chair,” and it required “some hard thumps” from the men of character, respectability, and personal worth to clear the way sufficiently for the presiding genius of the Whig dinner table to reach the platform. When he attempted to speak, the “yells of the mob” rendered all the chairman’s efforts “unavailing”; so he “put the question upon the resolutions which were carried by an immense majority,” and the meeting adjourned. Unhappily the “mob” did not disperse for some time afterwards.[681] When these committees, composed of bitter enemies of the President, began to pour into the capital and knock at the White House door, they were received, at first, with urbanity and heard with patience. The committeemen, however, carried back “grossly colored” stories of the interviews, and Jackson thereafter decided to hear and dismiss them without discussion.[682] In these stories Jackson is pictured as raving and ranting, spluttering and spouting imprecations and profanity. McMaster, however, accepts as true that he received these committees “with that stately courtesy for which he was so justly distinguished,” and concludes from the evidence that he “soon began to lecture them.”[683] In these lectures Jackson is reported to have told the committees to “go to the Bank” or to “go to Biddle” for relief. No less an authority than Catterall has concluded that he was not far wrong. On one occasion he did use extreme language to a committee which implied the threat of rebellion. “If that be your game,” he exclaimed, “come with your armed Bank mercenaries, and, by the Eternal, I will hang you around the Capitol on gallows higher than Haman.”[684] There is no doubt that he did harangue the committees with bitter denunciations of “The Monster” and properly ascribed a large part of the distress to the deliberate purpose of the Bank to “discipline” the Nation. Some historians have suggested that these outbursts were staged, and it is recorded as a fact by Henry A. Wise, the brilliant Virginia Whig. “When a Bank committee would come ...” he writes, “he would lay down his pipe, rise to the full height of his stature and voice, and seem to foam at the mouth whilst declaiming vehemently against the dangers of money monopoly. The committee would retire in disgust, thinking they were leaving a mad man, and as soon as they were gone, he would resume his pipe, and, chuckling, say, ‘They thought I was mad,’ and coolly comment on the policy of never never compromising a vital issue.”[685] This interpretation of Jackson’s tempests and whirlwinds of passion, coming from a severe critic of his Bank policy, is the most dependable of all the opinions that have been expressed by friend or foe. IX