When submitted to the Legislature, on January 17, 1821, the documents, according to the Governor's instructions, were indeed very voluminous. It required a bag to take them to the capitol--the green bag message, it was called; but it proved to be smoke, with little fire. It fully established that the naval storekeeper at Brooklyn, and other federal officials were offensive partisans, just as they had been under Clinton's control, and just as they have been ever since. The Bucktails saw distinctly enough that the State could not be aroused into indignation by such a mass of documents; but there was one letter from Van Buren to Henry Meigs, the congressman, dated April 5, 1820, advising the removal of postmasters at Bath, Little Falls, and Oxford, because it seemed impossible to secure the free circulation of Bucktail newspapers in the interior of the State, which provoked much criticism. How the Governor got it does not appear, but it gives a glimpse of Van Buren's political methods that is interesting. "Unless we can alarm them (the Clintonians) by two or three prompt removals," he says, "there is no limiting the injurious consequences that may result from it." Soon after, two of the postmasters were removed. If the charge was true, that postmasters were preventing the circulation of Bucktail newspapers, Van Buren's course was very charitable. Evidently he did not want places for his friends so much as a proper delivery of the mails; for otherwise he would have insisted upon the removal of all offenders. The gentle suggestion that the removal of two or three would be a warning to others, explains how this devout lover of men lived through a long life on most intimate terms with his neighbours. If such conditions existed under the modern management of the Post-Office Department, every wrong-doer would be summarily dismissed, regardless of party or creed. Van Buren's methods had no such drastic discipline; yet his letter became the subject of much animadversion by the Clintonians, not so much because they disapproved the suggestion as because Van Buren wrote it. "It is very important to destroy this prince of villains," Clinton declared, in a letter to Post of December 2, 1820.[213] [Footnote 213: DeWitt Clinton's Letters to Henry Post, in _Harper's Magazine_, Vol. 50, p. 415.