Meanwhile Jackson at Rip Raps was in daily conference with Frank Blair on the problems of the removal. All this time Blair was creating the impression in the “Globe” that the President’s sole thought was the recovery of his health. The sea air was “proving advantageous,” his appetite better, his strength returning. Nothing was more remote from the thoughts of Jackson. The situation was delicate and politically mixed. The Cabinet was, for the most part, hostile. Conservative Democrats were terrified at the thought of such radical action, and feared the complete disruption of the party and its defeat in 1836. Kendall does not misstate the conditions when he says that “the ambitious politicians who still surrounded General Jackson, trembled in their knees, and were ready to fly,” and that “almost the only fearless and determined supporters he had around him were Mr. Taney, the editor of the ‘Globe,’ and its few contributors.”[645] The brilliant, but ultra-conservative Ritchie, of the “Richmond Enquirer,” feared that the party would “rue the precipitate step in sackcloth and ashes,” and that it would “present nothing but a splendid ruin.”[646] Painful as the situation was to all conservatives, it was maddening to Van Buren, who thought he saw the Presidency slipping from his grasp. In his desire to get as far away as possible, he was planning a month’s outing with Washington Irving among the Dutch settlements of Long Island and the North River, when a letter reached him from Jackson calling upon him to take a stand. His reply, under date of August 19th, would have pleased Talleyrand. Having great confidence in Silas Wright, Senator from New York, he wrote that he would confer with him and then formulate his views. A little later he wrote that he and Wright favored the McLane plan. The tone of sharp surprise in Jackson’s response alarmed the hard-pressed heir apparent, and he hastily wrote that he would yield to the wisdom of Jackson. But his troubles were not over. Another letter from Jackson, more alarming still, pursued him to poison his vacation, summoning him to Washington for a consultation. The cunning politician never faced a more painful problem. He could not afford to break with the all-powerful party dictator in the White House--that would be to abandon the Presidency. Nor was he at all certain that he could afford to become intimately identified with the desperate enterprise upon which the chief was determined to embark. The one would deprive him of the nomination of his party; the other might make that nomination worthless. The campaign of 1836 was already in full swing, and the Opposition was insinuating a directing influence between the most unpopular measures of the Administration and Van Buren. Timid and cautious by temperament, his peculiar situation accentuated these traits in the candidate, and the summons to the seat of war sounded to him like the crack of doom.