The fight, as it was waged in New York, Virginia, and Mississippi, will suffice to illustrate the general character and method of the campaign. In all three States the Bank was the issue. Even the most hopeful of the Whigs entertained no illusions as to Pennsylvania, where the most powerful financial and commercial interests were arrayed with the Bank. The two parties in the Empire State were mobilized, organized on a military footing, and ready and eager for the fray.[764] The elections in New Jersey and Pennsylvania were held in October, a month before those in New York, and the first shock to the Whigs came in the returns from these two States. That Pennsylvania, the home of Biddle, Sergeant, and Duane, should have gone against the Bank and for Jackson, was not disappointing, for little had been expected there. But much was expected in New Jersey. There the issue was distinct. The two Senators from that State had voted with the Bank on the deposits question. The Legislature had adopted resolutions commendatory of Jackson’s actions, and in his Protest the fighting President had not scrupled to quote these resolutions to prove that the Senators had deliberately misrepresented their people. Senator Frelinghuysen, in commenting upon these instructions, had boasted that he and his colleague had “dared to meet the frowns of their constituents,” and would not “bow the knee to these instructions.”[765] Now he was before the people for reëlection, and the issue was plain. The people’s verdict was unmistakable. The little State swept into the Jackson column with a substantial majority, and Frelinghuysen was retired. Goaded by the sting of the New Jersey defeat, the New York Whigs redoubled their efforts. “The Whigs are raising liberty poles in all the wards,” wrote Hone. “I went to one of these ceremonies yesterday at the corner of the Bowery and Hester Street. The pole, a hundred feet high, with a splendid cap and gilt vane with suitable devices, was escorted by a procession of good men and true.”[766] Thus, if the “mob” could make the welkin ring at Democratic meetings, the more aristocratic Whigs could sally forth from their counting-rooms and libraries to rub shoulders with the common herd at Hester Street and the Bowery and shout approval of the raising of a pole. But all was in vain. By nine o’clock on the evening of the first day, Hone and his fellow Whigs realized that “enough was known to satisfy us to our hearts’ content that we are beaten--badly beaten; worse than the least sanguine of us expected.”[767] The jubilant Democrats, however, were determined that the Whig leaders should not feel utterly deserted, and a crowd of them surged before Hone’s house with hisses and catcalls which kept him awake all night. The Lord Holland of the American Whigs, who was sick at the time, was inclined to resent it, but the next evening he found consolation in dining with Webster who “was in a vein to be exceedingly pleasant.”[768]