Nowhere in the campaign of 1828 did Jackson receive more ardent support than in Mississippi where his old friend Poindexter directed his forces, and one year after his inauguration, the lieutenant entered the Senate, and almost immediately the feud between the erstwhile friends began. The sordid feature of the story is the fact that it grew out of a patronage controversy. Jackson had determined on the appointment of a Tennesseean, a neighbor of the Hermitage, to the land office of Mississippi. Poindexter protested that this patronage belonged to his State and to him. Jackson refused to yield. Poindexter prevented the confirmation of the Tennesseean. Jackson made a recess appointment, and thenceforward the two comrades of 1812 were at swords’ points. Thus far Jackson was manifestly in the wrong. His loyalty to friendship cannot explain his disloyalty to Poindexter--who was also a friend, and a friend in need. But such was the Mississippian’s prejudice and hate that he abandoned, not only the President and purely Administration measures, but the principles he had espoused and advocated for a generation. He crossed the Rubicon, burned the bridges, and became a special favorite of Clay’s. In every great fight of the Jackson period, Poindexter was found arrayed with the Opposition. He stood with the Bank, favored the censure, and offered the resolutions denunciatory of the Protest. In the Nullification contest, he had essayed to lead the Nullifiers, and became more offensive than Calhoun. Unfortunately for Poindexter, in the fighting that followed he was far from invulnerable on the personal side. Having been unfortunate in his domestic relations, he had divorced his wife, denied the paternity of his children, and plunged into the most reckless dissipation.[796] His indecent reflections upon the purity of his wife drove her family, extensive and influential, to his enemies; his intemperate tirades against Jackson alienated the dominant Democratic sentiment of the State; and while he fought boldly and bitterly to sustain himself, he failed, and, at the time of the attack on Jackson by the madman at the Capitol, was so discredited in Mississippi that he was planning to leave the State, with his second wife, on the expiration of his term. A man of genius whose morals failed to sustain his mentality--such the epitaph of George Poindexter.[797]