A little nonplussed, Biddle and Sergeant retired for further consideration, and returned to the conference with the politicians in the evening still convinced that the McLane compromise should be accepted. And it was then that Clay and Webster, by assuming an injured air, literally blackmailed their Philadelphia friends into the acceptance of their plan, asserting their ability at the time to carry the charter through in the face of a veto, but significantly adding that they would no longer be responsible for anything that might occur “if in the heat of the contest the Bank, abandoning its reliable friends, should strike hands with its foe.”[456] Thus it was neither Jackson nor Biddle that forced the Bank into the campaign of 1832, but Henry Clay, thinking solely in terms of politics and self-interest, as he saw them. III The winter roads between Philadelphia and Washington were ribbons of mud, cut across by frozen streams. A stagecoach, bumping and splattering through the mire, struck an obstruction, turned over, and General Cadwalader, with the Bank’s memorial in his pocket, arose from the wreck with an injured shoulder that was to delay its presentation to the Congress. But three weeks after the conference in Washington it was delivered into the hands of its friends. In the Senate it was presented by a Democrat, George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania, acting under strict instructions from the Legislature of his State, but very much against his personal judgment. In the House it was entrusted to one who could act with greater spirit, because of venomous hostility to Jackson--the vehement and picturesque McDuffie.