electoral vote upon which his election depended.[499] Thus, before the campaign had fairly started, the politicians of these two parties were working in close coöperation with a complete understanding, while the rank and file of both parties were left entirely in the dark. Wirt, with no faith in the coalition, was doing nothing to advance his candidacy.[500] Thus the nominee of one party was secretly planning to deliver the prize to the man his own party had repudiated. Not only did he write no letters to advance his party’s cause, but he “refused to answer whenever such answers could be interpreted as canvassing for office.”[501] Meanwhile the Jacksonians were merely amused at these intrigues of the old school politicians. The secret of their strength, here as always, was in their daring. Not only did they ignore the Anti-Masons and refuse to conciliate them, but they cast them off as completely as they had the Nullifiers. The highest member of the Masonic order in America was at the head of Jackson’s Cabinet, and John Quincy Adams gave the utmost publicity to the fact by addressing his attacks on Masonry to Edward Livingston. Jackson himself sought and found an opportunity to go on record against the prescriptive hysteria. In this manner the Jacksonian managers rallied the Masons to their banner, and they held in their hands the ammunition with which to blow to atoms the plan of the coalition leaders to deliver the rank and file of the enemies of Masonry to Clay. Early in October Blair published in the “Globe,” without comment, Clay’s manly letter to some Anti-Masons in Indiana refusing to be drawn into sectarian quarrels. “If a President of the United States ... were to employ his official power to sustain, or to abolish, or to advance the interest of Masonry or Anti-Masonry,” he had written, “it would be an act of usurpation and tyranny.”[502] That was enough. The Democratic press of the country, taking the cue from the “Globe,” reproduced the letter, and thus the rank and file of the party everywhere was strengthened in its determination not to support its author. While Clay was intriguing with the Nullifiers and the Anti-Masons, the Democrats were audaciously denouncing both, and were gaining rather than losing by their temerity. IV