Throughout July the Opposition and Bank papers were warning the public of the movement on foot, and the “Intelligencer” was especially alarmed, dwelling at length on the rumor that Kendall was in Philadelphia before he had even left Washington. Blair was moved to mirth. He admitted that Kendall had been seen taking a stage, carrying with him “a large black trunk,” and that, while he “looked charitable, his intent may be wicked.” Worse still, “the Editor of the ‘Globe’ left for the South two days before with baggage enough to last a man a lifetime.” A mysterious, uncanny combination of events, he conceded, that “bodes to owners of U.S. Bank stock, who purchased at 50 per cent, no good.”[641] This facetiousness enraged and alarmed the Opposition, and its press began to threaten to impeach Duane if he removed the deposits. Kendall was scourged with excoriations, and State banks were warned against taking the deposits on pain of the displeasure of the Biddle institution. Papers under the influence of the Bank, but still posing as Jacksonian, were sure that Jackson “and his able Secretary of the Treasury” would “not be hurried or retarded in his important measure by the violent and indiscreet denunciations and threats of any set of men,” and would “act on the deposits at the proper time and in the proper way.”[642] And Blair, catching the subtle suggestion of Bennett, hastened to assail him as having been “smuggled into the confidence of an unsuspecting Democracy as a friend of the cause” and as a “treacherous instrument of Webb and Biddle,” who had “the impudence to propose by praise to flatter the President and his Cabinet to adopt the views of the Bank.”[643] From his sanctum in the office of the “Albany Journal,” Thurlow Weed, wisest of the Whig journalists, sent forth the threat of panic. “We are impatient for the removal,” he wrote. “Nothing short of a general ruin will cure the people of their delusions, and the sooner it comes, the better.”[644] IV