With so much distress in the country and with the Administration overburdened with problems, Clay, Adams, and Webster organized the opposition in Congress and throughout the country very much as Van Buren, Calhoun, and Jackson had done in 1826-28. The President, they said, was no friend of the people; he had not so much 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.