The Democrats and Jackson Senators were naturally delighted. This was a political speech that Hayne was making, and he was crucifying Federalism and parading the closet skeletons of its greatest living champion, and shaming the section that refused to be converted to the new faith. And when the orator fell into the trap cleverly prepared for him by Webster, and, ostentatiously encouraged by Calhoun with numerous notes of suggestions sent by the pages from the chair, entered upon his exposition of the theory of Nullification, it is improbable that the delighted Jackson Senators caught the full significance of the departure. Duff Green, in the “National Telegraph,” the Calhoun organ, then supporting the Administration, was in a frenzy of delight. Andrew Jackson, who had kept in close touch with the debate, sending Major Lewis daily to the Senate Chamber, and was immensely pleased with the political or party features of the speech, wrote the orator a cordial letter of congratulation. The depression of the Federalists, the New Englanders, and the Opposition generally, was correspondingly great. A professional observer,[252] writing of the event in later years, tells us that “the immediate impression from the speech was most assuredly disheartening to the cause Mr. Webster upheld.” And Henry Cabot Lodge accepts the statement that “men of the North and of New England could be known in Washington in those days by their indignant and dejected looks and downcast eyes.”[253] The day Webster began his reply was the coldest of the winter, a biting wind filling the streets with clouds of dust, and Margaret Bayard Smith, sitting before a blazing fire, and free from the interruption of callers because “almost every one is thronging to the Capitol to hear Mr. Webster reply to Colonel Hayne’s attack on him and his party,” wrote regretfully of the growing tendency of women to monopolize the seats both in the gallery and upon the floor.[254] The reader is too familiar with that splendid oration to justify, for our purposes, any analysis or extended reference to the substance. His replies to Hayne’s attacks on the war policy of the Federalists, and upon his own inconsistencies, while clever, were not, in truth, convincing answers, and it was upon these points that the Jackson Senators were centering their attention. Thus it is not remarkable that the full import of his speech was momentarily lost upon the heated partisans. Even Benton, refusing to believe that the Union was in danger, or in any way involved in the debate, did not care for Webster’s peroration, finding the sentiment nobly and oratorically expressed, “but too elaborately and too artistically composed for real grief in the presence of a great calamity--of which calamity I saw no sign.”[255] To Benton, the debate was a party combat and nothing more. Nor is there anything in the notes recorded by Adams to indicate that he was impressed with the Webster