Strangely enough, so reliable an historian as McMaster has described these elections as a triumph of the Whigs. Such was not the interpretation of the Whigs themselves. Hone thought that they were “badly beaten--worse than the least sanguine of us expected.”[772] Webster accepted the verdict as final, and, much to the distress and indignation of Biddle, announced that he was through. But the most conclusive evidence of the contemporary opinion of the Whigs comes from Thurlow Weed, the sagacious Whig journalist of the “Albany Journal.” More prescient than most of the Whig leaders of the time, he had foreseen the inevitable result of an attempt to win upon the Bank issue. Quite early, when Webster’s keynote speech on the Bank, delivered at a mass meeting in Boston, was sent for publication to all the party papers, the copy that reached Weed never found its way into the “Albany Journal.”[773] And immediately after the election in 1834, he editorially expressed the feeling which appears to have taken possession of the party generally. “There is one cause,” he wrote, “for congratulations, connected with the recent election, in which even we participate. It has terminated the United States Bank war.... We have from the beginning deprecated the successive conflicts in defense of the Bank.... But we have gone with our friends through these three campaigns, under a strong and settled conviction that in every issue to be tried by the people to which the Bank was a party, we must be beaten. After struggling along from year to year with a doomed Bank upon our shoulders, both the Bank and our party are finally overwhelmed.[774]” Nor is it surprising that Clay, whose selfishness had forced Biddle into making the recharter a campaign issue, was glad to dump the doomed Bank from his shoulders. It is impossible to follow his course, pointing as every act does to a purely party purpose, without arriving at the conviction that he really cared little about the institution on Chestnut Street. As the fight became more hopeless, he found the importunities of Biddle more irksome. Viewed purely as a political or party contest, the clever politicians who dominated the Jacksonian camp had shown far more prescience and sagacity than the wisest of the Whigs. Amos Kendall had a better understanding of the psychology of the masses than Clay or Webster. Among the Whigs, Weed alone saw the end from the beginning. The attempt to arouse the people in behalf of a great moneyed institution against the attacks of a popular hero was in itself a grotesque and ghastly absurdity. But after the decision had been made to undertake it, the methods of Biddle and his political allies made defeat a certainty. Frank Blair, of the “Globe,” was evidently sincere in his assertion that had he been permitted to dictate the policy of the Whigs, he could not have hit upon a plan more satisfactory to the Democrats.