Such was the intensity of feeling and the bitterness of the struggle that enthusiastic partisans partook of the nature of mobs in the larger centers. Nowhere were the Democrats so intense as in Philadelphia, where, on election day, the warring partisans exchanged shots, the headquarters of the Whigs was sacked and burned by a mob which drove back the firemen that attempted to quench the flames. A number of houses were completely reduced to ashes. Such was the panic of Nicholas Biddle that the day before the election he sent his wife and children into the country, filled his house with armed men, and prepared for a siege. The Bank building bristled with the bayonets and muskets of guards. But when the gray dawn came, the one-time financial dictator found that none of his property had been molested. It was blow enough to him to learn that the Whigs, the country over, had gone down before the popular uprising. But the bitterest fight was waged in Virginia, where the situation was mixed to the point of chaos. The State was anti-Bank, but it was anti-Jackson. Opposed to the Bank, it had been equally opposed to the removal of the deposits. The feeling in Richmond was so inflamed that only personal respect for Ritchie saved the “Enquirer” from mob violence, for the courageous editor stuck to his guns and tried to divert attention to the Bank itself. Administration papers were established throughout the State with instructions to follow the lead of his pen. The Virginia plan was twofold: to make the most of the unpopularity of Leigh, who was again a candidate for the Senate, and to divide and distract the Whigs by playing Clay against Calhoun. Nowhere did the Democrats appreciate, as they did in Virginia, the impossible nature of the Whig combination, and they dwelt upon its inconsistencies from the beginning. Clay announced that he was not a candidate for the presidential nomination in 1836. “But Mr. Clay knows not himself,” wrote Ritchie. “But ambition does not burn so intensely in his bosom as it does in the heart of another leader of the Senate (Mr. Calhoun). If recent signs do not deceive us, this extraordinary man (extraordinary every way for the vigor of his mind, the variety of his principles, and the intensity of his ambition) will soon take the field, with feeble hopes of winning the votes of the South, as well as the support of the Bank. Then we shall see under which king the various members of the opposition will range themselves.”[769] This irrepressible conflict of Whig ambitions and interests was played upon by the Democratic press of Virginia all through the summer and autumn of 1834.