HENRY CLAY,

POPULAR HERO, PATRIOT, AND STATESMAN.

ITH the close of the great civil war in 1865 disappeared from our politics the great problem which for half a century had absorbed the attention and tasked the abilities of American statesmen Throughout that period there was always one overshadowing subject. Whatever other ques tions of domestic policy came up,-tariff, currency, internal improvements, State rights, they were always subordinate to the main question, how to preserve the Union and slavery together. Some, like Calhoun, were ready to abandon the Union to save slavery; others, like Garrison, were ready to abandon the Union to destroy slavery; but between

these extremes stood a great body of able and patriotic statesmen, who loved and prized the Union above all else, and who, to save it, would make any sacrifice, would join in any compromise. At the head of these, for more than fifty years, towered the great figure of Henry Clay.

Not often does a man whose life is spent in purely civil affairs become such a popular hero and idol as did Clay-especially when it is his fate never to reach the highest place in the people's gift. "Was there ever," says Parton, "a public man, not at the head of a state, so beloved as he? Who ever heard such cheers, so hearty, distinct and ringing, as those which his name evoked? Men shed tears at his defeat, and women went to bed sick from pure sympathy with his disappointment. He could not travel during the last thirty years of his life, but only make progresses. When he left home the public seized him and bore him along over the land, the committee of one State passing him on to the committee of another, and the hurrahs of one town dying away as those of the next caught his ear." One evidence of his popularity is the great number of children named in his honor. An English woman traveling in America during the Presidential canvass of 1844 writes that at least three-fourths of all the boy babies born in that year must have been named for Henry Clay. "Even now, more than thirty years after his death," says Carl Schurz, writing in 1886, "we may hear old men, who knew him in the days of his strength, speak of him

with an enthusiasm and affection so warm and fresh as to convince us that the recollection of having followed his leadership is among the dearest treasures of their memory."

Henry Clay was born in Hanover county, near Richmond, Virginia, in one of the darkest days of the Revolution,—the year of 1777; the year of the battles of Brandywine and Germantown, before yet the glad news of Burgoyne's surrender had come to cheer the hearts of the struggling colonists. His father, a poor Baptist preacher, died when Henry was four years old, leaving a wife and seven children. There is a story that while his body was lying in the house, a party of British cavalry made a raid through the neighborhood, and left on Mrs. Clay's table a handful of silver to pay for some property they had taken; but that as soon as they were gone, even in her poverty and grief the spirited woman swept the money from the table and threw it in the fireplace.

Clay's boyhood was that of the typical "self-made man,"-a time of hard labor, poverty, and small opportunities. "We catch our first glimpse of the boy when he sat in a little log school-house, without windows or floor, one of a humming score of shoeless boys, where a good-natured, irritable, drinking English schoolmaster taught him to read, write, and cipher as far as Practice. This was the only school he ever attended, and that was all he learned at it. His widowed mother with her seven young children, her little farm, and two or three slaves, could do no more for him. Next, we see him a tall, awkward, slender stripling of thirteen, still barefoot, clad in homespun butternut of his mother's making, tilling her fields, and going to mill with his bag of corn strapped upon the family pony." At fourteen, in the year 1791, a place was found for him in a Richmond drug store, where he served as errand boy and youngest clerk for one year.

At this time occurred an event which decided his future. His mother having married again, her husband had influence enough to obtain for the youth a clerkship in the office of the Court of Chancery. The young gentlemen employed in that office long remembered the entrance among them of their new comrade. He was fifteen at the time, but very tall for his age, very slender, very awkward, and far from handsome. His good mother had arrayed him in a full suit of pepper-and-salt "figinny," an old Virginia fabric of silk and cotton. His shirt and shirt-collar were stiffly starched, and his coat-tail stood out boldly behind him. The dandy clerks of Richmond exchanged glances as this gawky figure entered and took his place at a desk to begin work.

As he grew older, the raw and awkward stripling became a young man whose every movement had a winning or commanding grace. Handsome he never was; but his ruddy face and abundant light hair, the grandeur of his forehead, and the speaking intelligence of his countenance, more than atoned for the irregularity of his features. But of all the physical gifts bestowed by nature

upon this favored child, the most unique and admirable was his voice. There was a depth of tone in it, a volume, a compass, a rich and tender harmony, which invested all he said with majesty. Parton writes that he heard it last when Clay was an old man, past seventy; and all he said was a few words of acknowledgment to a group of ladies in the largest hall in Philadelphia. "He spoke only in the ordinary tone of conversation; but his voice filled the room as the organ fills a great cathedral, and the ladies stood spellbound as the swelling cadences rolled about the vast apartment. We have heard much of Whitefield's piercing voice and Patrick Henry's silvery tones, but we cannot believe that either of those natural orators possessed an organ superior to Clay's majestic bass. No one who ever heard him speak will find it difficult to believe what tradition reports, that he was the peer

less star of the Richmond Debating

Society in 1795."

But he soon discovered that these gifts would not get him a paying practice as an attorney in Richmond so quickly as he desired; and as his mother and step-father had removed to Kentucky in 1792, he resolved to follow them to the western wilds, and there "grow up with the country." He was in his twentyfirst year when he left Richmond, with his license to practice as an attorney, but with little else, in his pocket.

A tall, plain, poor, friendless youth was young Henry Clay, when he set up in Lexington, and announced himself a candidate for practice as an attorney. He had not even the means of paying his board. "I remember," he said, in a speech in 1842, "how comfortable I thought I should be if I could make £100, Virginia money, per year; and with what delight I received my first fifteen-shilling fee. My hopes were more than realized. I immediately rushed into a lucrative practice."

Less than two years after his arrival at Lexington, in April, 1799, Clay had achieved a position sufficiently secure to ask for and to obtain the hand of Lucretia Hart, the daughter of a man of high character and prominent standing in the State. She was a very estimable woman, and a most devoted wife to him. His prosperity increased rapidly; so that soon he was able to purchase Ashland, an estate of some six hundred acres, near Lexington, which afterward became famous as Henry Clay's home.

During the first thirteen years of Henry Clay's active life as a politician, he appears only as the eloquent champion of the policy of Mr. Jefferson, whom he esteemed the first and best of living men. After defending him on the stump and aiding him in the Kentucky Legislature, he was sent in 1806, when scarcely thirty, to fill for one term a seat in the Senate of the United States, made vacant

by the resignation of one of the Kentucky Senators. Returning home at the end of the session, he re-entered the Kentucky Legislature. In support of President Jefferson's policy of non-intercourse with the warring nations of Europe, who were preying upon American commerce, Mr. Clay proposed that members of the Legislature should bind themselves to wear nothing that was not of American manufacture. A Federalist member, ignorant of the fact that the refusal of the people to use foreign imports had caused the repeal of the Stamp Act, and would have postponed the Revolution but for the accident Lexington, denounced Mr. Clay's proposition as the act of a demagogue. Clay challenged this ill-informed gentleman, and a duel resulted, in which two shots were exchanged, and both antagonists were slightly wounded. Elected again to the Senate for an unexpired term, he re-appeared in that body in 1809, and sat during two sessions.

Mr. Clay's public life proper began in November, 1811, as a member of the House of Representatives. He was immediately elected speaker by the war party, by the decisive majority of thirty-one. He was then thirty-four years

of age.

It is agreed that to Henry Clay, Speaker of the House of Representatives, more than to any other individual, we owe the war of 1812. When the House hesitated, it was he who, descending from the chair, spoke so as to re-assure it. When President Madison faltered, it was the stimulus of Clay's resistless presence that put heart into him again. Clay it was whose clarion notes rang out over departing regiments, and kindled within them the martial fire; and it was Clay's speeches which the soldiers loved to read by the camp-fire. When the war was going all wrong in the first year, President Madison wished to appoint Clay commander-in-chief of the land forces; but, said Gallatin, "What shall we do without him in the House of Representatives?"

In 1814, Clay was sent with four other commissioners to Ghent, in Belgium, to arrange the terms of a peace with England. A single anecdote will illustrate the impression he everywhere produced. An octogenarian British earl, who had retired from public life because of his years, but who still cherished a natural interest in public men and measures, being struck by the impression made in the aristocratic circles of London by the American commissioners, then on their way home from Ghent, requested a friend to bring them to see him at his house, to which his growing infirmities confined him. The visit was promptly and cheerfully paid, and the obliging friend afterwards inquired of the old lord as to the impression the Americans had made upon him. "Ah!" said the veteran, with the "light of other days" gleaming from his eyes, "I liked them all, but I liked the Kentucky man best." It was so everywhere.

From 1815, when he returned from Europe, until 1825, when he became Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams, Clay was Speaker of the House of Representatives. He was confessedly the best presiding officer that any deliberative body in America has ever known, and none was ever more severely tried. The intensity and bitterness of party feeling during the earlier portion of his speakership cannot now be realized except by the few who remember those days. On the floor of the house, Mr. Clay was often impetuous in discussion, and delighted to relieve the tedium of debate, and modify the bitterness of antagonism, by a sportive jest or lively repartee. On one occasion, General Smythe of Virginia, who often afflicted the house by the dryness and verbosity of his harangues, had paused in the middle of a speech, which seemed likely to endure forever, to send to the library for a book from which he wished to note a passage. Fixing his eye on Mr. Clay, he observed the Kentuckian writhing in his seat, as if his patience had already been exhausted. "You, sir," remarked Smythe, addressing him, "speak for the present generation; but I speak for posterity." "Yes," said Clay, "and you seem resolved to speak until the arrival of your audience."

Only once in the course of his long representative career was Clay obliged to canvass for his election, and he was never defeated, nor ever could be, before