little more than the history of a personal feud. In the year 1819, it
was his fortune to incur the hatred of the best hater then
living,--Andrew Jackson. They met for the first time in November,
1815, when the hero of New Orleans came to Washington to consult with
the administration respecting the Indian and military affairs of his
department. Each of these eminent men truly admired the other. Jackson
saw in Clay the civil hero of the war, whose fiery eloquence had
powerfully seconded its military heroes. Clay beheld in Jackson the
man whose gallantry and skill had done most to justify the war in the
sight of the people. They became immediately and cordially intimate.
Jackson engaged to visit Ashland in the course of the next summer, and
spend a week there. On every occasion when Mr. Clay spoke of the
heroes of the war, he bestowed on Jackson the warmest praise.
In 1818 General Jackson invaded Florida, put to death two Indian
chiefs in cold blood, and executed two British subjects, Arbuthnot and
Armbrister.[3] During the twenty-seven days' debate upon these
proceedings, in 1819, the Speaker sided with those who disapproved
them, and he delivered a set speech against Jackson. This speech,
though it did full justice to General Jackson's motives, and contained
a fine eulogium upon his previous services, gave the General deadly
offence. Such was Jackson's self-love that he could not believe in the
honesty of any opposition to him, but invariably attributed such
opposition to low personal motives. Now it was a fact well known to
Jackson, that Henry Clay had expected the appointment of Secretary of
State under Mr. Monroe; and it was part of the gossip of the time that
Mr. Monroe's preference of Mr. Adams was the reason of Clay's
occasional opposition to measures favored by the administration. We do
not believe this, because the measures which Mr. Clay opposed were
such as he _must_ have disapproved, and which well-informed posterity
will forever disapprove. After much debate in the Cabinet, Mr. Monroe,
who was peculiarly bound to Jackson, and who had reasons of his own
for not offending him, determined to sustain him _in toto_, both at
home and in the courts of Spain and England. Hence, in condemning
General Jackson, Mr. Clay was again in opposition to the
administration; and the General of course concluded, that the Speaker
designed, in ruining him, merely to further his own political schemes.
How he boiled with fury against Mr. Clay, his published letters
amusingly attest. "The hypocrisy and baseness of Clay," wrote the
General, "in pretending friendship to me, and endeavoring to crush the
Executive through me, makes me despise the villain."
Jackson, as we all know, was triumphantly sustained by the House. In
fact, Mr. Clay's speech was totally unworthy of the occasion. Instead
of argument and fact, he gave the House and the galleries beautiful
declamation. The evidence was before him; he had it in his hands; but,
instead of getting up his case with patient assiduity, and exhibiting
the damning proofs of Jackson's misconduct, he merely glanced over the
mass of papers, fell into some enormous blunders, passed over some
most material points, and then endeavored to supply all deficiencies
by an imposing eloquence. He even acknowledges that he had not
examined the testimony. "It is _possible_," said he, "that a critical
examination of the evidence _would_ show" that Arbuthnot was an
innocent trader. We have had occasion to examine that evidence since,
and we can testify that this conjecture was correct. But why was it a
_conjecture_? Why did Mr. Clay neglect to convert the conjecture into
certainty? It fell to him, as representing the civilization and
humanity of the United States, to vindicate the memory of an honorable
old man, who had done all that was possible to prevent the war, and
who had been ruthlessly murdered by men wearing the uniform of
American soldiers. It fell to him to bar the further advancement of a
man most unfit for civil rule. To this duty he was imperatively
called, but he only half did it, and thus exasperated the tiger
without disabling him.
Four years passed. In December, 1823, General Jackson reappeared in
Washington to take his seat in the Senate, to which he had been
elected by his wire-pullers for the purpose of promoting his interests
as a candidate for the Presidency. Before he left home two or three of
his friends had besought him to assume a mild and conciliatory
demeanor at the capitol. It would never do, they told him, for a
candidate for the Presidency to threaten to cut off the ears of
gentlemen who disapproved his public conduct; he must restrain himself
and make friends. This advice he followed. He was reconciled with
General Winfield Scott, whom, in 1817, he had styled an "assassin," a
"hectoring bully," and an "intermeddling pimp and spy of the War
Office." He made friends with Colonel Thomas H. Benton, with whom he
had fought in the streets of Nashville, while he still carried in his
body a bullet received in that bloody affray. With Henry Clay, too, he
resumed friendly intercourse, met him twice at dinner-parties, rode
and exchanged visits with him, and attended one of the Speaker's
Congressional dinners.
When next these party chieftains met, in the spring of 1825, it was
about to devolve upon the House of Representatives to decide which of
three men should be the next President,--Jackson, Adams, or Crawford.
They exchanged visits as before; Mr. Clay being desirous, as he said,
to show General Jackson that, in the vote which he had determined to
give, he was influenced only by public considerations. No reader needs
to be informed that Mr. Clay and his friends were able to decide the
election, and that they decided it in favor of Mr. Adams. We believe
that Mr. Clay was wrong in so doing. As a Democrat he ought, we think,
to have been willing to gratify the plurality of his fellow-citizens,
who had voted for General Jackson. His motives we fully believe to
have been disinterested. Indeed, it was plainly intimated to him that,
if he gave the Presidency to General Jackson, General Jackson would
make him his heir apparent, or, in other words, his Secretary of
State.
The anger of General Jackson at his disappointment was not the blind
and wild fury of his earlier days; it was a deeper, a deadlier wrath,
which he governed and concealed in order to wreak a feller vengeance.
On the evening of the day on which the election in the House occurred
there was a levee at the Presidential mansion, which General Jackson
attended. Who, that saw him dart forward and grasp Mr. Adams cordially
by the hand, could have supposed that he then entirely believed that
Mr. Adams had stolen the Presidency from him by a corrupt bargain with
Mr. Clay? Who could have supposed that he and his friends had been,
for fourteen days, hatching a plot to blast the good name of Mr. Adams
and Mr. Clay, by spreading abroad the base insinuation that Clay had
been bought over to the support of Adams by the promise of the first
place in the Cabinet? Who could have supposed that, on his way home to
Tennessee, while the newspapers were paragraphing his magnanimity in
defeat, as shown by his behavior at the levee, he would denounce Adams
and Clay, in bar-rooms and public places, as guilty of a foul compact
to frustrate the wishes of the people?
It was calumny's masterpiece. It was a rare stroke of art to get an
old dotard of a member of Congress to publish, twelve days _before_
the election, that Mr. Clay had agreed to vote for Mr. Adams, and that
Mr. Adams had agreed to reward him by the office of Secretary of
State. When the vote had been given and the office conferred, how
plausible, how convincing, the charge of bargain!
It is common to censure Mr. Clay for accepting office under Mr. Adams.
We honor him for his courage in doing so. Having made Mr. Adams
President, it had been unlike the gallant Kentuckian to shrink from
the possible odium of the act by refusing his proper place in the
administration. The calumny which anticipated his acceptance of office
was a defiance: _Take office if you dare_! It was simply worthy of
Henry Clay to accept the challenge, and brave all the consequences of
what he had deliberately and conscientiously done.
In the office of Secretary of State Mr. Clay exhibited an admirable
talent for the despatch of business. He negotiated an unusual number
of useful treaties. He exerted himself to secure a recognition of the
principles, that, in time of war, private property should enjoy on the
ocean the same protection as on land, and that paper blockades are not
to be regarded. He seconded Mr. Adams in his determination not to
remove from office any man on account of his previous or present
opposition to the administration; and he carried this policy so far,
that, in selecting the newspapers for the publication of the laws, he
refused to consider their political character. This was in strict
accordance with the practice of all previous administrations; but it
is so pleasant to recur to the times when that honorable policy
prevailed, that we cannot help alluding to it. In his intercourse with
foreign ministers, Mr. Clay had an opportunity to display all the
charms of an unequalled courtesy: they remained his friends long after
he had retired. His Wednesday dinners and his pleasant evening
receptions were remembered for many years. How far he sympathized with
Mr. Adams's extravagant dreams of a system of national works that
should rival the magnificent structures of ancient Rome, or with the
extreme opinions of his colleague, Mr. Rush, as to the power and
importance of government, we do not know. He worked twelve hours a day
in his office, he tells us, and was content therewith. He was the last
high officer of the government to fight a duel. That bloodless contest
between the Secretary of State and John Randolph was as romantic and
absurd as a duel could well be. Colonel Benton's narrative of it is at
once the most amusing and the most affecting piece of gossip which our
political annals contain. Randolph, as the most unmanageable of
members of Congress, had been for fifteen years a thorn in Mr. Clay's
side, and Clay's later politics had been most exasperating to Mr.
Randolph; but the two men loved one another in their hearts, after
all. Nothing has ever exceeded the thorough-bred courtesy and tender
consideration with which they set about the work of putting one
another to death; and their joy was unbounded when, after the second
fire, each discovered that the other was unharmed. If all duels could
have such a result, duelling would be the prettiest thing in the
world.
The election of 1828 swept the administration from power. No man has
ever bowed more gracefully to the decision of the people than Henry
Clay. His remarks at the public dinner given him in Washington, on his
leaving for home, were entirely admirable. Andrew Jackson, he said,
had wronged him, but he was now the Chief Magistrate of his country,
and, as such, he should be treated with decorum, and his public acts
judged with candor. His journey to Ashland was more like the progress
of a victor than the return homeward of a rejected statesman.
He now entered largely into his favorite branch of rural business, the
raising of superior animals. Fifty merino sheep were driven over the
mountains from Pennsylvania to his farm, and he imported from England
some Durham and Hertford cattle. He had an Arabian horse in his
stable. For the improvement of the breed of mules, he imported an ass
from Malta, and another from Spain. Pigs, goats, and dogs he also
raised, and endeavored to improve. His slaves being about fifty in
number, he was able to carry on the raising of hemp and corn, as well
as the breeding of stock, and both on a considerable scale. Mrs. Clay
sent every morning to the principal hotel of Lexington thirty gallons
of milk, and her husband had large consignments to make to his factor
in New Orleans. His letters of this period show how he delighted in
his animals and his growing crops, and how thoughtfully he considered
the most trifling details of management. His health improved. He told
his old friend, Washington Irving, that he found it was as good for
men as for beasts to be turned out to grass occasionally. Though not
without domestic afflictions, he was very happy in his home. One of
his sons graduated second at West Point, and two of his daughters were
happily married. He was, perhaps, a too indulgent father; but his
children loved him most tenderly, and were guided by his opinion. It
is pleasing to read in the letters of his sons to him such passages as
this:
"You tell me that you wish me to receive your opinions, not
as commands, but as advice. Yet I must consider them as
commands, doubly binding; for they proceed from, one so
vastly my superior in all respects, and to whom I am under
such great obligations, that the mere intimation of an
opinion will be sufficient to govern my conduct."
The President, meanwhile, was paying such homage to the farmer of
Ashland as no President of the United States had ever paid to a
private individual. General Jackson's principal object--the object
nearest his heart--appears to have been to wound and injure Henry
Clay. His appointments, his measures, and his vetoes seem to have been
chiefly inspired by resentment against him. Ingham of Pennsylvania,
who had taken the lead in that State in giving currency to the
"bargain" calumny, was appointed Secretary of the Treasury. Eaton, who
had aided in the original concoction of that foul slander, was
appointed Secretary of War. Branch, who received the appointment of
Secretary of the Navy, was one of the few Senators who had voted and
spoken against the confirmation of Henry Clay to the office of
Secretary of State in 1825; and Berrien, Attorney-General, was
another. Barry, appointed Postmaster-General, was the Kentuckian who
had done most to inflict upon Mr. Clay the mortification of seeing his
own Kentucky siding against him. John Randolph, Clay's recent
antagonist in a duel, and the most unfit man in the world for a
diplomatic mission, was sent Minister to Russia. Pope, an old Kentucky
Federalist, Clay's opponent and competitor for half a lifetime,
received the appointment of Governor of the Territory of Arkansas.
General Harrison, who had generously defended Clay against the charge
of bargain and corruption, was recalled from a foreign mission on the
fourth day after General Jackson's accession to power, though he had
scarcely reached the country to which he was accredited. In the place
of General Harrison was sent a Kentuckian peculiarly obnoxious to Mr.
Clay. In Kentucky itself there was a clean sweep from office of Mr.
Clay's friends; not one man of them was left. His brother-in-law,
James Brown, was instantly recalled from a diplomatic post in Europe.
Kendall, the chief of the Kitchen Cabinet, had once been tutor to Mr.
Clay's children, and had won the favor of Jackson by lending a
dexterous hand in carrying Kentucky against his benefactor. Francis
Blair, editor of the Globe, had also been the particular friend and
correspondent of Mr. Clay, but had turned against him. From the
Departments in Washington, all of Mr. Clay's known friends were
immediately removed, except a few who had made themselves
indispensable, and a few others whom Mr. Van Buren contrived to spare.
In nearly every instance, the men who succeeded to the best places had
made themselves conspicuous by their vituperation of Mr. Clay. He was
strictly correct when he said, "Every movement of the President is
dictated by personal hostility toward me"; but he was deceived when he
added that it all conduced to his benefit. Every mind that was both
just and well-informed warmed toward the object of such pitiless and
demoniac wrath; but in what land are minds just and well-informed a
majority?
It was not only the appointments and removals that were aimed at Mr.
Clay. The sudden expulsion of gray hairs from the offices they had
honored, the precipitation of hundreds of families into poverty,--this
did not satisfy the President's vengeance. He assailed Henry Clay in
his first Message. In recommending a change in the mode of electing
the President, he said that, when the election devolves upon the House
of Representatives, circumstances may give the power of deciding the
election to one man. "May he not be tempted," added the President, "to
name his reward?" He vetoed appropriations for the Cumberland Road,
because the name and the honor of Henry Clay were peculiarly
identified with that work. He destroyed the Bank of the United States,
because he believed its power and influence were to be used in favor
of Mr. Clay's elevation to the Presidency. He took care, in his
Message vetoing the recharter of the Bank, to employ some of the
arguments which Clay had used in opposing the recharter of the United
States Bank in 1811. Miserably sick and infirm as he was, he consented
to stand for reelection, because there was no other candidate strong
enough to defeat Henry Clay; and he employed all his art, and the
whole power of the administration, during his second term, to smooth
Mr. Van Buren's path to the Presidency, to the exclusion of Henry
Clay. Plans were formed, too, and engagements made, the grand object
of which was to keep Clay from the Presidency, even after Mr. Van
Buren should have served his anticipated eight years. General Jackson
left Washington in 1837, expecting that Martin Van Buren would be
President until 1845, and that he would then be succeeded by Thomas H.
Benton. Nothing prevented the fulfilment of this programme but the
financial collapse of 1837, the effects of which continued during the
whole of Mr. Van Buren's term, and caused his defeat in 1840.
Mr. Clay accepted the defiance implied in General Jackson's conduct.
He reappeared in Washington in 1831, in the character of Senator and
candidate for the Presidency. His journey to Washington was again a
triumphal progress, and again the galleries were crowded to hear him
speak. A great and brilliant party gathered round him, strong in
talents, character, property, and supposed to be strong in numbers. He
at once proved himself to be a most unskilful party leader. Every
movement of his in _that_ character was a mistake. He was precipitate
when he ought to have been cautious, and cautious when nothing but
audacity could have availed. The first subject upon which he was
called upon to act was the tariff. The national debt being within two
or three years of liquidation, Calhoun threatening nullification, and
Jackson vetoing all internal improvement bills, it was necessary to
provide against an enormous surplus. Clay maintained that the
_protective_ duties should remain intact, and that only those duties
should be reduced which protected no American interest. This was done;
the revenue was reduced three millions; and the surplus was as
threatening as before. It was _impossible_ to save the protective
duties entire without raising too much revenue. Mr. Clay, as it seems
to us, should have plainly said this to the manufacturers, and
compelled his party in Congress to warn and save them by making a
judicious cut at the protective duties in 1832. This would have
deprived Calhoun of his pretext, and prepared the way for a safe and
gradual reduction of duties in the years following. Such was the
prosperity of the country in 1832, that the three millions lost to the
revenue by Mr. Clay's bill were likely to be made up to it in three
years by the mere increase in the imports and land sales.
Mr. Clay's next misstep was one of precipitation. General Jackson,
after a three years' war upon the Bank, was alarmed at the outcry of
its friends, and sincerely desired to make peace with it. We know,
from the avowals of the men who stood nearest his person at the time,
that he not only wished to keep the Bank question out of the
Presidential campaign of 1832, but that he was willing to consent, on
very easy conditions, to a recharter. It was Mr. Clay's commanding
influence that induced the directors of the Bank to press for a
recharter in 1832, and force the President to retraction or a veto. So
ignorant was this able and high-minded man of human nature and of the
American people, that he supposed a popular enthusiasm could be
kindled in behalf of a _bank_! Such was the infatuation of some of his
friends, that they went to the expense of circulating copies of the
veto message gratis, for the purpose of lessening the vote for its
author! Mr. Clay was ludicrously deceived as to his strength with the
masses of the people,--the _dumb_ masses,--those who have no eloquent
orators, no leading newspapers, no brilliant pamphleteers, to speak
for them, but who assert themselves with decisive effect on election
day.
It was another capital error in Mr. Clay, as the leader of a party, to
run at all against General Jackson. He should have hoarded his
prestige for 1836, when the magical name of Jackson would no longer
captivate the ignorant voter. Mr. Clay's defeat in 1832, so
unexpected, so overwhelming, lamed him for life as a candidate for the
Presidency. He lost faith in his star. In 1836, when there _was_ a
chance of success,--just a chance,--he would not suffer his name to
appear in the canvass. The vote of the opposition was divided among
three candidates,--General Harrison, Hugh L. White, and Daniel
Webster; and Mr. Van Buren, of course, had an easy victory.
Fortunately for his own happiness, Mr. Clay's desire for the
Presidency diminished as his chances of reaching it diminished. That
desire had never been morbid, it now became exceedingly moderate; nor
do we believe that, after his crushing defeat of 1832, he ever had
much expectation of winning the prize. He knew too well the arts by
which success is assured, to believe that an honorable man could be
elected to the Presidency by honorable means only.
Three other attempts were made to raise him to the highest office, and
it was always Andrew Jackson who struck him down. In 1840, he was set
aside by his party, and General Harrison nominated in his stead. This
was Jackson's doing; for it was the great defeat of 1832 which had
robbed Clay of prestige, and it was General Jackson's uniform success
that suggested the selection of a military candidate. Again, in 1844,
when the Texas issue was presented to the people, it was by the adroit
use of General Jackson's name that the question of annexation was
precipitated upon the country. In 1848, a military man was again
nominated, to the exclusion of Henry Clay.
Mr. Clay used to boast of his consistency, averring that he had never
changed his opinion upon a public question but once. We think he was
much too consistent. A notable example of an excessive consistency was
his adhering to the project of a United States Bank, when there was
scarcely a possibility of establishing one, and his too steadfast
opposition to the harmless expedient of the Sub-treasury. The
Sub-treasury system has now been in operation for a quarter of a
century. Call it a bungling and antiquated system, if you will; it has
nevertheless answered its purpose. The public money is taken out of
politics. If the few millions lying idle in the "Strong Box" do no
good, they at least do no harm; and we have no overshadowing national
bank to compete with private capital, and to furnish, every few years;
a theme for demagogues. Mr. Clay saw in the Sub-treasury the ruin of
the Republic. In his great speech of 1838, in opposition to it, he
uttered, in his most solemn and impressive manner, the following
words:--
"Mr. President, a great, novel, and untried measure is
perseveringly urged upon the acceptance of Congress. That it
is pregnant with tremendous consequences, for good or evil,
is undeniable, and admitted by all. We firmly believe that
it will be _fatal to the best interests of this country, and
ultimately subversive of its liberties_."
No one acquainted with Mr. Clay, and no man, himself sincere, who
reads this eloquent and most labored speech, can doubt Mr. Clay's
sincerity. Observe the awful solemnity of his first sentences:--