“When I visited him in Quincy to receive these letters,” related Ticknor,[434] “I had a remarkable interview with him, which at the time disturbed me not a little.... Soon after I was seated in Mr. Adams’s parlor,--where was no one but himself and Mrs. Adams, who was knitting,--he began to talk of the condition of the country with great earnestness. I said not a word; Mrs. Adams was equally silent; but Mr. Adams, who was a man of strong and prompt passions, went on more and more vehemently. He was dressed in a single-breasted dark-green coat, buttoned tightly by very large white metal buttons over his somewhat rotund person. As he grew more and more excited in his discourse, he impatiently endeavored to thrust his hand into the breast of his coat. The buttons did not yield readily; at last he _forced_ his hand in, saying, as he did so, in a very loud voice and most excited manner: ‘Thank God! thank God! George Cabot’s close-buttoned ambition has broke out at last: he wants to be President of New England, sir!’” Whether George Cabot wanted it or not, he was in danger of becoming what John Adams predicted. He was far from being the first man who had unwillingly allowed himself to be drawn into a position from which escape was impossible. After going so far, neither leaders nor people could retreat. The next and easy step of sequestrating the direct and indirect taxes was one to which the State stood pledged in the event of a refusal by President Madison and Congress to surrender them. After such an act, the establishment of a New England Confederation could hardly be matter of choice. If so considerable a mass of concurrent testimony did not prove the gravity of the occasion, as it was understood by the most intelligent and best-informed men of the time, ample evidence could be drawn from other sources. William Wirt described the painful anxiety of Madison as early as the month of October. Throughout Virginia the depression was akin to despair. John Randolph and Wilson Cary Nicholas gave expression to it in letters to prominent New Englanders; but Jefferson in private was still more pronounced in his fears. “The war, had it proceeded, would have upset our government,” he wrote to Gallatin a year later,[435] “and a new one, whenever tried, will do it.” George Ticknor, after obtaining at Quincy his letter of introduction from John Adams to Jefferson, delivered it at Monticello at a time when the anxiety for the safety of New Orleans was acute. He found Jefferson convinced that the city must fall, and Jefferson expressed the expectation that the British would hold it indefinitely.[436] Pickering felt the same conviction, and regarded the event as a dissolution of the Union.