The feeling against Clinton was intensified by the common belief that the election of Rufus King, as United States senator to succeed John Smith, on March 4, 1813, paid the Federalists their price for choosing Clinton electors. The Republicans had a majority on joint ballot, and James W. Wilkin, a senator from the middle district, was placed in nomination; but when the votes were counted King had sixty-four and Wilkin sixty-one. It looked treacherous, and it suggested gross ingratitude, since Wilkin had presided at the legislative caucus which nominated Clinton for President; but, as we have seen, events had been moving in different ways, events destined to produce a strange crop of political results. In buying its charter, the Bank of America had contracted to do many things, and the election of a United States senator was not unlikely among its bargains. This theory seems the more probable since Clinton, whom Rufus King had denounced as a dangerous demagogue, would have preferred putting King into a position of embarrassment more than into the United States Senate. Wilkin himself so understood it, or, at least, he believed that the Bank, and not Clinton, had contributed to his defeat, and he said so in a letter afterward found among the Clinton papers. Hostile Republicans were, however, now ready to believe Clinton guilty of any act of turpitude or ingratitude; and so, on February 4, when a legislative caucus renominated Daniel D. Tompkins for governor by acclamation, Clinton received only sixteen votes for lieutenant-governor. There is no evidence that Van Buren took part in Clinton's humiliation; but it is certain he did not act with all the fairness that might have been expected. He could well have said that Clinton was no worse than the majority of his party who had nominated him; that his aim, like theirs, was a vigorous prosecution of the war in the interest of an early peace; that he had no intention of separating himself from the Republican party, and that his renomination for lieutenant-governor would reunite the party, making it more potent to create and support war measures. But Van Buren himself was not beyond danger. Tammany's mutterings and Spencer's violent denunciations threatened to exclude others from the party, and to escape their hostility, this rising young statesman found it convenient to drop Clinton and shout for Tompkins. A less able and clear-headed man might have gone wrong at this parting of the ways, just as did Obadiah German and other friends of Clinton; but Van Buren never needed a guide-post to point out to him the safest political road to travel. The better to prove his party loyalty, he consented to draft the usual grandiloquent address issued by the legislative caucus to Republican electors, always a sophomoric appeal, but quite in accord with the rhetoric of the time. If any doubt existed as to the orthodoxy of Van Buren's Republicanism, this address must have dissipated it. It