The most portentous feature of the campaign was the appearance in August of Calhoun’s famous letter to Hamilton, decisively accepting as his own, and urging upon his people, the doctrine of Nullification. It was intended and timed to serve the purposes of the campaign. Unhappily Calhoun must ever remain more or less a steel engraving. His private life was carefully screened. Jefferson prowling among the brickmasons at the University, Jackson with his clay pipe on the veranda of the Hermitage, Webster among his cattle at Marshfield, Clay meditating speeches under the trees at Ashland, are possible of contact by future generations, but Calhoun at Fort Hill seems hopelessly remote and cannot be visualized. He stalks upon the stage, a dramatic and impressive figure, and plays his public part, but no one is admitted to the dressing-room. Thus all we know of the occasion of the preparation of the famous letter, which became the Magna Carta of the Nullifiers, is told in the letter itself.[539] The events of that summer and early autumn were intimately known to Jackson as he walked the grounds of the Hermitage, and lingered mournfully about the tomb of his beloved Rachel. In the spring of 1830 the brilliant Poinsett, fresh from his mission to Mexico, had been shocked, on his return to the drawing-rooms of Charleston, to find sedition poured with the tea, and had hurried to Washington to be closeted with Jackson at the White House. Before he emerged, he had been designated by the President as his personal ambassador in South Carolina,[540] and after calling upon Adams, in retirement, to tell him of his hopes and fears,[541] he made all haste home to combat, inch by inch, the growing madness, and prepared, if need be, to die with a musket in his hands. During the intervening three years his confidential reports had kept Jackson in close touch with all the movements of the enemy, and the grim old warrior, reëntering the White House on his return from Tennessee, entertained no illusions as to what he faced.