warned against him, but his advices were contradictory. Within a month he was reassured by one correspondent[428] and alarmed by Clay, who wrote him from Ashland that, while in Richmond, Van Buren had entered into a conspiracy with politicians to destroy the Bank.[429] And to add to the mystic maze of contradictions, Major Lewis wrote, in a “confidential” note, that the report that Jackson would veto a bill rechartering the Bank “must be some mistake because the report was at variance with what I had heard him say upon the subject.”[430] Still another correspondent[431] informed him that Van Buren had told him that “he disapproved of that part of the message and was not hostile to the Bank.” About this time Jackson journeyed to the Hermitage, and Biddle asked a leading citizen of Nashville to “feel him out.” The banker’s correspondent entertained the President at his home, and after a confidential chat felt justified in advising Biddle that he was “well convinced that he will not interfere with Congress on the subject of the renewing of the charter.”[432] By this time, however, Biddle had convinced himself that political expediency would determine the President’s attitude, and in a letter to one of Jackson’s personal friends he pointed out the disastrous political results to the Administration if the impression gained ground that it was “unfriendly to sound currency.” He even graciously indicated the line the next Message might take to save the Administration from that embarrassment.[433] But before that suggestion reached its destination, Clay solemnly wrote him that only a devoted friend of the Bank in the Presidency would make a recharter possible, and warned him against Van Buren. He was convinced that the Jacksonian politicians had determined to make the Bank question the issue in the next campaign. “I have seen many evidences of it,” he wrote. “The editors of certain papers have received their orders to that effect, and embrace every occasion to act in conformity with them.”[434] But when Congress met in December, and Jackson reiterated his views on the Bank, Biddle was earnestly urged from Washington to meet the issue at once by applying for a new charter. This advice was finally rejected. Congress, he wrote, was favorable, “and moreover the President would not reject the bill,” but many members favorable to the recharter would prefer not to vote that session. Then, too, time was working the removal of prejudices.[435]