separation. The Clintonians had settled upon John C. Spencer, while
the Bucktails thought Samuel Young, a decided friend of Clinton's
canal policy, the most likely man to attract support. Both were
representative men, and either would have done honour to the State.

John C. Spencer needed no introduction or advertisement as the son of
Ambrose Spencer. He was a man of large promise. Everything he did he
did well, and he had already done much. Though scarcely thirty-four
years of age, he had established himself as a leading lawyer of the
Commonwealth, whose strong, vigorous English in support of the war had
found its way into Parliament as an unanswerable argument to Lord
Liverpool's unwise policy, winning him an enviable reputation as a
writer. Skilful in expression, adroit in attack, calm and resourceful
in argument, with the sarcasm of the younger Pitt, he had presented
American rights and British outrages in a clearer light than others,
arousing his countrymen very much as the letters of Junius had
quickened English political life forty years before. He made it plain
that England's insistence upon the right to stop and search an
American vessel, and England's persistent refusal to recognise a
naturalised American citizen on board an American vessel, were the
real causes of quarrel. "There is not an individual," said a leading
British journal, "who has attended at all to the dispute with the
United States, who does not see that it has been embittered from the
first, and wantonly urged on by those who, for the sake of their own
aggrandisement, are willing to plunge their country into all the evils
portrayed by the American writer."

A single term in Congress had placed Spencer in the ranks of the
leaders. He was trenchant in speech, forceful on paper, and helpful in
committee. Intellectually, he took the place of the distinguished
South Carolinian, just then leaving Congress to become Monroe's
secretary of war, whose thin face and firm mouth resembled the New
Yorker's. Spencer, like Calhoun, delighted in establishing by the
subtlest train of philosophical reasoning the delicate lines that
exposed sophistry and error, and made clear the disputed point in law
or in legislation. The rhetorical drapery that gave Samuel Young such
signal success found no place in Spencer's arguments or in his
pamphlets; but to a logic that deeply penetrated his subject he added
an ethical interest which captivated the mind, as his reasonin