His replies after their [his colleagues in the House and Senate] are unprintable and shocked even Congress.
He called Daniel Webster “a vile slanderer,” President Adams a “traitor,” and Edward Livingston “the most contemptible and degraded of beings, whom no man ought to touch, unless with a pair of tongs.” In return, people called him “the half-mad Virginian,” “that long-dreaded churl and tyrant,” “a planetary plague,” “a boy with a mischievous syringe full of dirty water,” and “a maniac in his strait jacket, accidentally broken out of his cell.”
He challenged Daniel Webster to a duel over a debate on sugar. He called John Eppes a liar and promptly accepted his challenge. Nothing happened. Associates kept negotiating him out of duels. Once, he retracted his words. He told a man that he “wasn’t fit to carry guts to a bear.” The man demanded an apology or a duel. Randolph smiled and said, all right, he’d take it back, the fellow was fit to carry guts to a bear.
A raging snob, he hated democracy, the working classes, Negroes, most people who weren’t Virginians, and above all, Kentucky, that unworthy backwoods poor relation of Virginia’s, and Kentuckians like Henry Clay.
Source:
Holland, Barbara. “V. Birth of a Nation.” Gentlemen’s Blood: A History of Dueling From Swords at Dawn to Pistols at Dusk. Bloomsbury, 2004. 121-22. Print.
Further Reading:
@Boukert this sort of thing is why maintain that our President's political discourse is nothing new.