What follows should ring bells in everyone’s head. Many eternal truths within:
[He] was a fluent speaker, and when there was nothing to be said was possessed of great plenty of words. And he was gifted with that peculiar power which enables a man to have the last word in every encounter — a power which we are apt to call repartee, which is in truth the readiness which comes from continual practice. You…meet two men of whom you…know the one to be endowed with the brilliancy of true genius, and the other to be possessed of but moderate parts, and…find the former never able to hold his own against the latter. In a debate, the man of moderate parts will seem to be greater than the man of genius. But this skill of tongue, this glibness of speech is hardly an affair of intellect at all. It is…not the wares which he has to take to market, but the vehicle in which they may be carried…
Now [he] was a great vehicle but he had not in truth much to send. He could turn a laugh against an adversary; no man better. He could seize, at the moment, every advantage which the opportunity might give him. The [Committee] on which he sat…[was] to him a fortification of which he knew how to use every stone…
Politics had never been to him a study; but to [political] strategy he had devoted all his faculties….He knew how to blind the eyes of members to the truth. Those on the opposite side of the House would find themselves checkmated by his astuteness, when, with all the pieces on the board, there should be none which they could move. And this to him was Government! It was to these purposes that he conceived that a great statesman should devote himself! [Congressional] management! That, in his mind, was under this Constitution of ours the one act essential for government.
In all this he was very great; but when it might fall to his duty either to suggest or to defend any real piece of proposed legislation he was less happy.