In the middle of the 19th century, bands of adventurers organized in the United States were active in Central America and the West Indies, stirring up revolutions. Such an adventurer came to be known in English as a filibuster, from the Spanish filibustero. The word had originated in Dutch as vrijbuiter, meaning “pirate,” but its travels on the way from Dutch to Spanish are not well documented. It is likely that the Spanish borrowed the word from the French flibustier (or fribustier), which probably came from the English word freebooter (or fleebooter), which came from the Dutch vrijbuiter. So, now the word was back in English again but with a new form and a new meaning.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., early in the nineteenth century, John Randolph, a senator from Virginia, got into the habit of making long and irrelevant speeches on the floor of the Senate. Vice President John C. Calhoun refused to rule Randolph out of order, so the Senate soon voted to give the presiding officer explicit power to deal with such problems. In 1872, however, Vice President Schuyler Colfax struck a blow against the expeditious handling of Senate business with his ruling that “under the practice of the Senate the presiding officer could not restrain a Senator in remarks which the Senator considers pertinent to the pending issue.” Within a few years the use of delaying tactics in the Senate was rife. Senators practicing such tactics were compared with military adventurers, filibusters, who wreaked havoc in other countries, and were said to be filibustering.

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