Mr. Payne's election by the Legislature was a thunder-clap to the people of Ohio. They did not know he was a candidate. Who was to be United States Senator was of course one of the issues in the election of the Ohio Legislature of 1884, and the Democratic voters who elected the majority of that Legislature had sent them to the State Capitol to make George H. Pendleton or Durbin Ward senator. One of the leading newspaper men of the State testified: "I went over the entire State during the campaign.... Out of the eighty-eight counties I attended fifty-four Democratic conventions and wrote them up, giving the sentiment of the people as nearly as I could, and during that entire canvass I never heard a candidate for the Legislature say that he was for Henry B. Payne for United States Senator; but every man I ever talked with was either for George H. Pendleton or General Ward. I think out of the Democratic candidates throughout the State I conversed with at least two-thirds of them."[562] As was afterwards stated before the Senate of the United States by the representatives of the people of Ohio, "He was in no wise publicly connected with the canvass for the Senate, nor had the most active, honorable, and best-posted politicians in the State heard his name in connection with the senatorial office until subsequent to the October election [of the Legislature]. He was absolutely without following."[563] The Democratic constituencies sent their legislators to vote for Pendleton and Ward, but between the receipt and the execution of this trust from the people a secret charm was put to work of such a potency that the people woke up to find that the representative who had betrayed them in Congress in 1876 was their senator, instead of one of their real leaders. The people had been digging oil wells for twenty years that all the value might flow into the bank accounts of a few interceptors; they had been building railroads and pipe lines that their business and property might be transported into the same hands; they had organized agitation and conducted a national anti-monopoly campaign all over the country, only to see the men who were to have been investigated take command of the inquiry. The people had had enough such experience not to be surprised that when they started to make a beloved leader senator it was their enemy who came out of the voting mill with the senatorial toga upon his shoulders. But terrible was the moral storm that broke forth out of the hearts of the people of Ohio. The votes they had thrown, like roses to garland the head of a hero, had been transformed as they went, by a black magic, into missiles of destruction, and had fallen upon him like the stones that slew Stephen.