The story here enters into the melodramatic although there is nothing impossible about it. Letcher, in another conference, this time with Jackson, found the grim old warrior hard set against any sort of a compromise, unwilling to discuss one, and determined to enforce the laws. The Kentuckian related the conversation to McDuffie; he to Calhoun. A little later Letcher was awakened from a sound sleep by Senator Johnston of Louisiana, an intimate friend of Clay, with the startling story that he had heard authoritatively that Jackson would admit of no further delay, and was preparing to arrest Calhoun for treason. It was agreed that the Carolinian should be immediately notified, and in the darkness of the night Letcher hastened to Calhoun’s lodgings. As the gaunt statesman sat up in bed, the Johnston story was told him and “he was evidently disturbed.”[595] That some such incident occurred is corroborated by Perley Poore,[596] who was an observer of events in the Washington of that day. Here we have some embellishments. Calhoun had heard some threats and had sent Letcher to Jackson to ascertain his intentions. The old man’s eyes had been “lighted by an unwonted fire,” and he had told the emissary that with the first overt act, he would try Calhoun for treason and “hang him high as Haman.” Thereupon Letcher made all haste to Calhoun, who received him sitting up in bed, with a cloak thrown around him. “There sat Calhoun,” wrote Perley Poore, “drinking in eagerly every word, and, as Letcher proceeded, he turned pale as death, and great as he was in intellect, trembled like an aspen leaf, not from fear or cowardice, but from consciousness of guilt.”[597] Here we detect the professional journalist drawing perhaps on his imagination to dramatize the picture. However, Calhoun, convinced of Jackson’s grim determination, was ready to welcome a way out short of conflict or utter humiliation, and at the same time Clay and Clayton were not happy over the situation. The protective system had brought the country to the very verge of disintegration. With Nullification crushed by force, conservative public opinion might demand a complete reversal of the revenue policy and destroy the “American System.” That Clay at this time was thinking primarily of the preservation of his protective system, and secondarily of currying favor with the extreme State-Rights party, including the Nullifiers, is plainly disclosed in the record. Thus the proposed combination of the Nullifiers and the protectionists to stay the arm of Jackson. In this combination no one was more prominent than John M. Clayton, the brilliant and bibulous, who frankly cared less about saving the Union than of saving the tariff, and who would “pause long before he surrendered it [the tariff] even to save the Union.”[598] He was to prove himself as good as his word a little later.