THE decision made, the old President must have felt a sense of ineffable relief. His Cabinet had been a failure and he realized it. His dissatisfaction with a majority of its members was not due entirely to their hostility to Mrs. Eaton. The fight against the National Bank was in its incipiency and he looked upon Ingham as a tool of the Bank; the Nullification doctrine was being promulgated and he considered Berrien a Nullifier--and in both surmises he was right. He thought Branch pompous, incompetent, and subservient to petticoat rule. And we may be sure that whether or not the Cabinet was to be reorganized in the interest of Van Buren, the relations of all three toward the Carolinian entered into his decision to rid himself of them. There is evidence that he quite early determined to displace Berrien, but nothing of record to indicate the cause. In the man selected for his place, however, we have ample justification for the suspicion that the Red Fox had poisoned his mind against his Attorney-General. It was on the suggestion of Van Buren, very soon after the formation of the Cabinet in 1829, that the Attorney-Generalship was offered to Louis McLane, who, in disgust, had retired to Wilmington for the practice of his profession, with the inducement that he would later be transferred to the Supreme Bench on the death of the rapidly failing Justice Duval. Before breakfast one morning, after a hard ride over the wretched mud roads, Hamilton, the lieutenant of Van Buren, arrived at the McLane home with the proposal, which was accepted. Nothing, however, was done--another mystery that died with Jackson and his Secretary of State.[309]