1815-1816.
FOURTEENTH CONGRESS-- NATIONAL BANK--SPECIE RESOLUTIONS-- TARIFF OF 1816--DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER'S MOTHER--CHALLENGED BY MR. RANDOLPH-RETIRES FROM CONGRESS--REMOVAL TO BOSTON.
IN 1831, Mr. Webster said that he had seen no such Congress for talents as the Fourteenth.1 It commenced its first session in December, 1815. Mr. Clay, after taking part in the negotiation of the treaty of Ghent, bad returned to Congress, and was again Speaker. Mr. Calhoun had also been reëlected. The celebrated John Randolph, of Roanoke, a man of genius and with more than the usual eccentricities of genius, was again in Congress. Mr. Pinkney, then the first lawyer in the United States, and enjoying by far the largest practice at the bar of the Supreme Court, was a member of this Congress until April, when he resigned his seat to accept the mission to Russia. Joseph Hopkinson and John Sergeant, of Pennsylvania; Alexander C. Hanson, of Maryland; Daniel Sheffey, of Virginia; Henry Southard, of New Jersey; William Lowndes, of South Carolina; William Gaston, of North Carolina; John McLean, of Ohio; Samuel R. Betts, of New York; John Forsyth, of Georgia; and many other able men were on the roll of a House which, even without the names of Clay, Calhoun, Randolph, Pinkney, and Webster, would have been accounted no ordinary assémbly). Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Webster, on opposite sides,
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