uch as mentioned their
case in his messages to Congress. He was likened to a sea captain who
seizes the lifeboats on a distressed ship in midocean and, saving
himself and crew, leaves the passengers to the mercies of the angry
waves. Clay said the panic had been due entirely to the ungodly Jackson
and his foolish successor; Webster saw the sole cause of the ills of the
time in the foolhardy policy of the last half-dozen years. John Quincy
Adams never tired of ridiculing the puerile maneuvers of backwoods
politicians whose ignorance amounted almost to high crime. To him the
Independent Treasury Bill was an attempt to separate the Government from
business, as futile as to try to divorce the law from the judges in the
administration of justice.

Business men were appealed to to help avert the further catastrophes
which a Democratic Administration would surely inflict. Distressed
planters were reminded of the low price of cotton, all the friends of
the former National Bank were told to remember the war on the Bank
which had ruined them and the country at the same time. Indignation
meetings were held in the East to denounce Van Buren and the
"Loco-focos," a term of reproach applied generally to the party in
power; Henry Clay made a tour of the Eastern States thanking God that he
had been spared to help in undoing the work of Jackson; Webster
canvassed the West in the hope of restoring the minds of the people to
their wonted sanity and a renewal of the alliance of West and East, on
which alone depended the prospect of good government in the United
States. The Whig party was now a powerful machine, and its leaders would
take the people into their confidence. "The honesty of plain men" became
a favorite expression of the time; and Adams, Clay, and Webster repeated
the experiment of Jackson, Calhoun, and Benton in 1828, in a four-year
campaign against Van Buren. A disinterested philosopher might have said
that it was poetic justice for the persecuted Adams of 1828 to appear in
the role of persecutor in 1840.

Though the President was an abler politician than Adams had been in the
former struggle, he was hardly able to parry the blows of Clay and his
Eastern allies, especially after the elections of 1838, when both houses
of Congress were lost to the Administration. Calhoun, Benton, and Silas
Wright made a strong fight on behalf of the Democrats. To the
Independent Treasury measure they added the preemption and graduation
bills