But the immediate purpose of the Virginia Democrats was to humiliate Leigh, who was unpopular with the masses because of his bitter fight in the Constitutional Convention against the extension of the suffrage. And he was as strongly with the Bank as Virginia was against it. A house-to-house canvass was made, and in districts where a majority were found against him it was proposed to evoke the right of instructions to Assemblymen. The plan succeeded to the extent of disclosing a majority hostile to the reëlection of Leigh, but the Whigs, who carried the State, succeeded after a bitter struggle in returning him through a flagrant disregard of the expressed will of the constituencies. The battle was thus but half lost. The Democrats were supplied with ammunition they were to use with deadly effect, and within little more than a year they were to drive the two anti-Jackson Senators of Virginia into private life. Ritchie began the next year’s battle without delay. The “Enquirer” was flooded with resolutions and letters protesting the election of Leigh over the instructions of the majority of the people.[770] In Mississippi the Jacksonians determined to prevent the reëlection of Senator Poindexter, long the idol of the Mississippi Democracy, who had turned upon Jackson with a virulence scarcely equaled by any old-line Federalist, and cast his lot with Clay. With the adjournment of Congress, the Mississippi Senator hastened home, where the enemies of the Administration had planned a series of banquets at which he was to denounce the President and vindicate himself. The Whigs were with him. The Democrats, delighted with a slashing and brilliant assault on Poindexter by Robert J. Walker, put that able publicist in the field, and within a week he was engaged in one of the most spectacular canvasses Mississippi had ever known, firing enormous open-air meetings of frenzied Jacksonians. The outcome was the election of Walker--a victory sweet to Jackson, for it was the vanquished who had sponsored the resolution attacking his Protest.[771] And the triumph was all the sweeter from the fact that, while Poindexter had supported the Nullifiers, Walker had taken the lead against them in Mississippi, on the platform, and through the press. Thus the elections of 1834 were more than pleasing to Jackson and his party. Two of his strongest senatorial opponents had lost their seats as a result of their opposition, and Leigh had been saved only by a disreputable betrayal of the people. In the Senate the Administration was strengthened; and in the House the Democratic majority was reduced but eight votes, leaving it a clear majority of 46 out of 242 members.