritual tyranny,” Catholics were considered incapable of understanding Anglo-Protestant ideas of liberty. In the 1820s, a Protestant clergyman named Richard Warner issued a popular pamphlet arguing that Catholics throughout the United Kingdom should not be given rights equal to those of Protestants because they were “not to be trusted” and thus should not enjoy “equal participation of political power.” It was “insolent” to think otherwise.
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For the transatlantic Anglo-Protestant community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Irish presented a challenge to cultural, political, and economic norms such as laissez-faire economics, property rights, civic virtue, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, and, of course, Protestantism itself. The evangelical Protestant campaign in Ireland in the 1820s was rooted in larger moral reform campaigns that were sweeping mainland Britain and the United States during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In the United States, the movement gave impetus to an emerging moral critique of slavery, especially in New England. In Ireland, evangelicals concluded that Catholics were, in the words of a Protestant pamphleteer, “the vassals of papal tyranny” and were “languishing in the lowest 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 for that measure must in our minds be considered an unfit person to sit in Parliament.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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