Pickering was not so intelligent as Cabot, Parsons, and Ames; his temper was harsher than theirs; he was impatient of control, and never forgot or wholly forgave those who forced him to follow another course than the one he chose. Cabot’s letter showed a sense of these traits; for though it was in the nature of a command or entreaty to cease discussing disunion, if the Federalist party in Massachusetts were to be saved, it was couched in gentle language, and without affecting a tone of advice suggested ideas which ought to guide Federalists in Congress. Pickering was to wait for the crisis. Inaction was easy; and even though the crisis should be delayed five or ten years,--a case hardly to be supposed,--no step could be taken without a blunder before the public should be ready for it. With this simple and sound principle to guide them, conservatives could not go wrong. Cabot there left the matter. Such gentleness toward a man of Pickering’s temper was a mistake, which helped to cost the life of one whom conservatives regarded as their future leader in the crisis. Pickering was restive under the sense that his friends preferred other counsellors; whereas his experience and high offices, to say nothing of his ability, entitled him, as he thought, to greater weight in the party than Hamilton, Cabot, or Rufus King. Backed by Tracy, Griswold, and other men of standing, Pickering felt able to cope with opposition. His rough sense and democratic instincts warned him that the fine-drawn political theories of George Cabot and Theophilus Parsons might end in impotence. He could see no reason why Massachusetts, once corrupted, might not wallow in democratic iniquities with as much pleasure as New York or Pennsylvania; and all that was worth saving might be lost before her democracy would consent to eat the husks of repentance and ask forgiveness from the wise and good. Cabot wanted to wait a few months or years until democracy should work out its own fate; and whenever the public should yearn for repose, America would find her Pitt and Bonaparte combined in the political grasp and military genius of Alexander Hamilton. Pickering, as a practical politician, felt that if democracy were suffered to pull down the hierarchy of New England, neither disunion nor foreign war, nor “a very great calamity” of any kind, could with certainty restore what had once been destroyed.