AFTER the reading of the Journal, Mr. Underwood rose, and addressed the
senate as follows:
MR. PRESIDENT: I rise to announce the death of my colleague,
Mr. Clay. He died at his lodgings, in the National Hotel of this city,
at seventeen minutes past eleven o’clock yesterday morning, in the
seventy-sixth year of his age. He expired with perfect composure, and
without a groan or struggle.
By his death our country has lost one of its most eminent citizens and
statesmen; and, I think, its greatest genius. I shall not detain the
Senate by narrating the transactions of his long and useful life. His
distinguished services as a statesman are inseparably connected with
the history of his country. As Representative and Speaker in the other
House of Congress, as Senator in this body, as Secretary of State, and
as Envoy abroad, he has, in all these positions, exhibited a wisdom
and patriotism which have made a deep and lasting impression upon
the grateful hearts of his countrymen. His thoughts and his actions
have already been published to the world in written biography; in
Congressional debates and reports; in the Journals of the two Houses;
and in the pages of American history. They have been commemorated by
monuments erected on the wayside. They have been engraven on medals of
gold. Their memory will survive the monuments of marble and the medals
of gold; for these are effaced and decay by the friction of ages. But
the thoughts and actions of my late colleague have become identified
with the immortality of the human mind, and will pass down from
generation to generation, as a portion of our national inheritance,
incapable of annihilation, so long as genius has an admirer or liberty
a friend.
Mr. President: The character of Henry Clay was formed and developed
by the influence of our free institutions. His physical, mental, and
moral faculties were the gift of God. That they were greatly superior
to the faculties allotted to most men, cannot be questioned. They
were not cultivated, improved, and directed by a liberal or collegiate
education. His respectable parents were not wealthy, and had not the
means of maintaining their children at college. Moreover, his father
died when he was a boy. At an early period, Mr. Clay was thrown upon
his own resources, without patrimony. He grew up in a clerk’s office in
Richmond, Virginia. He there studied law. He emigrated from his native
state, and settled in Lexington, Kentucky, where he commenced the
practice of his profession before he was of full age.
The road to wealth, to honour, and fame, was open before him. Under
our Constitution and laws he might freely employ his great faculties
unobstructed by legal impediments, and unaided by exclusive privileges.
Very soon Mr. Clay made a deep and favorable impression upon the people
among whom he began his career. The excellence of his natural faculties
was soon displayed. Necessity stimulated him in their cultivation.
His assiduity, skill, and fidelity in professional engagements secured
public confidence. He was elected member of the legislature of Kentucky,
in which body he served several sessions prior to 1806. In that year he
was elevated to a seat in the senate of the United States.
At the bar and in the General Assembly of Kentucky, Mr. Clay first
manifested those high qualities as a public speaker which have secured
to him so much popular applause and admiration. His physical and mental
organization eminently qualified him to become a great and impressive
orator. His person was tall, slender, and commanding. His temperament
ardent, fearless, and full of hope. His countenance clear, expressive,
and variable――indicating the emotion which predominated at the moment
with exact similitude. His voice, cultivated and modulated in harmony
with the sentiment he desired to express, fell upon the ear like the
melody of enrapturing music. His eye beaming with intelligence and
flashing with coruscations of genius. His gestures and attitudes
graceful and natural. These personal advantages won the prepossessions
of an audience, even before his intellectual powers began to move his
hearers; and when his strong common sense, his profound reasoning, his
clear conceptions of his subject in all its bearings, and his striking
and beautiful illustrations, united with such personal qualities, were
brought to the discussion of any question, his audience was enraptured,
convinced, and led by the orator as if enchanted by the lyre of Orpheus.
No man was ever blessed by his Creator with faculties of a higher order
of excellence than those given to Mr. Clay. In the quickness of his
perceptions, and the rapidity with which his conclusions were formed,
he had few equals and no superior. He was eminently endowed with a nice,
discriminating taste for order, symmetry, and beauty. He detected in a
moment every thing out of place or deficient in his room, upon his farm,
in his own or the dress of others. He was a skilful judge of the form
and qualities of his domestic animals, which he delighted to raise on
his farm. I could give you instances of the quickness and minuteness
of his keen faculty of observation which never overlooked any thing. A
want of neatness and order was offensive to him. He was particular and
neat in his handwriting and his apparel. A slovenly blot or negligence
of any sort met his condemnation; while he was so organized that he
attended to, and arranged little things to please and gratify his
natural love for neatness, order, and beauty, his great intellectual
faculties grasped all the subjects of jurisprudence and politics with
a facility amounting almost to intuition. As a lawyer, he stood at the
head of his profession. As a statesman, his stand at the head of the
Republican Whig party for nearly half a century, establishes his title
to preeminence among his illustrious associates.
Mr. Clay was deeply versed in all the springs of human action. He had
read and studied biography and history. Shortly after I left college, I
had occasion to call on him in Frankfort, where he was attending court,
and well I remember to have found him with Plutarch’s Lives in his
hands. No one better than he knew how to avail himself of human motives,
and all the circumstances which surrounded a subject, or could present
them with more force and skill to accomplish the object of an argument.
Mr. Clay, throughout his public career, was influenced by the loftiest
patriotism. Confident in the truth of his convictions and the purity
of his purposes, he was ardent, sometimes impetuous, in the pursuit of
objects which he believed essential to the general welfare. Those who
stood in his way were thrown aside without fear or ceremony. He never
affected a courtier’s deference to men or opinions which he thought
hostile to the best interests of his country; and hence he may have
wounded the vanity of those who thought themselves of consequence. It
is certain, whatever the cause, that at one period of his life Mr. Clay
might have been referred to as proof that there is more truth than
fiction in those profound lines of the poet――
‘He who ascends the mountain top shall find
Its loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;
He who surpasses or subdues mankind,
Must look down on the hate of those below:
Though far above the sun of glory glow,
And far beneath the earth and ocean spread.
Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow
Contending tempests on his naked head,
And thus reward the toils which to those summits led.’
Calumny and detraction emptied their vials upon him. But how glorious
the change! He outlived malice and envy. He lived long enough to prove
to the world that his ambition was no more than a holy aspiration to
make his country the greatest, most powerful, and best governed on the
earth. If he desired its highest office, it was because the greater
power and influence resulting from such elevation would enable him to
do more than he otherwise could for the progress and advancement――first
of his own countrymen, then of his whole race. His sympathies embraced
all. The African slave, the Creole of Spanish America, the children
of renovated classic Greece――all families of men, without respect to
color or clime, found in his expanded bosom and comprehensive intellect
a friend of their elevation and amelioration. Such ambition as that,
is God’s implantation in the human heart for raising the down-trodden
nations of the earth, and fitting them for regenerated existence in
politics, in morals, and religion.
Bold and determined as Mr. Clay was in all his actions, he was,
nevertheless, conciliating. He did not obstinately adhere to things
impracticable. If he could not accomplish the best, he contented
himself with the nighest approach to it. He has been the great
compromiser of those political agitations and opposing opinions which
have, in the belief of thousands, at different times, endangered the
perpetuity of our Federal Government and Union.
Mr. Clay was no less remarkable for his admirable social qualities
than for his intellectual abilities. As a companion, he was the delight
of his friends; and no man ever had better or truer. They have loved
him from the beginning, and loved him to the last. His hospitable
mansion at Ashland was always open to their reception. No guest ever
thence departed without feeling happier for his visit. But, alas! that
hospitable mansion has already been converted into a house of mourning;
already has intelligence of his death passed with electric velocity to
that aged and now widowed lady, who, for more than fifty years, bore
to him all the endearing relations of wife, and whose feeble condition
prevented her from joining him in this city, and soothing the anguish
of life’s last scene by those endearing attentions which no one can
give so well as woman and a wife. May God infuse into her heart and
mind the Christian spirit of submission under her bereavement! It
cannot be long before she may expect a rëunion in Heaven. A nation
condoles with her and her children on account of their irreparable loss.
Mr. Clay, from the nature of his disease, declined very gradually. He
bore his protracted sufferings with great equanimity and patience. On
one occasion, he said to me, that when death was inevitable and must
soon come, and when the sufferer was ready to die, he did not perceive
the wisdom of praying to be ‘delivered from sudden death.’ He thought
under such circumstances the sooner suffering was relieved by death
the better. He desired the termination of his own sufferings, while
he acknowledged the duty of patiently waiting and abiding the pleasure
of God. Mr. Clay frequently spoke to me of his hope of eternal life,
founded upon the merits of Jesus Christ as a Saviour; who, as he
remarked, came into the world to bring ‘life and immortality to light.’
He was a member of the Episcopalian Church. In one of our conversations
he told me, that as his hour of dissolution approached, he found that
his affections were concentrating more and more upon his domestic
circle――his wife and children. In my daily visits, he was in the
habit of asking me to detail to him the transactions of the senate.
This I did, and he manifested much interest in passing occurrences.
His inquiries were less frequent as his end approached. For the
week preceding his death, he seemed to be altogether abstracted
from the concerns of the world. When he became so low that he could
not converse without being fatigued, he frequently requested those
around him to converse. He would then quietly listen. He retained his
mental faculties in great perfection. His memory remained perfect. He
frequently mentioned events and conversations of recent occurrence,
showing that he had a perfect recollection of what was said and done.
He said to me that he was grateful to God for continuing to him the
blessing of reason, which enabled him to contemplate and reflect
on his situation. He manifested during his confinement the same
characteristics which marked his conduct through the vigor of his life.
He was exceedingly averse to give his friends ‘_trouble_,’ as he called
it. Some time before he knew it, we commenced waiting through the
night in an adjoining room. He said to me, after passing a painful day,
‘Perhaps some one had better remain all night in the parlor.’ From this
time he knew some friend was constantly at hand, ready to attend to him.
Mr. President, the majestic form of Mr. Clay will no more grace these
halls. No more shall we hear that voice which has so often thrilled and
charmed the assembled representatives of the American people. No more
shall we see that waving hand and eye of light, as when he was engaged
unfolding his policy in regard to the varied interests of our growing
and mighty republican empire. His voice is silent on earth for ever!
The darkness of death has obscured the lustre of his eye. But the
memory of his services――not only to his beloved Kentucky, not only
to the United States, but for the cause of human freedom and progress
throughout the world――will live through future ages, as a bright
example, stimulating and encouraging his own countrymen and the people
of all nations in their patriotic devotions to country and humanity.
With Christians, there is yet a nobler and a higher thought in regard
to Mr. Clay. They will think of him in connection with eternity.
They will contemplate his immortal spirit occupying its true relative
magnitude among the moral stars of glory in the presence of God. They
will think of him as having fulfilled the duties allotted to him on
earth, having been regenerated by Divine grace, and having passed
through the valley of the shadow of death, and reached an everlasting
and happy home in that ‘house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens.’
On Sunday morning last I was watching alone at Mr. Clay’s bedside.
For the last hour he had been unusually quiet, and I thought he was
sleeping. In that, however, he told me I was mistaken. Opening his eyes
and looking at me, he said, ‘Mr. Underwood, there may be some question
where my remains shall be buried. Some persons may designate Frankfort.
I wish to repose at the cemetery in Lexington, where many of my friends
and connections are buried.’ My reply was, ‘I will endeavor to have
your wish executed.’
I now ask the senate to have his corpse transmitted to Lexington,
Kentucky, for sepulture. Let him sleep with the dead of that city, in
and near which his home has been for more than half a century. For the
people of Lexington, the living and the dead, he manifested, by the
statement made to me, a pure and holy sympathy, and a desire to cleave
unto them, as strong as that which bound Ruth to Naomi. It was his
anxious wish to return to them before he died, and to realize what
the daughter of Moab so strongly felt and beautifully expressed: ‘Thy
people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will
I die, and there will I be buried.’
It is fit that the tomb of Henry Clay should be in the city of
Lexington. In our Revolution, liberty’s first libation-blood was
poured out in a town of that name in Massachusetts. On hearing it, the
pioneers of Kentucky consecrated the name, and applied it to the place
where Mr. Clay desired to be buried. The associations connected with
the name harmonize with his character; and the monument erected to his
memory at the spot selected by him will be visited by the votaries of
genius and liberty with that reverence which is inspired at the tomb
of Washington. Upon that monument let his epitaph be engraved.
Mr. President, I have availed myself of Doctor Johnson’s paraphrase of
the epitaph on Thomas Hanmer, with a few alterations and additions, to
express in borrowed verse my admiration for the life and character of
Mr. Clay, and with this heart-tribute to the memory of my illustrious
colleague I conclude my remarks:
Born when Freedom her stripes and stars unfurl’d,
When Revolution shook the startled world――
Heroes and sages taught his brilliant mind
To know and love the rights of all mankind.
‘In life’s first bloom his public toils began,
At once commenced the senator and man:
In business dext’rous, weighty in debate,
Near fifty years he labor’d for the state.
In every speech persuasive wisdom flow’d,
In every act refulgent virtue glow’d;
Suspended faction ceased from rage and strife,
To hear his eloquence and praise his life.
Resistless merit fixed the Members’ choice,
Who hail’d him Speaker with united voice.’
His talents ripening with advancing years――
His wisdom growing with his public cares――
A chosen envoy, war’s dark horrors cease,
And tides of carnage turn to streams of peace.
Conflicting principles; internal strife,
Tariff and slavery, disunion rife,
All, all are _compromised_ by his great hand,
And beams of joy illuminate the land.
Patriot, Christian, Husband, Father, Friend,
Thy work of life achieved a glorious end!