Thus the first days of the session were passed in maneuvering for position, with frequent incidents of a petty nature indicative of the rancorous party spirit of the times. Having observed the unobtrusive figure of Major Lewis, that most consummate of politicians and presidential reporters, moving about the floor of the House, Richard Henry Wilde, poet and politician, Nullifier and Whig, framed a resolution to exclude him, but it was defeated.[696] Meanwhile Clay was busy mapping his campaign, preparing the resolutions on which he proposed to make the issue. The Opposition leaders were clearly embarrassed in determining their course of action. Webster appealed to Justice Story, the scholarly associate of John Marshall, for an opinion on the legal phases; and writing from Cambridge that great jurist would not advise that the deposits could not be legally withdrawn unless danger to their security was involved, but he advanced the theory on which the Bank champions acted--that the Secretary of the Treasury did not become custodian of the funds by virtue of his position in the Cabinet, but held them as a “personal trust, and as much so as if confided to the Chief Justice of the United States.” Thus he furnished the Opposition with the opinion it required. The President had no right to interfere; more--if he did interfere, and the Secretary submitted against his own judgment, he violated his trust; and the State banks had no proper authority to take over the deposits.[697] Unhappily, the learned jurist failed to take the next necessary step, and conclude that the President had no power to remove a Secretary of the Treasury. And it was just this queer opinion that Clay was zealously seeking. About the time Webster was appealing to Story for the elucidation of legal points, Clay was writing to former Senator Tazewell at Norfolk, a great constitutional lawyer, inquiring as to whether or not Jackson had transcended his power in dismissing Duane. It must have been with some embarrassment that he read the Virginian’s reply, that to him it was “manifestly absurd to regard the President as responsible for the acts of subordinate agents, and yet to deny him the uncontrolled power of supervising them, and removing them from office whenever they had lost his confidence.”[698] This opinion, however, did not deter some statesmen from advancing the idea that Tazewell had contemptuously rejected. But the position of Story was accepted, and Clay submitted his resolutions censuring the President, and holding the reasons given by Taney for the removal “unsatisfactory and insufficient.” Thus the decks were cleared for action. The real fight began in the debate that day upon these resolutions, and upon these, and others growing out of them, the verbal battle, which at times threatened to be other than bloodless, raged with intemperate fury for seven months. II