During the remainder of this session Mr. Clay took opposition ground on all the cardinal points maintained by the President, especially on the constitutional question concerning internal improvements, and upon South American affairs. His course was so obviously marked with the design of rising on the ruins of Mr. Monroe's administration, that one of his own papers in Kentucky publicly stated that "he had broken ground within battering distance of the President's message." In a speech made on the 24th of March, 1817, on the general appropriation bill, he moved an appropriation of eighteen thousand dollars as one year's salary and an outfit for a minister to the government of Buenos Ayres. This was only a mode of proposing a formal acknowledgment of that government. The motion was soon after rejected in the House of Representatives by a great majority, and his attempt to make manifest the unpopularity of the administration proved a failure. In July, 1818, news came that General Jackson had taken Pensacola by storm,--a measure which excited universal surprise. But one opinion appeared at first to prevail in the nation,--that Jackson had not only acted without, but against, his instructions; that he had commenced war upon Spain, which could not be justified, and in which, if not disavowed by the administration, they would be abandoned by the country. Every member of the cabinet, the President included, concurred in these sentiments, with the exception of Mr. Adams. He maintained that there was no real, though an apparent violation of his instructions; that his proceedings were justified by the necessity of the case, and the misconduct of the Spanish commandant in Florida. Mr. Adams admitted that the question was embarrassing and complicated, as involving not merely an actual war with Spain, but also the power of the executive to authorize hostilities without a declaration of war by Congress. He averred that there was no doubt that _defensive_ acts of hostility might be authorized by the executive, and on this ground Jackson had been authorized to cross the Spanish frontier in pursuit of the Indian enemy. His argument was, that the question of the constitutional authority of the executive was in its nature defensive; that all the rest, even to the taking the fort of Barancas by storm, was incidental, deriving its character from the object, which was not hostility to Spain, but the termination of the Indian war. This was the justification offered by Jackson himself, who alleged that an imaginary air-line of the thirty-first degree of latitude could not afford protection to our frontier, while the Indians had a safe refuge in Florida; and that all his operations had been founded on that consideration.