after eleven, in his chamber at Washington. To those who followed his lead
in public affairs, it more appropriately belongs to pronounce his eulogy
and pay specific honors to the memory of the illustrious dead. But all
Americans may show the grief which his death inspires, for his character
and fame are national property. As on a question of liberty he knew no
North, no South, no East, no West, but only the Union which held them all
in its sacred circle, so now his countrymen will know no grief that is not
as wide-spread as the bounds of the confederacy. The career of Henry Clay
was a public career. From his youth he has been devoted to the public
service, at a period, too, in the world's history justly regarded as a
remarkable era in human affairs. He witnessed in the beginning the throes
of the French Revolution. He saw the rise and fall of Napoleon. He was
called upon to legislate for America and direct her policy when all Europe
was the battlefield of contending dynasties, and when the struggle for
supremacy imperilled the rights of all neutral nations. His voice spoke
war and peace in the contest with Great Britain.
"When Greece rose against the Turks and struck for liberty, his name was
mingled with the battle-cry of freedom. When South America threw off the
thraldom of Spain, his speeches were read at the head of her armies by
Bolivar. His name has been, and will continue to be, hallowed in two
hemispheres, for it is
"'One of the few, the immortal names
That were not born to die!'
"To the ardent patriot and profound statesman he added a quality possessed
by few of the gifted on earth. His eloquence has not been surpassed. In
the effective power to move the heart of man, Clay was without an equal,
and the heaven-born endowment, in the spirit of its origin, has been
most conspicuously exhibited against intestine feud. On at least three
important occasions he has quelled our civil commotions by a power and
influence which belonged to no other statesman of his age and times. And
in our last internal discord, when this Union trembled to its centre, in
old age he left the shades of private life, and gave the death-blow to
fraternal strife, with the vigor of his earlier years, in a series
of senatorial efforts which in themselves would bring immortality by
challenging comparison with the efforts of any statesman in any age. He
exorcised the demon which possessed the body politic, and gave peace to a
distracted land. Alas! the achievement cost him his life. He sank day by
day to the tomb his pale but noble brow bound with a triple wreath, put
there by a grateful country. May his ashes rest in peace, while his spirit
goes to take its station among the great and good men who preceded him."
While it is customary and proper upon occasions like the present to give
a brief sketch of the life of the deceased, in the case of Mr. Clay it is
less necessary than most others; for his biography has been written and
rewritten and read and reread for the last twenty-five years; so that,
with the exception of a few of the latest incidents of his life, all is
as well known as it can be. The short sketch which I give is, therefore,
merely to maintain the connection of this discourse.
Henry Clay was born on the twelfth day of April, 1777, in Hanover County,
Virginia. Of his father, who died in the fourth or fifth year of Henry's
age, little seems to be known, except that he was a respectable man and
a preacher of the Baptist persuasion. Mr. Clay's education to the end of
life was comparatively limited. I say "to the end of life," because I
have understood that from time to time he added something to his education
during the greater part of his whole life. Mr. Clay's lack of a more
perfect early education, however it may be regretted generally, teaches
at least one profitable lesson: it teaches that in this country one
can scarcely be so poor but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient
education to get through the world respectably. In his twenty-third
year Mr. Clay was licensed to practise law, and emigrated to Lexington,
Kentucky. Here he commenced and continued the practice till the year
1803, when he was first elected to the Kentucky Legislature. By successive
elections he was continued in the Legislature till the latter part of
1806, when he was elected to fill a vacancy of a single session in the
United States Senate. In 1807 he was again elected to the Kentucky House
of Representatives, and by that body chosen Speaker. In 1808 he was
re-elected to the same body. In 1809 he was again chosen to fill a vacancy
of two years in the United States Senate. In 1811 he was elected to the
United States House of Representatives, and on the first day of taking his
seat in that body he was chosen its Speaker. In 1813 he was again elected
Speaker. Early in 1814, being the period of our last British war, Mr. Clay
was sent as commissioner, with others, to negotiate a treaty of peace,
which treaty was concluded in the latter part of the same year. On his
return from Europe he was again elected to the lower branch of Congress,
and on taking his seat in December, 1815, was called to his old post-the
Speaker's chair, a position in which he was retained by successive
elections, with one brief intermission, till the inauguration of John
Quincy Adams, in March, 1825. He was then appointed Secretary of State,
and occupied that important station till the inauguration of General
Jackson, in March, 1829. After this he returned to Kentucky, resumed the
practice of law, and continued it till the autumn of 1831, when he was by
the Legislature of Kentucky again placed in the United States Senate. By
a reelection he was continued in the Senate till he resigned his seat and
retired, in March, 1848. In December, 1849, he again took his seat in the
Senate, which he again resigned only a few months before his death.
By the foregoing it is perceived that the period from the beginning of Mr.
Clay's official life in 1803 to the end of 1852 is but one year short
of half a century, and that the sum of all the intervals in it will not
amount to ten years. But mere duration of time in office constitutes the
smallest part of Mr. Clay's history. Throughout that long period he has
constantly been the most loved and most implicitly followed by friends,
and the most dreaded by opponents, of all living American politicians. In
all the great questions which have agitated the country, and particularly
in those fearful crises, the Missouri question, the nullification
question, and the late slavery question, as connected with the newly
acquired territory, involving and endangering the stability of the Union,
his has been the leading and most conspicuous part. In 1824 he was first
a candidate for the Presidency, and was defeated; and, although he was
successively defeated for the same office in 1832 and in 1844, there has
never been a moment since 1824 till after 1848 when a very large portion
of the American people did not cling to him with an enthusiastic hope and
purpose of still elevating him to the Presidency. With other men, to
be defeated was to be forgotten; but with him defeat was but a trifling
incident, neither changing him nor the world's estimate of him. Even those
of both political parties who have been preferred to him for the highest
office have run far briefer courses than he, and left him still shining
high in the heavens of the political world. Jackson, Van Buren, Harnson,
Polk, and Taylor all rose after, and set long before him. The spell--the
long-enduring spell--with which the souls of men were bound to him is a
miracle. Who can compass it? It is probably true he owed his pre-eminence
to no one quality, but to a fortunate combination of several. He was
surpassingly eloquent; but many eloquent men fail utterly, and they are
not, as a class, generally successful. His judgment was excellent;
but many men of good judgment live and die unnoticed. His will was
indomitable; but this quality often secures to its owner nothing better
than a character for useless obstinacy. These, then, were Mr. Clay's
leading qualities. No one of them is very uncommon; but all together are
rarely combined in a single individual, and this is probably the reason
why such men as Henry Clay are so rare in the world.
Mr. Clay's eloquence did not consist, as many fine specimens of eloquence
do, of types and figures, of antithesis and elegant arrangement of words
and sentences, but rather of that deeply earnest and impassioned tone
and manner which can proceed only from great sincerity, and a thorough
conviction in the speaker of the justice and importance of his cause. This
it is that truly touches the chords of sympathy; and those who heard
Mr. Clay never failed to be moved by it, or ever afterward forgot the
impression. All his efforts were made for practical effect. He never spoke
merely to be heard. He never delivered a Fourth of July oration, or a
eulogy on an occasion like this. As a politician or statesman, no one was
so habitually careful to avoid all sectional ground. Whatever he did he
did for the whole country. In the construction of his measures, he
ever carefully surveyed every part of the field, and duly weighed every
conflicting interest. Feeling as he did, and as the truth surely is, that
the world's best hope depended on the continued union of these States,
he was ever jealous of and watchful for whatever might have the slightest
tendency to separate them.
Mr. Clay's predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion
to the cause of human liberty--a strong sympathy with the oppressed
everywhere, and an ardent wish for their elevation. With him this was a
primary and all-controlling passion. Subsidiary to this was the conduct
of his whole life. He loved his country partly because it was his own
country, and mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a
zeal for its advancement, prosperity, and glory, because he saw in such
the advancement, prosperity, and glory of human liberty, human right, and
human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen, partly because
they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that free men
could be prosperous.
That his views and measures were always the wisest needs not to be
affirmed; nor should it be on this occasion, where so many thinking
differently join in doing honor to his memory. A free people in times of
peace and quiet when pressed by no common danger-naturally divide into
parties. At such times the man who is of neither party is not, cannot be,
of any consequence. Mr. Clay therefore was of a party. Taking a prominent
part, as he did, in all the great political questions of his country for
the last half century, the wisdom of his course on many is doubted and
denied by a large portion of his countrymen; and of such it is not now
proper to speak particularly. But there are many others, about his course
upon which there is little or no disagreement amongst intelligent and
patriotic Americans. Of these last are the War of 1812, the Missouri
question, nullification, and the now recent compromise measures. In 1812
Mr. Clay, though not unknown, was still a young man. Whether we should
go to war with Great Britain being the question of the day, a minority
opposed the declaration of war by Congress, while the majority, though
apparently inclined to war, had for years wavered, and hesitated to act
decisively. Meanwhile British aggressions multiplied, and grew more daring
and aggravated. By Mr. Clay more than any other man the struggle was
brought to a decision in Congress. The question, being now fully before
Congress, came up in a variety of ways in rapid succession, on most of
which occasions Mr. Clay spoke. Adding to all the logic of which the
subject was susceptible that noble inspiration which came to him as it
came to no other, he aroused and nerved and inspired his friends, and
confounded and bore down all opposition. Several of his speeches on these
occasions were reported and are still extant, but the best of them all
never was. During its delivery the reporters forgot their vocation,
dropped their pens, and sat enchanted from near the beginning to quite the
close. The speech now lives only in the memory of a few old men, and the
enthusiasm with which they cherish their recollection of it is absolutely
astonishing. The precise language of this speech we shall never know; but
we do know we cannot help knowing--that with deep pathos it pleaded the
cause of the injured sailor, that it invoked the genius of the Revolution,
that it apostrophized the names of Otis, of Henry, and of Washington, that
it appealed to the interests, the pride, the honor, and the glory of
the nation, that it shamed and taunted the timidity of friends, that it
scorned and scouted and withered the temerity of domestic foes, that
it bearded and defied the British lion, and, rising and swelling and
maddening in its course, it sounded the onset, till the charge, the shock,
the steady struggle, and the glorious victory all passed in vivid review
before the entranced hearers.
Important and exciting as was the war question of 1812, it never so
alarmed the sagacious statesmen of the country for the safety of the
Republic as afterward did the Missouri question. This sprang from
that unfortunate source of discord--negro slavery. When our Federal
Constitution was adopted, we owned no territory beyond the limits or
ownership of the States, except the territory northwest of the River Ohio
and east of the Mississippi. What has since been formed into the States
of Maine, Kentucky and Tennessee, was, I believe, within the limits of
or owned by Massachusetts, Virginia, and North Carolina. As to the
Northwestern Territory, provision had been made even before the adoption
of the Constitution that slavery should never go there. On the admission
of States into the Union, carved from the territory we owned before the
Constitution, no question, or at most no considerable question, arose
about slavery--those which were within the limits of or owned by the old
States following respectively the condition of the parent State, and those
within the Northwest Territory following the previously made provision.
But in 1803 we purchased Louisiana of the French, and it included with
much more what has since been formed into the State of Missouri. With
regard to it, nothing had been done to forestall the question of slavery.
When, therefore, in 1819, Missouri, having formed a State constitution
without excluding slavery, and with slavery already actually existing
within its limits, knocked at the door of the Union for admission, almost
the entire representation of the non-slaveholding States objected. A
fearful and angry struggle instantly followed. This alarmed thinking
men more than any previous question, because, unlike all the former,
it divided the country by geographical lines. Other questions had their
opposing partisans in all localities of the country and in almost every
family, so that no division of the Union could follow such without a
separation of friends to quite as great an extent as that of opponents.
Not so with the Missouri question. On this a geographical line could be
traced, which in the main would separate opponents only. This was the
danger. Mr. Jefferson, then in retirement, wrote:
"I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers or to pay any attention
to public affairs, confident they were in good hands and content to be a
passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this
momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled
me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is
hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final
sentence. A geographical line coinciding with a marked principle, moral
and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men,
will never be obliterated, and every irritation will mark it deeper and
deeper. I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth
who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy
reproach in any practicable way.
"The cession of that kind of property--for it is so misnamed--is a
bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought if in that way a
general emancipation and expatriation could be effected, and gradually and
with due sacrifices I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by
the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in
one scale, and self-preservation in the other."
Mr. Clay was in Congress, and, perceiving the danger, at once engaged his
whole energies to avert it. It began, as I have said, in 1819; and it did
not terminate till 1821. Missouri would not yield the point; and Congress
that is, a majority in Congress--by repeated votes showed a determination
not to admit the State unless it should yield. After several failures,
and great labor on the part of Mr. Clay to so present the question that a
majority could consent to the admission, it was by a vote rejected, and,
as all seemed to think, finally. A sullen gloom hung over the nation. All
felt that the rejection of Missouri was equivalent to a dissolution of the
Union, because those States which already had what Missouri was rejected
for refusing to relinquish would go with Missouri. All deprecated and
deplored this, but none saw how to avert it. For the judgment of members
to be convinced of the necessity of yielding was not the whole difficulty;
each had a constituency to meet and to answer to. Mr. Clay, though worn
down and exhausted, was appealed to by members to renew his efforts at
compromise. He did so, and by some judicious modifications of his plan,
coupled with laborious efforts with individual members and his own
overmastering eloquence upon that floor, he finally secured the admission
of the State. Brightly and captivating as it had previously shown, it was
now perceived that his great eloquence was a mere embellishment, or at
most but a helping hand to his inventive genius and his devotion to his
country in the day of her extreme peril.
After the settlement of the Missouri question, although a portion of the
American people have differed with Mr. Clay, and a majority even
appear generally to have been opposed to him on questions of ordinary
administration, he seems constantly to have been regarded by all as the
man for the crisis. Accordingly, in the days of nullification, and more
recently in the reappearance of the slavery question connected with
our territory newly acquired of Mexico, the task of devising a mode of
adjustment seems to have been cast upon Mr. Clay by common consent--and
his performance of the task in each case was little else than a literal
fulfilment of the public expectation.
Mr. Clay's efforts in behalf of the South Americans, and afterward in
behalf of the Greeks, in the times of their respective struggles for civil
liberty, are among the finest on record, upon the noblest of all themes,
and bear ample corroboration of what I have said was his ruling passion--a
love of liberty and right, unselfishly, and for their own sakes.
Having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am
unwilling to close without referring more particularly to Mr. Clay's
views and conduct in regard to it. He ever was on principle and in feeling
opposed to slavery. The very earliest, and one of the latest, public
efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were
both made in favor of gradual emancipation. He did not perceive that on
a question of human right the negroes were to be excepted from the human
race. And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves. Cast into life when
slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive,
as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated
without producing a greater evil even to the cause of human liberty
itself. His feeling and his judgment, therefore, ever led him to oppose
both extremes of opinion on the subject. Those who would shiver into
fragments the Union of these States, tear to tatters its now venerated
Constitution, and even burn the last copy of the Bible, rather than
slavery should continue a single hour, together with all their more
halting sympathizers, have received, and are receiving, their just
execration; and the name and opinions and influence of Mr. Clay are fully
and, as I trust, effectually and enduringly arrayed against them. But I
would also, if I could, array his name, opinions, and influence against
the opposite extreme--against a few but an increasing number of men who,
for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to
ridicule the white man's charter of freedom, the declaration that "all men
are created free and equal." So far as I have learned, the first American
of any note to do or attempt this was the late John C. Calhoun; and if I
mistake not, it soon after found its way into some of the messages of the
Governor of South Carolina. We, however, look for and are not much shocked
by political eccentricities and heresies in South Carolina. But only
last year I saw with astonishment what purported to be a letter of a very
distinguished and influential clergyman of Virginia, copied, with apparent
approbation, into a St. Louis newspaper, containing the following to me
very unsatisfactory language:
"I am fully aware that there is a text in some Bibles that is not in mine.
Professional abolitionists have made more use of it than of any passage in
the Bible. It came, however, as I trace it, from Saint Voltaire, and was
baptized by Thomas Jefferson, and since almost universally regarded as
canonical authority`All men are born free and equal.'
"This is a genuine coin in the political currency of our generation. I am
sorry to say that I have never seen two men of whom it is true. But I must
admit I never saw the Siamese Twins, and therefore will not dogmatically
say that no man ever saw a proof of this sage aphorism."
This sounds strangely in republican America. The like was not heard in the
fresher days of the republic. Let us contrast with it the language of that
truly national man whose life and death we now commemorate and lament: I
quote from a speech of Mr. Clay delivered before the American Colonization
Society in 1827: