ition must break. The
Regency wanted Herman J. Redfield, one of the seventeen senators whose
opposition to the electoral bill had caused his defeat; but the eighth
district was Clinton's stronghold, and if he nominated Redfield, the
Governor argued, it would deprive him of strength and prestige, and
seriously weaken the cause of Jackson. The Regency, accustomed to
remain faithful to the men who incurred popular odium for being
faithful to them, found it difficult, either to reconcile the
conditions with their wishes, or to compromise upon any one else.
Nevertheless, on the last day of the session, through the active and
judicious agency of Benjamin Knower, John Birdsall of Chautauqua
County, a friend of Clinton, was nominated and confirmed.

[Footnote 248: Jabez D. Hammond, _Political History of New York_, Vol.
2, p. 164.]

In the meantime, Van Buren had returned to his seat in Congress. He
entered the United States Senate in 1821, and, although observing the
decorum expected of a new member of that body, he displayed powers of
mind that distinguished him as a senator of more than ordinary
ability. He now became a parliamentary orator, putting himself at the
head of an anti-Administration faction, and developing the tact and
management of a great parliamentary leader. He had made up his mind
that nothing less than a large and comprehensive difference between
the two wings of the Republican party would be of any real use; so he
arraigned the Administration, with great violence, as un-Republican
and Federalistic. He took a definite stand against internal
improvements by the United States government; he led the opposition to
the appointment of American representatives to the Congress of Panama,
treating the proposed mission as unconstitutional and dangerous; and
he charged the Administration with returning to the practices of the
Federalist party, to which Adams originally belonged, declaring that
the presidential choice of 1825 was not only the restoration of the
men of 1798, but of the principles of that day; that the spirit of
encroachment had become more wary, but not more honest; and that the
system then was coercion, now it was seduction. He classed the famous
alien and sedition laws, of the elder Adams, with the bold avowal of
the younger Adams that it belonged to the President alone to decide
upon the propriety of a foreign mission. Thus, he associated the
administration of John Quincy Adams with the administrati