Membership uptake had been slow.

In the south and west, the great numbers of tenant farmers, small-town traders and journeymen O'Connell had rallied to the cause of Emancipation in the 1820s did not similarly respond to his lead on the more abstract proposition of Repeal. Patriotic and republican sentiment among the Presbyterians of the north-east had surrendered, since the Rebellion of 1798, to the conviction that the union with Great Britain