quest,” which “lives by perpetual, agitating excitement, and would die in a state of perfect repose and tranquillity,” — a spirit attacking in turn “the Indians, the Indian policy, internal improvements, the colonial trade, the Supreme Court, Congress, the bank,” and now presenting himself “as a dictator to rebuke a refractory Senate,” and preparing to attack and annihilate the Senate itself.
After a debate of three weeks, which called forth the heaviest thunders of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun on one side, and of Benton and Silas Wright on the other, the resolutions condemning the protest as an unconstitutional assertion of power and a breach of the privileges of the Senate, and refusing to put it on the journal, passed by 27 to 16 votes.
The war between the President and the majority of the Senate was carried on with unprecedented bitterness and all available weapons. In one of the short addresses, with which he presented “distress petitions,” Clay laid down certain rules to be followed by Senators who meant “to oppose to all encroachments, and to all corruption, a manly, resolute, and uncompromising resistance,” in acting upon nominations for office. He said: —
“In the first place, to preserve untarnished and unsuspected the purity of Congress, let us negative the nomination of every member for office, high or low, foreign or domestic, until the authority of the Constitution and laws is fully restored. And, in the next place, let us approve of the original nomination of no notorious,
