in April, 1777. His father died when he was quite young; and he was, in
consequence, left to the common educational chances which befriend all
the young citizens of the United States. He studied law after leaving
the common school at which his education began, and settled early at
Lexington, in Kentucky, where his residence has ever since been fixed.
His first important act was labouring diligently in favour of a plan for
the gradual abolition of slavery in Kentucky, which was proposed in
1798. His exertions were, however, in vain. In 1803 he entered the
legislature of his state, and in 1806 was sent, with the dignity of
senator, to Washington, having not quite attained the requisite age. In
1809 he found occasion to advocate the principle of protection to
domestic manufactures, which he has since had the very questionable
honour of imbodying in his famous American System. In 1811 he became
Speaker of the House of Representatives, and for three years exercised
in that situation a powerful influence over the affairs of the country.
In 1814 he was appointed one of the commissioners who negotiated the
treaty of Ghent; and when that business was concluded, he repaired to
London with his colleagues, Messrs. Adams and Gallatin, and there
concluded the commercial convention which was made the basis of all the
subsequent commercial arrangements between the United States and Europe.
In 1825 Mr. Clay accepted the appointment of Secretary of State under
Mr. Adams, an act for which he is still extensively and vehemently
blamed, but with how much or how little reason I do not pretend, from
want of knowledge of the party politics of the time, to understand.
While in this office he did a great deal in procuring, with much labour
and difficulty, a recognition of the independence of the Spanish
colonies in South America; a recognition which had the all-important
effect of deterring the great European powers from their contemplated
intervention on behalf of Spain. Mr. Clay's speeches were read at the
head of the armies of the South American republics; and if his name were
forgotten everywhere else, it would stand in the history of their
independence. Mr. Clay has since been a powerful advocate of internal
improvements, and the framer of "the American System;" the founder of
the protective policy, which I believe he is more proud of than of any
act of his public life, while many others are justly amazed that a man
of his sagacity should not see the unsoundness of the principle on which
the whole system is based. Much more honour is due to him for the
Compromise Bill, by which he virtually surrendered his system, and
immediately put an end to the nullification struggle. Mr. Webster
victoriously exposed the badness of the nullification principle, and Mr.
Clay removed the present cause of its exercise. The one humbled South
Carolina to the dust on her nullification ground, the other left her in
triumphant possession of her principle of free trade, while disarming
her by a wise and well-principled compromise.
The one act of Mr. Clay's public life for which he must be held to
require pardon from posterity, is that by which he secured the
continuance of slavery in Missouri, and, in consequence, its
establishment in Arkansas and Florida; the one an admitted state, the
other a territory destined to be so. Mr. Clay is not an advocate of
slavery, though, instead of being a friend to abolition, he is a dupe of
colonization. When he held the destinies of American slavery in his
hand, he had, unhappily, more regard for precedent in human arrangements
than for the spirit of the divine laws in the light of which such
arrangements should be ever regarded. He acted to avert the conflict
which cannot be averted. It was still to take place; it is now taking
place, under less favourable circumstances; and his measure of
expediency is already meeting with the retribution which ever follows
upon the subordination of a higher principle to a lower. For many of his
public acts Mr. Clay will be permanently honoured; with regard to
others, the honour will be mingled with allowance for error in
philosophy; for this one he will have to be forgiven.
Mr. Clay married an excellent woman, who is still living, the surviver
of six daughters, taken away, some of them in the bloom of promise, and
one in the maturity of virtue. The great stateman's house is very
desolate. He must seek in his own strength of soul, and in the love and
honour with which his friends regard him, that good which has been
denied to him in the latter days of his political and domestic life.
His recollections of Europe are very vivid and pleasurable. We spent
many an hour of my visit to him in Kentucky in talking over our mutual
English friends, till we forgot the time and space we had both traversed
since we parted from them, and looked up surprised to find ourselves,
not at a London dinner-table, but in the wild woods of the West. Mr.
Clay has not kept up his knowledge of British life and politics so
accurately as some of his brother-statesmen; but he is still full of the
sayings of Castlereagh and Canning, of Lords Eldon and Stowell, of
Mackintosh and Sydney Smith.
The finest speech I heard from Mr. Clay in the Senate was on the sad
subject of the injuries of the Indians. He exposed the facts of the
treatment of the Cherokees by Georgia. He told how the lands in Georgia,
guaranteed by solemn treaties to the Cherokees, had been surveyed and
partitioned off to white citizens of the state; that, though there is a
nominal right of appeal awarded to the complainants, this is a mere
mockery, as an acknowledgment of the right of Georgia to divide the
lands is made a necessary preliminary to the exercise of the right; in
other words, the Indians must lay down their claims on the threshold of
the courts which they enter for the purpose of enforcing these claims!
The object of Mr. Clay's plea was to have the Supreme Court open to the
Cherokees, their case being, he contended, contemplated by the
Constitution. A minor proposition was that Congress should assist, with
territory and appliances, a body of Cherokees who desired to emigrate
beyond the Mississippi.
It was known that Mr. Clay would probably bring forward his great topic
that day. Some of the foreign ambassadors might be seen leaning against
the pillars behind the chair, and many members of the other house
appeared behind and in the passages; and one sat on the steps of the
platform, his hands clasped, and his eyes fixed on Mr. Clay, as if life
hung upon his words. As many as could crowd into the gallery leaned over
the balustrade; and the lower circle was thronged with ladies and
gentlemen, in the centre of whom stood a group of Cherokee chiefs,
listening immoveably. I never saw so deep a moral impression produced by
a speech. The best testimony to this was the disgust excited by the
empty and abusive reply of the senator from Georgia, who, by-the-way,
might be judged from his accent to have been about three months from the
Green Island. This gentleman's speech, however, showed us one good
thing, that Mr. Clay is as excellent in reply as in proposition; prompt,
earnest, temperate, and graceful. The chief characteristic of his
eloquence is its earnestness. Every tone of his voice, every fibre of
his frame bears testimony to this. His attitudes are, from the beginning
to the close, very graceful. His first sentences are homely, and given
with a little hesitation and repetition, and with an agitation shown by
a frequent putting on and taking off of the spectacles, and a trembling
of the hands among the documents on the desk. Then, as the speaker
becomes possessed with his subject, the agitation changes its character,
but does not subside. His utterance is still deliberate, but his voice
becomes deliciously winning. Its higher tones disappointed me at first;
but the lower ones, trembling with emotion, swelling and falling with
the earnestness of the speaker, are very moving, and his whole manner
becomes irresistibly persuasive. I saw tears, of which I am sure he was
wholly unconscious, falling on his papers as he vividly described the
woes and injuries of the aborigines. I saw Webster draw his hand across
his eyes; I saw every one deeply moved except two persons, the
vice-president, who yawned somewhat ostentatiously, and the Georgian
senator, who was busy brewing his storm. I was amazed at the daring of
this gentleman; at the audacity which could break up such a moral
impression as this Cherokee tale, so told, had produced, by accusing Mr.
Clay of securing an interest in opposition to Georgia "by stage starts
and theatric gesticulations." The audience were visibly displeased at
having their feelings thus treated, in the presence even of the Cherokee
chiefs; but Mr. Clay's replies both to argument and abuse were so happy,
and the Georgian's rejoinder was so outrageous, that the business ended
with a general burst of laughter. The propositions were to lie over till
the next day; and, as I soon after left Washington, I never learned
their ultimate fate.
The American Senate is a most imposing assemblage. When I first entered
it I thought I never saw a finer set of heads than the forty-six before
my eyes: two only being absent, and the Union then consisting of
twenty-four states. Mr. Calhoun's countenance first fixed my attention;
the splendid eye, the straight forehead, surmounted by a load of stiff,
upright, dark hair; the stern brow; the inflexible mouth; it is one of
the most remarkable heads in the country. Next him sat his colleague,
Mr. Preston, in singular contrast; stout in person, with a round, ruddy,
good-humoured face, large blue eyes, and a wig, orange to-day, brown
yesterday, and golden to-morrow. Near them sat Colonel Benton, a
temporary people's man, remarkable chiefly for his pomposity. He sat
swelling amid his piles of papers and books, looking like a being
designed by nature to be a good-humoured barber or innkeeper, but forced
by fate to make himself into a mock-heroic senator. Opposite sat the
transcendant Webster, with his square forehead and cavernous eyes; and
behind him the homely Clay, with the face and figure of a farmer, but
something of the air of a divine, from his hair being combed straight
back from his temples. Near them sat Southard and Porter; the former
astute and rapid in countenance and gesture; the latter strangely
mingling a boyish fun and lightness of manner and glance with the
sobriety suitable to the judge and the senator. His keen eye takes in
everything that passes; his extraordinary mouth, with its overhanging
upper lip, has but to unfold into a smile to win laughter from the
sourest official or demagogue. Then there was the bright _bonhommie_ of
Ewing of Ohio, the most primitive-looking of senators; and the benign,
religious gravity of Frelinghuysen; the gentlemanly air of Buchanan; the
shrewdness of Poindexter; the somewhat melancholy simplicity of Silsbee;
all these and many others were striking, and for nothing more that for
their total unlikeness to each other. No English person who has not
travelled over half the world can form an idea of such differences among
men forming one assembly for the same purposes, and speaking the same
language. Some were descended from Dutch farmers, some from French
Huguenots, some from Scotch Puritans, some from English cavaliers, some
from Irish chieftains. They were brought together out of law-courts,
sugar-fields, merchants' stores, mountain farms, forests, and prairies.
The stamp of originality was impressed upon every one, and inspired a
deep, involuntary respect. I have seen no assembly of chosen men, and no
company of the highborn, invested with the antique dignities of an
antique realm, half so imposing to the imagination as this collection
of stout-souled, full-grown, original men, brought together on the
ground of their supposed sufficiency, to work out the will of their
diverse constituencies.
In this splendid chamber, thus splendidly inhabited, we spent many hours
of many weeks. Here I was able to gain no little knowledge of the state,
political and other, of various parts of the country, from my large
acquaintance among the members of the Senate. When dull official reports
were read, and uninteresting local matters were discussed, or when the
one interminable speaker, Benton, was on his legs, one member or another
of the body would come and talk with us. I have heard certain of the
members, stalking from their seats towards those of the ladies, compared
to cranes in search of fish. The comparison is not a bad one.
I wished every day that the ladies would conduct themselves in a more
dignified manner than they did in the Senate. They came in with waving
plumes, and glittering in all the colours of the rainbow, causing no
little bustle in the place, no little annoyance to the gentlemen
spectators, and rarely sat still for any length of time. I know that
these ladies are no fair specimen of the women who would attend
parliamentary proceedings in any other metropolis. I know that they were
the wives, daughters, and sisters of legislators, women thronging to
Washington for purposes of convenience or pleasure, leaving their usual
employments behind them, and seeking to pass away the time. I knew this,
and made allowance accordingly; but I still wished that they could
understand the gravity of such an assembly, and show so much respect to
it as to repay the privilege of admission by striving to excite as
little attention as possible, and by having the patience to sit still
when they happened not to be amused, till some interruption gave them
opportunity to depart quietly. If they had done this, Judge Porter would
not have moved that they should be appointed seats in the gallery
instead of below; and they would have been guiltless of furnishing a
plea for the exclusion of women, who would probably make a better use of
the privilege, from the galleries of other houses of parliament.
I was glad of an opportunity of hearing both the South Carolina senators
soon after my arrival in Washington. They are listened to with close
attention, and every indication of their state of feeling is watched
with the interest which has survived the nullification struggle. Mr.
Calhoun on this occasion let us a little into his mind; Mr. Preston kept
more closely to the question before the body. The question was whether a
vote of censure of the president, recorded in the minutes of the
proceedings of the Senate the preceding session, should be expunged. The
motion for the expunging was made by Colonel Benton, and rejected, as it
had been before, and has been since; though it was finally carried, to
the agony of the opposition, at the end of last session (February,
1837).
Mr. Preston was out of health, and unable to throw his accustomed force
into his speaking; but his effort showed us how beautiful his eloquence
is in its way. It is not solid. His speeches, if taken to pieces, will
be found to consist of analogies and declamation; but his figures are
sometimes very striking, and his manner is as graceful as anything so
artificial can be. I never before understood the eloquence of action.
The action of public speakers in England, as far as I have observed (and
perhaps I may be allowed to hint that deaf persons are peculiarly
qualified to judge of the nature of such action), is of two kinds; the
involuntary gesture which is resorted to for the relief of the nerves,
which may or may not be expressive of meaning, and the action which is
wholly the result of study; arbitrary, and not the birth of the
sentiment; and, therefore, though pleasing, perhaps, to the eye,
perplexing to the mind of the listener. Mr. Preston's manner unites the
advantages of these two methods, and avoids most of their evils. It is
easy to see that he could not speak without an abundant use of action,
and that he has therefore done wisely in making it a study. To an
unaccustomed eye it appears somewhat exuberant; but it is exquisitely
graceful, and far more than commonly appropriate. His voice is not good,
but his person is tall, stout, and commanding, and his countenance
animated.
Mr. Calhoun followed, and impressed me very strongly. While he kept to
the question, what he said was close, good, and moderate, though
delivered in rapid speech, and with a voice not sufficiently modulated.
But when he began to reply to a taunt of Colonel Benton's, that he
wanted to be president, the force of his speaking became painful. He
made protestations which it seemed to strangers had better have been
spared, that he would not turn on his heel to be president; and that he
had given up all for his own brave, magnanimous little State of South
Carolina. While thus protesting, his eyes flashed, his brow seemed
charged with thunder, his voice became almost a bark, and his sentences
were abrupt, intense, producing in the auditory that sort of laugh which
is squeezed out of people by the application of a very sudden mental
force. I believe he knew little what a revelation he made in a few
sentences. They were to us strangers the key, not only to all that was
said and done by the South Carolina party during the remainder of the
session, but to many things at Charleston and Columbia which would
otherwise have passed unobserved or unexplained.
I was less struck than some strangers appear to have been with the
length and prosy character of the speeches in Congress. I do not
remember hearing any senator (always excepting Colonel Benton) speak for
more than an hour. I was seldom present in the other house, where
probably the most diffuse oratory is heard; but I was daily informed of
the proceedings there by the representative who was of our party, and I
did not find that there was much annoyance or delay from this cause.
Perhaps the practice may be connected with the amount of business to be
done. It is well known that the business of Congress is so moderate in
quantity, from the functions of the general government being few and
simple, that it would be considered a mere trifle by any parliament in
the Old World; and long speeches, which would be a great annoyance
elsewhere, may be an innocent pastime in an assembly which may have
leisure upon its hands.
The gallery of the splendid Hall of Representatives is not well
contrived for hearing, and I rarely went into it for more than a passing
view of what was going on; a view which might be taken without
disturbance to anybody, as the gallery was generally empty, and too high
raised above the area of the hall to fix the eye of the members. My
chief interest was watching Mr. Adams, of whose speaking, however, I can
give no account. The circumstance of this gentleman being now a member
of the representative body after having been president, fixes the
attention of all Europeans upon him with as much admiration as interest.
He is one of the most remarkable men in America. He is an imbodiment of
the pure, simple morals which are assumed to prevail in the thriving
young republic. His term of office was marked by nothing so much as by
the subordination of glory to goodness, of showy objects to moral ones.
The eccentricity of thought and action in Mr. Adams, of which his
admirers bitterly or sorrowfully complain, and which renders him an
impracticable member of a party, arises from the same honest simplicity
which crowns his virtues, mingled with a faulty taste and an imperfect
temper. His hastiness of assertion has sometimes placed him in
predicaments so undignified as almost to be a set-off against the
honours he wins by pertinacious and bold adherence to a principle which
he considers sound. His occasional starts out of the ranks of his party,
without notice and without apparent cause, have been in vain attempted
to be explained on suppositions of interest or vanity; they may be more
easily accounted for in other ways. Between one day and another, some
new idea of justice and impartiality may strike his brain, and send him
to the house warm with invective against his party and sympathy with
their foes. He rises, and speaks out all his new mind, to the perplexity
of the whole assembly, every man of whom bends to hear every syllable he
says; perplexity which gives way to dismay on the one hand and triumph
on the other. The triumphant party begins to coax and honour him; but,
before the process is well begun, he is off again, finding that he had
gone too far; and the probability is, that he finishes by placing
himself between two fires. I now describe what I actually saw of his
conduct in one instance; conduct which left no more doubt of his
integrity than of his eccentricity. He was well described to me before I
saw him. "Study Mr. Adams," was the exhortation. "You will find him well
worth it. He runs in veins; if you light upon one, you will find him
marvellously rich; if not, you may chance to meet rubbish. In action he
is very peculiar. He will do ninety-nine things nobly, excellently; but
the hundredth will be so bad in taste and temper, that it will drive all
the rest out of your head, if you don't take care." His countrymen will
"take care." Whatever the heats of party may be, however the tone of
disappointment against Mr. Adams may sometimes rise to something too
like hatred, there is undoubtedly a deep reverence and affection for the
man in the nation's heart; and any one may safely prophesy that his
reputation, half a century after his death, will be of a very honourable
kind. He fought a stout and noble battle in Congress last session in
favour of discussion of the slavery question, and in defence of the
right of petition upon it; on behalf of women as well as of men. While
hunted, held at bay, almost torn to pieces by an outrageous
majority--leaving him, I believe, in absolute unity--he preserved a
boldness and coolness as amusing as they were admirable. Though he now
and then vents his spleen with violence when disappointed in a favourite
object, he seems able to bear perfectly well that which it is the great
fault of Americans to shrink from, singularity and blame. He seems, at
times, reckless of opinion; and this is the point of his character which
his countrymen seem, naturally, least to comprehend.
Such is the result of the observations I was able to make on this
gentleman when at Washington. I was prevented seeing so much of him as I
earnestly desired by his family circumstances. He had just lost a son,
and did not appear in society. It is well known in America that Mr.
Adams will leave behind him papers of inestimable value. For forty years
(I was told) he has kept a diary, full and exact. In this diary he every
morning sets down not only the events of the preceding day, but the
conversations he has had with foreigners, and on all subjects of
interest. This immense accumulation of papers will afford such materials
for history as the country has never yet been blessed with. Perhaps no
country has ever possessed a public man, of great powers, and involved
in all the remarkable events of its most remarkable period, who has had
industry enough to leave behind him a similar record of his times. This
will probably turn out to be (whether he thinks so or not) the greatest
and most useful of his deeds, and his most honourable monument.
Those whose taste is the contemplation of great and original men may
always have it gratified by going to Washington. Whatever may be thought
of the form and administration of government there; however certain it
may be that the greatest men are not, in this age of the world, to be
found in political life, it cannot be but that, among the real
representatives of a composite and self-governing nation, there must be
many men of power; power of intellect, of goodness, or, at least, of
will.
MOUNT VERNON.
"He might have been a king
But that he understood
How much it was a meaner thing
To be unjustly great than honourably good."
_Duke of Buckingham on Lord Fairfax._