The first Cabinet, which almost immediately put on a drawing-room comedy, went out with a rip-roaring farce, with seconds bearing ominous messages, and with Cabinet officers lying in wait in the shadows, creeping through alleys, brandishing pistols, and in the darkest hours before the dawn lumbering in stage-coaches out of the capital city to escape a shot. The thoroughly frightened Ingham openly charged that Eaton intended to murder him, and the letters of the former secretaries concerning the “murder conspiracy” added mightily to the amusement of the enemies of the Administration and to the chagrin and disgust of its friends. “Before you receive this,” wrote a Washingtonian to Senator John Forsyth, “you will have seen the disgraceful publications of Eaton and Ingham, which, of course, are the sole topics of conversation here. The rumor was that the President was engaged the day before yesterday in investigating the matter, and I know that he had a magistrate with him taking depositions.”[326] The hilarity of Jackson’s enemies was vividly expressed in a cartoon, entitled “The Rats Leaving a Falling House,” published in Philadelphia, and, with childish delight, Adams records in his diary that “two thousand copies of this print have been sold in Philadelphia this day,” and that the ten thousand copies struck of “will be disposed of within a fortnight.”[327] Van Buren was sent to the English Court. Eaton was made Governor of Florida and later Minister to Spain, where Mrs. Eaton, in the most dignified Court in Europe, became a brilliant success. Ingham passed from public life. Branch affiliated with the Whigs in 1832 and in 1836, and was made Governor of Florida by Tyler. Berrien became one of the orators and leaders of the Whigs, and one of the founders of the Know-Nothing Party. Thus, after two years of disorganization and domestic turmoil, the Jackson Administration, with a powerful Cabinet, and, for the first time, a definite policy, began to strike its stride. At least two of the new Ministers were to play leading and spectacular parts in the great party battles that were to follow.