FAMOUS AMERICANS OF RECENT TIMES
By
JAMES PARTON
Author of "Life of Andrew Jackson," "Life and Times of Aaron Burr,"
"Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin," etc.
1867
[Illustration: J.C. Calhoun]
CONTENTS
HENRY CLAY
DANIEL WEBSTER
JOHN C. CALHOUN
JOHN RANDOLPH
STEPHEN GIRARD AND HIS COLLEGE
JAMES GORDON BENNETT AND THE NEW YORK HERALD
CHARLES GOODYEAR
HENRY WARD BEECHER AND HIS CHURCH
COMMODORE VANDERBILT
THEODOSIA BURR
JOHN JACOB ASTOR
NOTE
The papers contained in this volume were originally published in the
_North American Review_, with four exceptions. Those upon THEODOSIA
BURR and JOHN JACOB ASTOR first appeared in _Harper's Magazine_; that
upon COMMODORE VANDERBILT, in the _New York Ledger_; and that upon
HENRY WARD BEECHER AND HIS CHURCH, in the _Atlantic Monthly_.
HENRY CLAY.
The close of the war removes the period preceding it to a great
distance from us, so that we can judge its public men as though we
were the "posterity" to whom they sometimes appealed. James Buchanan
still haunts the neighborhood of Lancaster, a living man, giving and
receiving dinners, paying his taxes, and taking his accustomed
exercise; but as an historical figure he is as complete as Bolingbroke
or Walpole. It is not merely that his work is done, nor that the
results of his work are apparent; but the thing upon which he wrought,
by their relation to which he and his contemporaries are to be
estimated, has perished. The statesmen of his day, we can all now
plainly see, inherited from the founders of the Republic a problem
impossible of solution, with which some of them wrestled manfully,
others meanly, some wisely, others foolishly. If the workmen have not
all passed away, the work is at once finished and destroyed, like the
Russian ice-palace, laboriously built, then melted in the sun. We can
now have the requisite sympathy with those late doctors of the body
politic, who came to the consultation pledged not to attempt to
_remove_ the thorn from its flesh, and trained to regard it as the
spear-head in the side of Epaminondas,--extract it, and the patient
dies. In the writhings of the sufferer the barb has fallen out, and
lo! he lives and is getting well. We can now forgive most of those
blind healers, and even admire such of them as were honest and not
cowards; for, in truth, it _was_ an impossibility with which they had
to grapple, and it was not one of their creating.
Of our public men of the sixty years preceding the war, Henry Clay was
certainly the most shining figure. Was there ever 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 his
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. The country seemed to place all its resources at his disposal;
all commodities sought his acceptance. Passing through Newark once, he
thoughtlessly ordered a carriage of a certain pattern: the same
evening the carriage was at the door of his hotel in New York, the
gift of a few Newark friends. It was so everywhere and with
everything. His house became at last a museum of curious gifts. There
was the counterpane made for him by a lady ninety-three years of age,
and Washington's camp-goblet given him by a lady of eighty; there were
pistols, rifles, and fowling-pieces enough to defend a citadel; and,
among a bundle of walking-sticks, was one cut for him from a tree that
shaded Cicero's grave. There were gorgeous prayer-books, and Bibles of
exceeding magnitude and splendor, and silver-ware in great profusion.
On one occasion there arrived at Ashland the substantial present of
twenty-three barrels of salt. In his old age, when his fine estate,
through the misfortunes of his sons, was burdened with mortgages to
the amount of thirty thousand dollars, and other large debts weighed
heavily upon his soul, and he feared to be compelled to sell the home
of fifty years and seek a strange abode, a few old friends secretly
raised the needful sum, secretly paid the mortgages and discharged the
debts, and then caused the aged orator to be informed of what had been
done, but not of the names of the donors. "Could my life insure the
success of Henry Clay, I would freely lay it down this day," exclaimed
an old Rhode Island sea-captain on the morning of the Presidential
election of 1844. Who has forgotten the passion of disappointment, the
amazement and despair, at the result of that day's fatal work? Fatal
we thought it then, little dreaming that, while it precipitated evil,
it brought nearer the day of deliverance.
Our readers do not need to be reminded that popularity the most
intense is not a proof of merit. The two most mischievous men this
country has ever produced were extremely popular,--one in a State, the
other in every State,--and both for long periods of time. There are
certain men and women and children who are natural heart-winners, and
their gift of winning hearts seems something apart from their general
character. We have known this sweet power over the affections of
others to be possessed by very worthy and by very barren natures.
There are good men who repel, and bad men who attract. We cannot,
therefore, assent to the opinion held by many, that popularity is an
evidence of shallowness or ill-desert. As there are pictures expressly
designed to be looked at from a distance by great numbers of people at
once,--the scenery of a theatre, for example,--so there are men who
appear formed by Nature to stand forth before multitudes, captivating
every eye, and gathering in great harvests of love with little effort.
If, upon looking closely at these pictures and these men, we find them
less admirable than they seemed at a distance, it is but fair to
remember that they were not meant to be looked at closely, and that
"scenery" has as much right to exist as a Dutch painting which bears
the test of the microscope.
It must be confessed, however, that Henry Clay, who was for
twenty-eight years a candidate for the Presidency, cultivated his
popularity. Without ever being a hypocrite, he was habitually an
actor; but the part which he enacted was Henry Clay exaggerated. He
was naturally a most courteous man; but the consciousness of his
position made him more elaborately and universally courteous than any
man ever was from mere good-nature. A man on the stage must overdo his
part, in order not to seem to underdo it. There was a time when almost
every visitor to the city of Washington desired, above all things, to
be presented to three men there, Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, whom to
have seen was a distinction. When the country member brought forward
his agitated constituent on the floor of the Senate-chamber, and
introduced him to Daniel Webster, the Expounder was likely enough to
thrust a hand at him without so much as turning his head or
discontinuing his occupation, and the stranger shrunk away painfully
conscious of his insignificance. Calhoun, on the contrary, besides
receiving him with civility, would converse with him, if opportunity
favored, and treat him to a disquisition on the nature of government
and the "beauty" of nullification, striving to make a lasting
impression on his intellect. Clay would rise, extend his hand with
that winning grace of his, and instantly captivate him by his
all-conquering courtesy. He would call him by name, inquire respecting
his health, the town whence he came, how long he had been in
Washington, and send him away pleased with himself and enchanted with
Henry Clay. And what was his delight to receive a few weeks after, in
his distant village, a copy of the Kentuckian's last speech, bearing
on the cover the frank of "H. Clay"! It was almost enough to make a
man think of "running for Congress"! And, what was still more
intoxicating, Mr. Clay, who had a surprising memory, would be likely,
on meeting this individual two years after the introduction, to
address him by name.
There was a gamy flavor, in those days, about Southern men, which was
very pleasing to the people of the North. Reason teaches us that the
barn-yard fowl is a more meritorious bird than the game-cock; but the
imagination does not assent to the proposition. Clay was at once
game-cock and domestic fowl. His gestures called to mind the
magnificently branching trees of his Kentucky forests, and his
handwriting had the neatness and delicacy of a female copyist. There
was a careless, graceful ease in his movements and attitudes, like
those of an Indian, chief; but he was an exact man of business, who
docketed his letters, and could send from Washington to Ashland for a
document, telling in what pigeon-hole it could be found. Naturally
impetuous, he acquired early in life an habitual moderation of
statement, an habitual consideration for other men's self-love, which
made him the pacificator of his time. The great compromiser was
himself a compromise. The ideal of education is to tame men without
lessening their vivacity,--to unite in them the freedom, the dignity,
the prowess of a Tecumseh, with the serviceable qualities of the
civilized man. This happy union is said to be sometimes produced in
the pupils of the great public schools of England, who are savages on
the play-ground and gentlemen in the school-room. In no man of our
knowledge has there been combined so much of the best of the forest
chief with so much of the good of the trained man of business as in
Henry Clay. This was one secret of his power over classes of men so
diverse as the hunters of Kentucky and the manufacturers of New
England.
It used to be accounted a merit in a man to rise to high station from
humble beginnings; but we now perceive that humble beginnings are
favorable to the development of that force of character which wins the
world's great prizes. Let us never again commend any one for "rising"
from obscurity to eminence, but reserve our special homage for those
who have become respectable human beings in spite of having had every
advantage procured for them by rich fathers. Henry Clay found an Eton,
and an Oxford in Old Virginia that were better for _him_ than those of
Old England. Few men have been more truly fortunate in their education
than he. It was said of a certain lady, that to know her was a liberal
education; and there really have been, and are, women of whom that
could be truly averred. But perhaps the greatest good fortune that can
befall an intelligent and noble-minded youth is to come into intimate,
confidential relations with a wise, learned, and good old man, one who
has been greatly trusted and found worthy of trust, who knows the
world by having long taken a leading part in its affairs, and has
outlived illusions only to get a firmer footing in realities. This,
indeed, is a liberal education; and this was the happiness of Henry
Clay. Nothing in biography is so strange as the certainty with which a
superior youth, in the most improbable circumstances, finds the mental
nourishment he needs. Here, in the swampy region of Hanover County,
Virginia, was a barefooted, ungainly urchin, a poor widow's son,
without one influential relative on earth; and there, in Richmond, sat
on the chancellor's bench George Wythe, venerable with years and
honors, one of the grand old men of Old Virginia, the preceptor of
Jefferson, signer of the Declaration of Independence, the most learned
man in his profession, and one of the best men of any profession. Who
could have foreseen that this friendless orphan, a Baptist preacher's
son, in a State where to be a "dissenter" was social inferiority,
should have found in this eminent judge a friend, a mentor, a patron,
a father?
Yet it came about in the most natural way. 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.
Then occurred the event which decided his career. His mother having
married again, her husband had influence enough to procure for the lad
the place of copying clerk in the office of the Court of Chancery. The
young gentlemen then employed in the office of that court 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 "figginy," 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 law clerks of
metropolitan Richmond exchanged glances as this gawky figure entered,
and took his place at a desk to begin his work. There was something in
his manner which prevented their indulgence in the jests that usually
greet the arrival of a country youth among city blades; and they
afterwards congratulated one another that they had waited a little
before beginning to tease him, for they soon found that he had brought
with him from the country an exceedingly sharp tongue. Of his first
service little is known, except the immense fact that he was a most
diligent reader. It rests on better authority than "Campaign Lives,"
that, while his fellow-clerks went abroad in the evening in search of
pleasure, this lad stayed at home with his books. It is a pleasure
also to know that he had not a taste for the low vices. He came of
sound English stock, of a family who would not have regarded
drunkenness and debauchery as "sowing wild oats," but recoiled from
the thought of them with horror. Clay was far from being a saint; but
it is our privilege to believe of him that he was a clean, temperate,
and studious young man.
Richmond, the town of the young Republic that had most in it of the
metropolitan, proved to this aspiring youth as true a University as
the printing-office in old Boston was to Benjamin Franklin; for he
found in it the culture best suited to him and his circumstances.
Chancellor Wythe, then sixty-seven years of age, overflowing with
knowledge and good nature, was the president of that university. Its
professors were the cluster of able men who had gone along with
Washington and Jefferson in the measures which resulted in the
independence of the country. Patrick Henry was there to teach him the
arts of oratory. There was a flourishing and famous debating society,
the pride of the young men of Richmond, in which to try his
half-fledged powers. The impulse given to thought by the American
Revolution was quickened and prolonged by the thrilling news which
every vessel brought from France of the revolution there. There was an
atmosphere in Virginia favorable to the growth of a sympathetic mind.
Young Clay's excellent handwriting brought him gradually into the most
affectionate relations with Chancellor Wythe, whose aged hand trembled
to such a degree that he was glad to borrow a copyist from the clerk's
office. For nearly four years it was the young man's principal duty to
copy the decisions of the venerable Chancellor, which were curiously
learned and elaborate; for it was the bent of the Chancellor's mind to
trace the law to its sources in the ancient world, and fortify his
positions by citations from Greek and Latin authors. The Greek
passages were a plague to the copyist, who knew not the alphabet of
that language, but copied it, so to speak, by rote.
Here we have another proof that, no matter what a man's opportunities
are, he only learns what is congenial with his nature and
circumstances. Living under the influence of this learned judge, Henry
Clay might have become a man of learning. George Wythe was a "scholar"
in the ancient acceptation of the word. The whole education of his
youth consisted in his acquiring the Latin language, which his mother
taught him. Early inheriting a considerable fortune, he squandered it
in dissipation, and sat down at thirty, a reformed man, to the study
of the law. To his youthful Latin he now added Greek, which he studied
assiduously for many years, becoming, probably, the best Greek scholar
in Virginia. His mind would have wholly lived in the ancient world,
and been exclusively nourished from the ancient literatures, but for
the necessities of his profession and the stirring political events of
his later life. The Stamp Act and the Revolution varied and completed
his education. His young copyist was not attracted by him to the study
of Greek and Latin, nor did he catch from him the habit of probing a
subject to the bottom, and ascending from the questions of the moment
to universal principles. Henry Clay probed nothing to the bottom,
except, perhaps, the game of whist; and though his instincts and
tendencies were high and noble, he had no grasp of general truths.
Under Wythe, he became a staunch Republican of the Jeffersonian
school. Under Wythe, who emancipated his slaves before his death, and
set apart a portion of his estate for their maintenance, he acquired a
repugnance to slavery which he never lost. The Chancellor's learning
and philosophy were not for him, and so he passed them by.
The tranquil wisdom of the judge was counteracted, in some degree, by
the excitements of the debating society. As he grew older, the raw and
awkward stripling became a young man whose every movement had a
winning or a 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. His face, too, was a compromise. With
all its vivacity of expression, there was always something that spoke
of the Baptist preacher's son,--just as Andrew Jackson's face had the
set expression of a Presbyterian elder. But of all the bodily gifts
bestowed by Nature upon this favored child, the most unique and
admirable was his voice. Who ever heard one more melodious? There was
a depth of tone in it, a volume, a compass, a rich and tender harmony,
which invested all he said with majesty. We heard it last when he 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 peerless star of the
Richmond Debating Society in 1795.
Oratory was then in the highest vogue. Young Virginians did not need
to look beyond the sea in order to learn that the orator was the man
most in request in the dawn of freedom. Chatham, Burke, Fox, Sheridan,
and Pitt were inconceivably imposing names at that day; but was not
Patrick Henry the foremost man in Virginia, only because he could
speak and entertain an audience? And what made John Adams President
but his fiery utterances in favor of the Declaration of Independence?
There were other speakers then in Virginia who would have had to this
day a world-wide fame if they had spoken where the world could hear
them. The tendency now is to undervalue oratory, and we regret it. We
believe that, in a free country, every citizen should be able to stand
undaunted before his fellow-citizens, and give an account of the faith
that is in him. It is no argument against oratory to point to the
Disraelis of both countries, and say that a gift possessed by such men
cannot be a valuable one. It is the unmanly timidity and
shamefacedness of the rest of us that give to such men their
preposterous importance. It were a calamity to America if, in the
present rage for ball-playing and boat-rowing, which we heartily
rejoice in, the debating society should be forgotten. Let us rather
end the sway of oratory by all becoming orators. Most men who can talk
well seated in a chair can _learn_ to talk well standing on their
legs; and a man who can move or instruct five persons in a small room
can learn to move or instruct two thousand in a large one.
That Henry Clay cultivated his oratorical talent in Richmond, we have
his own explicit testimony. He told a class of law students once that
he owed his success in life to a habit early formed, and for some
years continued, of reading daily in a book of history or science, and
declaiming the substance of what he had read in some solitary
place,--a cornfield, the forest, a barn, with only oxen and horses for
auditors. "It is," said he,
"to this early practice of the art of all arts that I am
indebted for the primary and leading impulses that
stimulated my progress, and have shaped and moulded my
entire destiny."
We should be glad to know more of this self-training; but Mr. Clay's
"campaign" biographers have stuffed their volumes too full of eulogy
to leave room for such instructive details. We do not even know the
books from which he declaimed. Plutarch's Lives were favorite reading
with him, we accidentally learn; and his speeches contain evidence
that he was powerfully influenced by the writings of Dr. Franklin. We
believe it was from Franklin that he learned very much of the art of
managing men. Franklin, we think, aided this impetuous and
exaggerating spirit to acquire his habitual moderation of statement,
and that sleepless courtesy which, in his keenest encounters,
generally kept him within parliamentary bounds, and enabled him to
live pleasantly with men from whom he differed in opinion. Obsolete as
many of his speeches are, from the transient nature of the topics of
which they treat, they may still be studied with profit by young
orators and old politicians as examples of parliamentary politeness.
It was the good-natured and wise Franklin that helped him to this. It
is certain, too, that at some part of his earlier life he read
translations of Demosthenes; for of all modern orators Henry Clay was
the most Demosthenian. Calhoun purposely and consciously imitated the
Athenian orator; but Clay was a kindred spirit with Demosthenes. We
could select passages from both these orators, and no man could tell
which was American and which was Greek, unless he chanced to remember
the passage. Tell us, gentle reader, were the sentences following
spoken by Henry Clay after the war of 1812 _at_ the Federalists who
had opposed that war, or by Demosthenes against the degenerate Greeks
who favored the designs of Philip?
"From first to last I have uniformly pursued the just and
virtuous course,--asserter of the honors, of the
prerogatives, of the glory of my country. Studious to
support them, zealous to advance them, my whole being is
devoted to this glorious cause. I was never known to walk
abroad with a face of joy and exultation at the success of
the enemy, embracing and announcing the joyous tidings to
those who I supposed would transmit it to the proper place.
I was never known to receive the successes of my own country
with trembling, with sighs, with my eyes bent to the earth,
like those impious men who are the defamers of their
country, as if by such conduct they were not defamers of
themselves."
Is it Clay, or is it Demosthenes? Or have we made a mistake, and
copied a passage from the speech of a Unionist of 1865?
After serving four years as clerk and amanuensis, barely earning a
subsistence, Clay was advised by his venerable friend, the Chancellor,
to study law; and a place was procured for him in the office of the
Attorney-General of the State. In less than a year after formally
beginning his studies he was admitted to the bar. This seems a short
preparation; but the whole period of his connection with Chancellor
Wythe was a study of the law. The Chancellor was what a certain other
chancellor styles "a full man," and Henry Clay was a receptive youth.
When he had obtained his license to practise he was twenty years of
age. Debating-society fame and drawing-room popularity do not, in an
old commonwealth like Virginia, bring practice to a lawyer of twenty.
But, as a distinguished French author has recently remarked of Julius
Caesar, "In him was united the elegance of manner which wins, to the
energy of character which commands." He sought, therefore, a new
sphere of exertion far from the refinements of Richmond. Kentucky,
which Boone explored in 1770, was a part of Virginia when Clay was a
child, and only became a State in 1792, when first he began to copy
Chancellor Wythe's decisions. The first white family settled in it in
1775; but when our young barrister obtained his license, twenty-two
years after, it contained a white population of nearly two hundred
thousand. His mother, with five of her children and a second husband,
had gone thither five years before. In 1797 Henry Clay removed to
Lexington, the new State's oldest town and capital, though then
containing, it is said, but fifty houses. He was a stranger there, and
almost penniless. He took board, not knowing where the money was to
come from to pay for it. There were already several lawyers of repute
in the place. "I remember," said Mr. Clay, forty-five years after,
"how comfortable I thought I should be if I could make one
hundred pounds a year, Virginia money; and with what delight
I received my first fifteen-shilling fee. My hopes were more
than realized. I immediately rushed into a successful and
lucrative practice."
In a year and a half he was in a position to marry the daughter of one
of the first men of the State, Colonel Thomas Hart, a man exceedingly
beloved in Lexington.
It is surprising how addicted to litigation were the early settlers of
the Western States. The imperfect surveys of land, the universal habit
of getting goods on credit at the store, and "difficulties" between
individuals ending in bloodshed, filled the court calendars with land
disputes, suits for debt, and exciting murder cases, which gave to
lawyers more importance and better chances of advancement than they
possessed in the older States. Mr. Clay had two strings to his bow.
Besides being a man of red tape and pigeon-holes, exact, methodical,
and strictly attentive to business, he had a power over a Kentucky
jury such as no other man has ever wielded. To this day nothing
pleases aged Kentuckians better than to tell stories which they heard
their fathers tell, of Clay's happy repartees to opposing counsel, his
ingenious cross-questioning of witnesses, his sweeping torrents of
invective, his captivating courtesy, his melting pathos. Single
gestures, attitudes, tones, have come down to us through two or three
memories, and still please the curious guest at Kentucky firesides.
But when we turn to the cold records of this part of his life, we find
little to justify his traditional celebrity. It appears that the
principal use to which his talents were applied during the first years
of his practice at the bar was in defending murderers. He seems to
have shared the feeling which then prevailed in the Western country,
that to defend a prisoner at the bar is a nobler thing than to assist
in defending the public against his further depredations; and he threw
all his force into the defence of some men who would have been "none
the worse for a hanging." One day, in the streets of Lexington, a
drunken fellow whom he had rescued from the murderer's doom cried out,
"Here comes Mr. Clay, who saved my life." "Ah! my poor fellow,"
replied the advocate, "I fear I have saved too many like you, who
ought to be hanged." The anecdotes printed of his exploits in cheating
the gallows of its due are of a quality which shows that the power of
this man over a jury lay much in his manner. His delivery, which
"bears absolute sway in oratory," was bewitching and irresistible, and
gave to quite commonplace wit and very questionable sentiment an
amazing power to please and subdue.
We are far from thinking that he was not a very able lawyer. Judge
Story, we remember, before whom he argued a cause later in life, was
of opinion that he would have won a high position at the bar of the
Supreme Court, if he had not been early drawn away to public life. In
Kentucky he was a brilliant, successful practitioner, such as Kentucky
wanted and could appreciate. In a very few years he was the possessor
of a fine estate near Lexington, and to the single slave who came to
him as his share of his father's property were added several others.
His wife being a skilful and vigorous manager, he was in independent
circumstances, and ready to serve the public, if the public wished
him, when he had been but ten years in his Western home. Thus he had a
basis for a public career, without which few men can long serve the
public with honor and success. And this was a principal reason of the
former supremacy of Southern men in Washington; nearly all of them
being men who owned land, which slaves tilled for them, whether they
were present or absent.
The young lawyer took to politics very naturally. Posterity, which
will judge the public men of that period chiefly by their course with
regard to slavery, will note with pleasure that Clay's first public
act was an attempt to deliver the infant State of Kentucky from that
curse. The State Constitution was to be remodelled in 1799. Fresh from
the society of Chancellor Wythe, an abolitionist who had set free his
own slaves,--fresh from Richmond, where every man of note, from
Jefferson and Patrick Henry downwards, was an abolitionist,--Henry
Clay began in 1798, being then twenty-one years of age, to write a
series of articles for a newspaper, advocating the gradual abolition
of slavery in Kentucky. He afterwards spoke on that side at public
meetings. Young as he was, he took the lead of the public-spirited
young men who strove to purge the State from this iniquity; but in the
Convention the proposition was voted down by a majority so decisive as
to banish the subject from politics for fifty years. Still more
honorable was it in Mr. Clay, that, in 1829, when Calhoun was maturing
nullification, he could publicly say that among the acts of his life
which he reflected upon with most satisfaction was his youthful effort
to secure emancipation in Kentucky.
The chapter of our history most abounding in all the elements of
interest will be that one which will relate the rise and first
national triumph of the Democratic party. Young Clay came to the
Kentucky stump just when the country was at the crisis of the struggle
between the Old and the New. But in Kentucky it was not a struggle;
for the people there, mostly of Virginian birth, had been personally
benefited by Jefferson's equalizing measures, and were in the fullest
sympathy with his political doctrines. When, therefore, this brilliant
and commanding youth, with that magnificent voice of his, and large
gesticulation, mounted the wagon that usually served as platform in
the open-air meetings of Kentucky, and gave forth, in fervid oratory,
the republican principles he had imbibed in Richmond, he won that
immediate and intense popularity which an orator always wins who gives
powerful expression to the sentiments of his hearers. We cannot wonder
that, at the close of an impassioned address upon the Alien and
Sedition Laws, the multitude should have pressed about him, and borne
him aloft in triumph upon their shoulders; nor that Kentucky should
have hastened to employ him in her public business as soon as he was
of the requisite age. At thirty he was, to use the language of the
stump, "Kentucky's favorite son," and incomparably the finest orator
in the Western country. Kentucky had tried him, and found him
perfectly to her mind. He was an easy, comfortable man to associate
with, wholly in the Jeffersonian taste. His wit was not of the highest
quality, but he had plenty of it; and if he said a good thing, he had
such a way of saying it as gave it ten times its natural force. He
chewed tobacco and took snuff,--practices which lowered the tone of
his health all his life. In familiar conversation he used language of
the most Western description; and he had a singularly careless,
graceful way with him, that was in strong contrast with the vigor and
dignity of his public efforts. He was an honest and brave young man,
altogether above lying, hypocrisy, and meanness,--full of the idea of
Republican America and her great destiny. The splendor of his talents
concealed his defects and glorified his foibles; and Kentucky rejoiced
in him, loved him, trusted him, and sent him forth to represent her in
the national council.
During the first thirteen years of Henry Clay's active life as a
politician,--from his twenty-first to his thirty-fourth year,--he
appears in politics 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 he was 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. Mr. Jefferson received
his affectionate young disciple with cordiality, and admitted him to
his confidence. Clay had been recently defending Burr before a
Kentucky court, entirely believing that his designs were lawful and
sanctioned. Mr. Jefferson showed him the cipher letters of that
mysterious and ill-starred adventurer, which convinced Mr. Clay that
Burr was certainly a liar, if he was not a traitor. Mr. Jefferson's
perplexity in 1806 was similar to that of Jackson in 1833,--too much
money in the treasury. The revenue then was fifteen millions; and,
after paying all the expenses of the government and the stipulated
portion of the national debt, there was an obstinate and most
embarrassing surplus. What to do with this irrepressible surplus was
the question then discussed in Mr. Jefferson's Cabinet. The President,
being a free-trader, would naturally have said, Reduce the duties. But
the younger men of the party, who had no pet theories, and
particularly our young Senator, who had just come in from a six weeks'
horseback flounder over bridgeless roads, urged another solution of
the difficulty,--Internal Improvements. But the President was a
strict-constructionist, denied the authority of Congress to vote money
for public works, and was fully committed to that opinion.
Mr. Jefferson yielded. The most beautiful theories will not always
endure the wear and tear of practice. The President, it is true, still
maintained that an amendment to the Constitution ought to precede
appropriations for public works; but he said this very briefly and
without emphasis, while he stated at some length, and with force, the
desirableness of expending the surplus revenue in improving the
country. As time wore on, less and less was said about the amendment,
more and more about the importance of internal improvements; until, at
last, the Republican party, under Clay, Adams, Calhoun, and Rush, went
as far in this business of road-making and canal-digging as Hamilton
himself could have desired. Thus it was that Jefferson rendered true
his own saying, "We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans."
Jefferson yielded, also, on the question of free-trade. There is a
passage of a few lines in Mr. Jefferson's Message of 1806, the year of
Henry Clay's first appearance in Washington, which may be regarded as
the text of half the Kentuckian's speeches, and the inspiration of his
public life. The President is discussing the question, What shall we
do with the surplus?
"Shall we suppress the impost, and give that advantage to
foreign over domestic manufactures? On a few articles of
more general and necessary use, the suppression, in due
season, will doubtless be right; but the great mass of the
articles upon which impost is paid are foreign luxuries,
purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford
themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly
prefer its continuance, and application to the great
purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and
such other objects of public improvement as it may be
thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of
Federal powers. By these operations, new channels of
communication will be opened between the States, the lines
of separation will disappear, their interests will be
identified, and their union cemented by new and indissoluble
bonds."
Upon these hints, the young Senator delayed not to speak and act; nor
did he wait for an amendment to the Constitution. His first speech in
the Senate was in favor of building a bridge over the Potomac; one of
his first acts, to propose an appropriation of lands for a canal round
the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville; and soon he brought forward a
resolution directing the Secretary of the Treasury to report a system
of roads and canals for the consideration of Congress. The seed of the
President's Message had fallen into good ground.
Returning home at the end of the session, and reentering the Kentucky
Legislature, we still find him a strict follower of Mr. Jefferson. In
support of the President's non-intercourse policy (which was
Franklin's policy of 1775 applied to the circumstances of 1808), Mr.
Clay proposed that the members of the Legislature should bind
themselves to wear nothing that was not of American manufacture. A
Federalist, ignorant of the illustrious origin of this idea, ignorant
that the homespun system had caused the repeal of the Stamp Act, and
_would_ have postponed the Revolution but for the accident of
Lexington, denounced Mr. Clay's proposition as the act of a shameless
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 reappeared in that body in 1809, and sat during two sessions.
Homespun was again the theme of his speeches. His ideas on the subject
of protecting and encouraging American manufactures were not derived
from books, nor expressed in the language of political economy. At his
own Kentucky home, Mrs. Clay, assisted by her servants, was spinning
and weaving, knitting and sewing, most of the garments required in her
little kingdom of six hundred acres, while her husband was away over
the mountains serving his country. "Let the nation do what we Kentucky
farmers are doing," said Mr. Clay to the Senate. "Let us manufacture
enough to be independent of foreign nations in things essential,--no
more." He discoursed on this subject in a very pleasant, humorous
manner, without referring to the abstract principle involved, or
employing any of the technical language of economists.
His service in the Senate during these two sessions enhanced his
reputation greatly, and the galleries were filled when he was expected
to speak, little known as he was to the nation at large. We have a
glimpse of him in one of Washington Irving's letters of February,
1811:
"Clay, from Kentucky, spoke against the Bank. He is one of
the finest fellows I have seen here, and one of the finest
orators in the Senate, though I believe the youngest man in
it. The galleries, however, were so much crowded with ladies
and gentlemen, and such expectations had been expressed
concerning his speech, that he was completely frightened,
and acquitted himself very little to his own satisfaction.
He is a man I have great personal regard for."
This was the anti-bank speech which General Jackson used to say had
convinced him of the impolicy of a national bank, and which, with
ingenious malice, he covertly quoted in making up his Bank Veto
Message of 1832.
Mr. Clay's public life proper began in November, 1811, when he
appeared in Washington as a member of the House of Representatives,
and was immediately elected Speaker by the war party, by the decisive
majority of thirty-one. He was then thirty-four years of age. His
election to the Speakership on his first appearance in the House gave
him, at once, national standing. His master in political doctrine and
his partisan chief, Thomas Jefferson, was gone from the scene; and
Clay could now be a planet instead of a satellite. Restive as he had
been under the arrogant aggressions of England, he had schooled
himself to patient waiting, aided by Jefferson's benign sentiments and
great example. But his voice was now for war; and such was the temper
of the public in those months, that the eloquence of Henry Clay,
seconded by the power of the Speaker, rendered the war unavoidable.
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 reassure it. When President Madison faltered, it
was the stimulus of Clay's resistless presence that put heart into him
again. If the people seemed reluctant, it was Clay's trumpet harangues
that fired their minds. And when the war was declared, it was he, more
than President or Cabinet or War Committee, that carried it along upon
his shoulders. All our wars begin in disaster; it was Clay who
restored the country to confidence when it was disheartened by the
loss of Detroit and its betrayed garrison. It was Clay alone who could
encounter without flinching the acrid sarcasm of John Randolph, and
exhibit the nothingness of his telling arguments. It was he alone who
could adequately deal with Quincy of Massachusetts, who alluded to the
Speaker and his friends as "young politicians, with their pin-feathers
yet unshed, the shell still sticking upon them,--perfectly unfledged,
though they fluttered and cackled on the floor." 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. Fiery Jackson read them, and found
them perfectly to his taste. Gentle Harrison read them to his
Tippecanoe heroes. 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?"
Henry Clay was not a man of blood. On the contrary, he was eminently
pacific, both in his disposition and in his politics. Yet he believed
in the war of 1812, and his whole heart was in it. The question
occurs, then, Was it right and best for the United States to declare
war against Great Britain in 1812? The proper answer to this question
depends upon another: What ought we to think of Napoleon Bonaparte? If
Napoleon _was_, what English Tories and American Federalists said he
was, the enemy of mankind,--and if England, in warring upon him, _was_
fighting the battle of mankind,--then the injuries received by neutral
nations might have been borne without dishonor. When those giant
belligerents were hurling continents at one another, the damage done
to bystanders from the flying off of fragments was a thing to be
expected, and submitted to as their share of the general ruin,--to be
compensated by the final suppression of the common foe. To have
endured this, and even to have submitted, for a time, to the searching
of ships, so that not one Englishman should be allowed to skulk from
such a fight, had not been pusillanimity, but magnanimity. But if, as
English Whigs and American Democrats contended, Napoleon Bonaparte was
the armed soldier of democracy, the rightful heir of the Revolution,
the sole alternative to anarchy, the _legitimate_ ruler of France; if
the responsibility of those enormous desolating wars does not lie at
his door, but belongs to George III. and the Tory party of England; if
it is a fact that Napoleon always stood ready to make a just peace,
which George III. and William Pitt refused, _not_ in the interest of
mankind and civilization, but in that of the Tory party and the allied
dynasties,--then America was right in resenting the searching and
seizure of her ships, and right, after exhausting every peaceful
expedient, in declaring war.
That this was really the point in dispute between our two parties is
shown in the debates, newspapers, and pamphlets of the time. The
Federalists, as Mr. Clay observed in one of his speeches, compared
Napoleon to "every monster and beast, from that mentioned in the
Revelation down to the most insignificant quadruped." The Republicans,
on the contrary, spoke of him always with moderation and decency,
sometimes with commendation, and occasionally he was toasted at their
public dinners with enthusiasm. Mr. Clay himself, while lamenting his
enormous power and the suspension of ancient nationalities, always had
a lurking sympathy with him. "Bonaparte," said he in his great war
speech of 1813,
"has been called the scourge of mankind, the destroyer of
Europe, the great robber, the infidel, the modern Attila,
and Heaven knows by what other names. Really, gentlemen
remind me of an obscure lady, in a city not very far off,
who also took it into her head, in conversation with an
accomplished French gentleman, to talk of the affairs of
Europe. She, too, spoke of the destruction of the balance of
power; stormed and raged about the insatiable ambition of
the Emperor; called him the curse of mankind, the destroyer
of Europe. The Frenchman listened to her with perfect
patience, and when she had ceased said to her, with
ineffable politeness, 'Madam, it would give my master, the
Emperor, infinite pain if he knew how hardly you thought of
him.'"
This brief passage suffices to show the prevailing tone of the two
parties when Napoleon was the theme of discourse.
It is, of course, impossible for us to enter into this question of
Napoleon's moral position. Intelligent opinion, ever since the means
of forming an opinion were accessible, has been constantly judging
Napoleon more leniently, and the Tory party more severely. We can only
say, that, in our opinion, the war of 1812 was just and necessary; and
that Henry Clay, both in supporting Mr. Jefferson's policy of
non-intercourse and in supporting President Madison's policy of war,
deserved well of his country. Postponed that war might have been. But,
human nature being what it is, and the English government being what
it was, we do not believe that the United States could ever have been
distinctly recognized as one of the powers of the earth without
another fight for it.