Emmet's political rehabilitation begins in the Famine-years of the 1840s with the Young Irelanders. In 1846 they had finally broken with O'Connell declaring that if Repeal could not be carried by moral persuasion and peaceful means, a resort to arms would be "a no less honourable course". The Young Irelander publisher Charles Gavan Duffy repeatedly reprinted Michael James Whitty's popular chapbook "Life, Trial and Conversations of Robert Emmet Esq." (1836), and promoted R.R. Madden's "Life and Times of Robert Emmet" (1847) which, despite its devastating account of the Thomas Street fiasco, was hagiographic.