The effect on the Senate may be better imagined than described. Poindexter, whose private grudge was the inspiration of his renegadism, could not “express the feeling of indignation” the paper had excited in his bosom, and he would “spurn it from the Senate”--“that body which stands as a barrier between the people and the encroachments of executive power.” It was not a Message--merely “a paper, signed ‘Andrew Jackson,’” and “nothing else.”[728] Sprague of Maine, who had been pilloried, spoke “more in grief than in anger,” and while the President had referred to “his Secretary” and felt that this was “his Government,” he, the Senator, “never bowed the knee to Baal.” And while the tyrant was appealing to the people, look about. “Behold your green fields withered; listen to the cries of distress of the widows and orphans, rising almost in execration of the exercise of that power which has blasted their hopes and reduced them to despair.”[729] Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, another pilloried statesman, next arose to discuss “this most extraordinary proceeding--one which would form an era in American history.” What a spectacle! “When the busy hum of industry was silenced, when the laborer was in want of employment, when banks were breaking in every direction, and the cries for relief from the unrelenting hand of power were heard everywhere around us,” the Senate had listened to a lecture of an hour and a half. And why refer to the New Jersey Legislature? He had “dared to meet the frowns of his constituents” because of his zeal for his country.[730] Southard of New Jersey, also pilloried by Jackson, hoped that he might “school himself into that degree of moderation necessary for the occasion.” He could find no excuse for Jackson’s indignation. And yet “we have received, not from Charles I, Cromwell, or Napoleon Bonaparte, but from a man combining the characters of the whole of them, a warning to cease our further proceedings.”[731] And Leigh closed the day’s events by declaring “before God that upon the fate of these resolutions, and the disposition of this question, depends the permanency of the Constitution, handed down to us by our fathers.”[732]