He used to say that Congress could scarcely do too little.  His ideal of a session was one in which members should make speeches till every man had fully expressed and perfectly relieved his mind, then pass the appropriation bills, and go home.  And we ought not to forgot that, when President John Quincy Adams brought forward his schemes for covering the continent with magnificent works at the expense of the treasury of the United States, and of uniting the republics of both Americas into a kind of holy alliance, it was Randolph’s piercing sarcasm which, more than anything else, made plain to new members the fallacy, the peril, of such a system.  His opposition to this wild federalism involved his support of Andrew Jackson; but there was no other choice open to him.

Seldom did he display in Congress so much audacity and ingenuity as in defending General Jackson while he was a candidate for the Presidency against Mr. Adams.  The two objections oftenest urged against Jackson were that he was a military chieftain, and that he could not spell.  Mr. Randolph discoursed on these two points in a most amusing manner, displaying all the impudence and ignorance of the tory, inextricably mingled with the good sense and wit of the man.  “General Jackson cannot write,” said a friend.  “Granted,” replied he.  “General Jackson cannot write because he was never taught; but his competitor cannot write because he was not teachable.”  He made a bold remark in one of his Jacksonian harangues.  “The talent which enables a man to write a book or make a speech has no more relation to the leading of an army or a senate, than it has to the dressing of a dinner.”  He pronounced a fine eulogium on the Duke of Marlborough, one of the worst spellers in Europe, and then asked if gentlemen would have had that illustrious man “superseded by a Scotch schoolmaster.”  It was in the same ludicrous harangue that he uttered his famous joke upon those schools in which young ladies were said to be “finished.”  “Yes,” he exclaimed, “finished indeed; finished for all the duties of a wife, or mother, or mistress of a family.”  Again he said: 

“There is much which it becomes a second-rate man to know, which a first-rate man ought to be ashamed to know.  No head was ever clear and sound that was stuffed with book-learning.  My friend, W.R.  Johnson, has many a groom that can clean and dress a racehorse, and ride him too, better than he can.”

He made the sweeping assertion, that no man had ever presided over a government with advantage to the country governed, who had not in him the making of a good general; for, said he, “the talent for government lies in these two things,—­sagacity to perceive, and decision to act.”  Really, when we read this ingenious apology for, or rather eulogy of, ignorance, we cease to wonder that General Jackson should have sent him to Russia.