Nor was this clamor for office confined to the more important positions--it reached down to the most menial places, to those of the gardener, the janitor, and messenger. Worse still--men in position to serve were even appealed to for place by members of their immediate families. Thus we find Amos Kendall writing to his wife: “I had thought before of trying to get some place for your father, but I cannot do anything until I am myself appointed. I hope in a year or two, and perhaps sooner, to find some situation that will enable him to live near us, and comfortably.”[189] Meanwhile the clerks in Washington lived in a state of terror. Men who had long worked in harmony, and on terms of intimacy, were afraid to talk to one another. Every one suddenly assumed the aspect of a spy and an informer. “All the subordinate officers of the Government, and even the clerks are full of tremblings and anxiety,” wrote one woman to a correspondent. “To add to this general gloom, we have horrible weather, snowstorm after snowstorm, the river frozen up and the poor suffering.”[190] The majority of the subordinates and clerks, many the ne’er-do-wells of distinguished families, assuming that they were assured of a life position, had lived up to, and beyond, their meager incomes, and suddenly found themselves unfit for other employment and confronted with dismissal.[191] And slowly, but surely, the dismissals came, leaving many in desperate straits, without sufficient funds to reach their homes, and unfit to earn a livelihood if they did. Some were driven to desperation. One dismissed employee of the Custom House in Boston went “in a transport of grief” to Ingham with a plea to be informed of the cause of his dismissal, only to be told that offices were not hereditary.[192] One clerk in the War Department cut his throat from ear to ear; another in the State Department went stark mad. But all appeals for sympathy were met by the proscriptionists with the stern reminder: “The exclusive party who were never known to tolerate any political opponent raise and reiterate the cry of persecution and proscription at every removal that takes place. They have provoked retaliation by the most profligate and abandoned course of electioneering; the most unheard-of calumny and abuse was heaped upon the candidate of the people; he was called by every epithet that could designate crime, and the amiable partner of his bosom was dragged before the people as worse than a convicted felon. What sympathy do men of such a party deserve when complaining that the places which they have abused are given to others?”[193]