The Constitutional Convention's main proponent of a powerful, popularly elected president expressed an equally paternal conception of the relationship between the presidency and the public. The task of responding to the president's message embroiled the Senate in a prolonged discussion about how to address the president. Andrew Jackson advanced a new understanding of the relationship between the presidency and the American people, particularly in his second term as he faced growing congressional resistance to the war he had declared on the national bank. Whigs insistence that presidential elections revealed nothing about the people's preferences was out of step with a more democratic and partisan age. Squeezed between the Progressive Era and the New Deal, the decade is generally neatly packed away in our historical memory as one of little relevance to American political development. Intended to shore up traditional understandings of politics, the Farewell Address ironically presaged new understandings of the presidency's relationship to public opinion.