Throughout the great war over the Bank of the United States the _Evening Post_ had stood by the President. Jackson appealed to the loyalty of Bryant and Leggett in equal degree, but differently. To Leggett he was “the man of the people,” a son of the frontier, a democrat from heel to crown. In Bryant he awakened the same admiration that he aroused in Irving, Cooper, Bancroft, and in Landor abroad: admiration for his adventurous heroism, his unspotted honesty, his simplicity, his stern directness, his tenacity in pressing forward to his goal. One had to be either the wholehearted admirer of “Old Hickory” or his wholehearted opponent, and as early as Jackson Day in 1828 Bryant had become the former, writing for a dinner at Masonic Hall an ode which, according to Verplanck, threw Van Buren into ecstasies. Not a single measure of Jackson’s, not even his wholesale removals from office under the spoils system, was censured by the _Evening Post_, and by 1832, after the end of nullification, it was hailing him as “the man destined to stand in history by the side of Washington, the one bearing the proud title of the Father of his Country, the other the scarcely less illustrious one of Preserver of the Union.” All Jackson’s charges against the Bank--that it was a source of political corruption, that it was monopolistic, that it was hostile to popular interests and dangerous to the government, that it was unsafely managed--were echoed by Bryant and Leggett. Probably only the accusation that it had gone into politics was fully warranted, but the _Evening Post_ pressed them all. Speaking of the Bank’s “enormous powers” and “its barefaced bribery and corruption,” it applauded Jackson’s veto of the bill to recharter it, and his withdrawal in 1833 of the government deposits in it. When the Bank curtailed its loans to meet the withdrawal of these deposits, the editors thought that it was trying to coerce the people and government, by threatening a panic, into yielding. “The object of the Bank is to create a pressure for money, to impair the confidence of business men in each other, and to keep the community at large in a state of great uncertainty and confusion, in the hope that men will at last say, ‘let us have the Bank rechartered, rather than that ... the whole country should be thrown into distress.’” The alliance of the chief statesmen in Congress on behalf of the Bank drew from the journal three interesting characterizations (March 31, 1834):