Your chance to receive a FREE Milwaukee Power Drill

Your chance to receive a FREE Milwaukee Power Drill



















appointee, as the Senate had usually rejected attempts to fill a seat by appointment when a state legislature had failed to choose.[32] The balloting continued, once per day excepting Sundays, with Quay never getting close to a majority with a quorum.[27] The anti-Quay Republicans offered to meet with his supporters, but Quay's manager, state senator John C. Grady, was slow to accept, and it was clear the Quay Republicans would rather have deadlock than find a compromise candidate. This was along the lines that Quay urged in a letter to his supporters, "To temporize with those persons who for three months have prevented the election of a Senator in Pennsylvania would extricate them from the abyss into which they have plunged. Instead of making their treason to the party odious, their treason would be made respectable, and treason made respectable would become fashionable."[33] The Democrats refused to reach across the aisle to the anti-Quay Republicans to elect a compromise candidate, remaining loyal to Jenks.[34] According to historian James A. Kehl: The deliberations of the legislature tried men's patience and tired their minds. To those directly involved, the frantic efforts to make successful combinations or convert individual legislators turned the protracted struggle into a reign of terror—physically, mentally and morally. The tension was heightened by Quay's success in having his case brought to trial in Philadelphia ... The prosecution obviously had a weak case that had been patched together primarily to discredit Quay in political circles. He may have been guilty, but [Philadelphia district attorney Peter F.] Rothermel had neither the documents nor the witnesses to pr