The President himself betrayed unusual signs of distress. Nothing in Madison’s character was more remarkable than the placidity with which he commonly met anxieties that would have crushed a sensitive man; but the shock of defeat at Bladensburg, the flight from Washington, and the anxieties that followed broke him down. William Wirt visited Washington October 14, before the action of the Massachusetts legislature was yet completed. After viewing the ruins of the White House, a “mournful monument of American imbecility and improvidence,” he called upon the President at Colonel Tayloe’s Octagon House, which Serurier had occupied, but which Madison took for his residence after his return. “P---- and I called on the President,” wrote Wirt in a private letter.[345] “He looks miserably shattered and woe-begone. In short, he looked heart-broken. His mind is full of the New England sedition. He introduced the subject and continued to press it, painful as it obviously was to him. I denied the probability, even the possibility, that the yeomanry of the North could be induced to place themselves under the power and protection of England, and diverted the conversation to another topic; but he took the first opportunity to return to it, and convinced me that his heart and mind were painfully full of the subject.” No misconduct of New England alone would have so unmanned a Virginia President. Madison’s worst troubles lay nearer home; Massachusetts made only the last straw in his burden. Jefferson, with his usual kindliness, tried to console and encourage him; but Jefferson’s consolations proved only the difficulty of finding words or arguments to warrant satisfaction with the past or hope for the future. “In the late events at Washington,” wrote Jefferson, September 24,[346] “I have felt so much for you that I cannot withhold the expression of my sympathies. For although every reasonable man must ne sensible that all you can do is to order,--that execution must depend on others, and failures be imputed to them alone,--yet I know that when such failures happen they affect even those who have done everything they could to prevent them. Had General Washington himself been now at the head of our affairs, the same event would probably have happened.”