It revealed the characteristic impotence in two obvious ways. First, it pinned its hopes for victory on brilliant personalities rather than on dialectically secured positions. Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, who between them represented the best statesmanship of the generation, were among its leaders, but none of them ever reached the White House. The beau ideal of the party was Clay, whose title “the Great Compromiser” seems to mark him as the archetypal Whig. Finally it discovered a politically “practical” candidate in William Henry Harrison, soldier and Indian fighter, and through a campaign of noise and irrelevancies, put him in the Presidency. But this success was short, and before long the Whigs were back battling under their native handicaps. Second, frustrated by its series of reverses, it decided that what the patient needed was more of the disease. Whereas at the beginning it had been only relatively pragmatic in program and had preserved dignity in method, it now resolved to become completely pragmatic in program and as pragmatic as its rivals the Democrats in method. Of the latter step, the “coonskin and hard-cider” campaign on behalf of Harrison was the proof. We may cite as special evidence the advice given to Harrison’s campaign manager by Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia. “Let him [the candidate] say not a single word about his principles or his creed—let him say nothing, promise nothing. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden.”[66] E. Malcolm Carroll in his _Origins of the Whig Party_ has thus summed up the policy of the Whig leaders after their round with Jackson: “The most active of the Whig politicians and editors after 1836, men like Weed, Greeley, Ewing of Ohio, Thaddeus Stevens, and Richard Houghton of Boston, preferred success to a consistent position and, therefore, influenced the party to make its campaign in the form of appeal to popular emotion and, for this purpose, to copy the methods of the Democratic Party.”[67] This verdict is supported by Paul Murray in his study of Whig operations in Georgia: “The compelling aim of the party was to get control of the existing machinery of government, to maintain that control, and, in some cases, to change the form of government the better to serve the dominant interest of the group.”[68] Murray found that the Whigs of Georgia “naturally had a respect for the past that approached at times the unreasonable reverence of Edmund Burke for eighteenth century political institutions.”[69]