making the necessary appropriation, which passed by more than two to one. The spirit of the “opposition in any event” betrayed itself in unguarded utterances, such as the following, ascribed to Van Buren, the anti-administration leader in the Senate: “Yes, they have beaten us by a few votes, after a hard battle; but if they had only taken the other side and refused the mission, we should have had them.”
But that was not the end of the debate in the Senate. The attack on the administration was continued in the discussion on a resolution offered by Branch, of North Carolina, denying the competency of the President to send ministers to the Panama Congress without the previous advice and consent of the Senate, which competency the President had originally claimed in his message to Congress. This presented to John Randolph an opportunity for a display of his peculiar power of vituperation. In a long, rambling harangue he insinuated that the invitations to the Panama Congress addressed by the ministers of the Southern republics to the government of the United States had been written, or at least inspired, by the State Department, and were therefore fraudulent. It was in this speech that he characterized the administration, alluding to Adams and Clay, as “the coalition of Blifil and Black George, — the combination, unheard of till then, of the Puritan with the blackleg.”
When Clay heard of this, he boiled over with
