Very early the friends of the Administration took their cue from its enemies, and began to flood the Senate with memorials against the Bank. Thus day by day the proceedings were opened by the reading of petitions, followed by speeches on the “distress,” and replies belittling the panic. Mr. Clay’s heart was wrung by news of the distress in Savannah and Augusta; whereupon Mr. Forsyth rose to deny that there was distress in those cities. “I know the individuals,” he said. “They are highly respectable men--merchants and members of the Bar. They are friends of the Bank of the United States.”[705] A New Jersey Senator, opposed to the Administration, presented conflicting petitions from his State, with the Jackson petitions numerically the stronger. Ah, laughed Forsyth, “from the State of New Jersey we have three cheers for one groan.”[706] When an Opposition Senator presented a petition from Portsmouth with a doleful tale, Senator Isaac Hill killed the effect by explaining the dubious manner in which the signatures had been obtained. And when, a little later, Hill undertook to present a petition of the New Hampshire Legislature against the Bank, Webster moved to lay it on the table. In truth the actions of legislatures were beginning to annoy the panic-breeders. Maine, New York, New Hampshire, and other States had spoken in support of Jackson’s policy. It became necessary to devote more attention to that end of the petition business. “What is doing in your legislature about the deposits?” Clay wrote to his friend, Judge Brooke of Virginia. “We want all aid here on that subject which can be given us from Richmond.”[707] And when the Legislature acted, John Tyler lost all patience with the Governor for not sending the petition on at once. “The resolutions of the legislature have not yet reached me,” he wrote impatiently to Mrs. Tyler, “nor can I conceive what Floyd is after that he does not forward them.”[708] They arrived in time, and Webster did not move to lay them on the table. Then, with the effect of a bomb exploding among the Bank champions, came the message of Governor Wolf of Pennsylvania, denouncing the Bank for responsibility for the depression. Clay lost no time in denouncing him as a man worshiper, albeit the Governor had previously favored the Bank. Another Bank Senator rushed forward with a resolution “disapproving the vacillating or time-serving policy of the Governor of Pennsylvania,” while Forsyth and others criticized the taste of the proceedings.[709]