But more sinister still was the appearance, for the first time in American politics, of the weapons of intimidation and coercion. In New Orleans a bank commenced discounting four months’ paper at eight per centum--“because of the veto.” An advertisement appeared in a Cincinnati paper offering $2.50 per hundred for pork if Clay should be elected, $1.50 if Jackson won--a bribe of one dollar a head on each hundred pounds of pork. From Brownsville, Pennsylvania, went forth the disturbing report that “a large manufacturer has discharged all his hands, and others have given notice to do so,” and that “not a single steam boat will be built this season at Wheeling, Pittsburg or Louisville.” From Baltimore: “A great many mechanics are thrown out of employment by the stoppage of building. The prospect ahead is that we shall have a very distressing winter.” And so the work went on, with the Bank and its political champions holding the sword of Damocles over the heads of the masses who dared to vote for Jackson.[510] Jackson was held before the conservative and timid as rash, dangerous, destructive. Webster’s State convention speech at Worcester, expanding on the unfortunate sentence from the Veto Message as to the finality of Supreme Court decisions, was given general circulation. Even the brilliant Ritchie, of the “Richmond Enquirer,” lived in constant terror of some rash act of Jackson’s that would wreck the country.[511] For the benefit of the ardent Jacksonians who disliked and distrusted Van Buren, the nominee for Vice-President, the Whig and Bank press gravely quoted some mysterious “Philadelphian” to whom Jackson had said, “with his own lips,” that a reëlection would satisfy him as a vindication, and that he would resign and go home, leaving Van Buren in the Presidency. Even the “National Intelligencer” referred to the rumor as “the disclosure of an important fact ... going to confirm our own impressions.” And Blair had been forced to notice and denounce the story with the comment that “we had always thought Simpson the most depraved of all the miscreants purchased by the Bank, but certainly now Gales[512] deserves to be put below him.”[513] Earlier in the campaign the Whigs had attempted to serve the same purpose by circulating alarming reports regarding Jackson’s health. And Blair, in denouncing this canard, announced that the President “receives from 50 to 100 persons daily, is incessantly engaged in the despatch of the duties of his office, and joins regularly at table his large dinner parties of from 40 to 50 persons twice a week.”[514]