Part 16 (1/2)
An octogenarian British Earl, who had retired from public life because of his years, but who still cherished a natural interest in public men and measures, being struck by the impression made in the aristocratic circles of London by the American Commissioners, then on their way home from Ghent, requested a friend to bring them to see him at his house, to which his growing infirmities confined him. The visit was promptly and cheerfully paid, and the obliging friend afterwards inquired of the old Lord as to the impression the Americans had made upon him. ”Ah!” said the veteran, with the ”light of other days” gleaming from his eyes, ”I liked them all, but _I liked the Kentucky man best_.” It was so every where.
One specimen has been preserved of Mr. Clay's felicity of repartee and charm of conversation, as exhibited while in Paris, immediately after the conclusion of Peace at Ghent. He was there introduced to the famous Madame de Stael, who cordially addressed him with--”Ah, Mr. Clay! I have been in England, and have been battling your cause for you there.” ”I know it, madame; we heard of your powerful interposition, and are grateful and thankful for it.” ”They were much enraged against you,”
said she: ”so much so, that they at one time thought seriously of sending the Duke of Wellington to command their armies against you!” ”I am very sorry, madame,” replied Mr. Clay, ”that they did not send his Grace.” ”Why?” asked she, surprised. ”Because, madame, if he had beaten us, we should have been in the condition of Europe, without disgrace.
But, if we had been so fortunate as to defeat him, we should have greatly added to the renown of our arms.”
At his next meeting with ”Corinne,” at her own house, Mr. Clay was introduced by her to the conqueror at Waterloo, when she related the above conversation. The Duke promptly responded that, had it been his fortune to serve against the Americans, and to triumph over them, he should indeed have regarded that triumph as the proudest of his achievements.
Mr. Clay was in London when the tidings of Waterloo arrived, and set the British frantic with exultation. He was dining one day at Lord Castlereagh's, while Bonaparte's position was still uncertain, as he had disappeared from Paris, and fled none knew whither. The most probable conjecture was that he had embarked at some little port for the United States, and would probably make his way thither, as he was always lucky on water. ”If he reaches your sh.o.r.es, Mr. Clay,” gravely inquired Lord Liverpool (one of the Ministers), ”will he not give you a great deal of trouble?” ”Not the least,” was the prompt reply of the Kentuckian; ”we shall be very glad to receive him; to treat him with all hospitality, and very soon make him a good democrat.” A general laugh here restored the hilarity of the party.
The magnetism of Mr. Clay's manner and conversation have perhaps received no stronger testimony than that of Gen. Glasc.o.c.k, a political antagonist, who came into Congress from Georgia, during the fierce struggle which followed the removal of the Deposits. ”Gen. Glasc.o.c.k,”
said a mutual friend, at a party one evening, ”shall I make you acquainted with Mr. Clay?” ”No, Sir!” was the prompt and stern response; ”I choose not to be fascinated and moulded by him, as friend and foe appear to be, and I shall therefore decline his acquaintance.”
Mr. Clay had a natural repugnance to caucuses, conventions, and the kindred contrivances whereby great men are elaborated out of very small materials, and was uniformly a candidate for Congress ”on his own hook,”
with no fence between him and his const.i.tuents. Only once in the course of his long Representative career was he obliged to canva.s.s for his election, and he was never defeated, nor ever could be, before a public that he could personally meet and address. The one searching ordeal to which he was subjected, followed the pa.s.sage of the ”Compensation Act”
of 1816, whereby Congress subst.i.tuted for its own per diem a fixed salary of $1,500 to each Member. This act raised a storm throughout the country, which prostrated most of its supporters. The hostility excited was especially strong in the West, then very poor, especially in money: $1,500 then, being equal to $4000 at present. John Pope (afterward Gen.
Jackson's Governor of Arkansas), one of the ablest men in Kentucky, a federalist of the old school, and a personal antagonist of Mr. Clay, took the stump as his compet.i.tor for the seat, and gave him enough to do through the canva.s.s. They met in discussion at several local a.s.semblages, and finally in a pitched battle at Higbie; a place central to the three counties composing the district, where the whole people collected to hear them. Pope had the district with him in his denunciation of the Compensation Bill, while Clay retorted with effect, by pressing home on his antagonist the embittered and not very consistent hostility of the latter to the war with Great Britain, recently concluded, which uniformly had been very popular in Kentucky.
The result was decisive: Mr. Clay was re-elected by about six hundred majority.
That excited canva.s.s was fruitful of characteristic incidents like the following:
While traversing the district, Mr. Clay encountered an old hunter, who had always before been his warm friend, but was now opposed to his re-election on account of the Compensation Bill. ”Have you a good rifle, my friend?” asked Mr. Clay. ”Yes.” ”Did it ever flash?” ”Once only,” he replied. ”What did you do with it--throw it away?” ”No, I picked the flint, tried it again, and brought down the game.” ”Have _I_ ever flashed but upon the Compensation Bill?” ”No!” ”Will you throw me away?”
”No, no!” exclaimed the hunter with enthusiasm, nearly overpowered by his feelings; ”I will pick the flint, and try you again!” He was afterward a warm supporter of Mr. Clay.
An Irish barber in Lexington, Jerry Murphy by name, who had always before been a zealous admirer and active supporter of Mr. Clay, was observed during this canva.s.s to maintain a studied silence. That silence was ominous, especially as he was known to be under personal obligation to Mr. Clay for legal a.s.sistance to rescue him from various difficulties in which his hasty temper had involved him. At length, an active and prominent partisan of the speaker called on the barber, with whom he had great influence, and pressed him to dispel the doubt that hung over his intentions by a frank declaration in favor of his old favorite. Looking his canva.s.ser in the eye, with equal earnestness and shrewdness, Murphy responded; ”I tell you what, docthur; I mane to vote for the man _that can put but one hand into the Treasury_.” (Mr. Pope had lost one of his arms in early life, and the humor of Pat's allusion to this circ.u.mstance, in connection with Mr. Clay's support of the Compensation Bill, was inimitable.)
Mr. Clay was confessedly the best presiding officer that any deliberative body in America has ever known, and none was ever more severely tried. The intensity and bitterness of party feeling during the earlier portion of his Speakers.h.i.+p cannot now be realized except by the few who remember those days. It was common at that time in New England town-meetings, for the rival parties to take opposite sides of the broad aisle in the meeting-house, and thus remain, hardly speaking across the line separation, from morning till night. Hon. Josiah Quincy, the Representative of Boston, was distinguished in Congress for the ferocity of his a.s.saults on the policy of Jefferson and Madison; and between him and Mr. Clay there were frequent and sharp encounters, barely kept within the limits prescribed by parliamentary decorum. At a later period, the eccentric and distinguished John Randolph, the master of satire and invective; and who, though not avowedly a Federalist, opposed nearly every act of the Democrat Administrations of 1801-16, and was the unfailing antagonist of every measure proposed or supported by Mr. Clay, was a thorn in the side of the Speaker for years. Many were the pa.s.sages between them in which blows were given and taken, whereof the gloves of parliamentary etiquette could not break the force: the War, the Tariff, the early recognition of Greek and South American Independence, the Missouri Compromise, &c. &c., being strenuously advocated by Mr. Clay and opposed by Mr. Randolph. But of these this is no place to speak.
Innumerable appeals from Mr. Clay's decisions, as Speaker, were made by the orator of Roanoke, but no one of them was ever sustained by the House. At length, after Mr. Clay had left Congress, and Mr. Randolph been transferred to the Senate, a bloodless duel between them grew out of the Virginian's unmeasured abuse of the Kentuckian's agency in electing J.Q. Adams to the Presidency; a duel which seems to have had the effect of softening, if not dissipating Randolph's rancor against Mr. Clay. Though evermore a political antagonist, his personal antipathy was no longer manifested; and one of the last visits of Randolph to the Capitol, when dying of consumption, was made for the avowed purpose of hearing in the Senate the well-known voice of the eloquent Sage of Ashland.
On the floor of the House, Mr. Clay was often impetuous in discussion, and delighted to relieve the tedium of debate, and modify the sternness of antagonism by a sportive jest or lively repartee. On one occasion, Gen. Alexander Smythe of Virginia, who often afflicted the House by the verbosity of his harangues and the multiplicity of his dry citations, had paused in the middle of a speech which seemed likely to endure for ever, to send to the library for a book from which he wished to note a pa.s.sage. Fixing his eye on Mr. Clay, who sat near him, he observed the Kentuckian writhing in his seat as if his patience had already been exhausted. ”You, sir,” remarked Smythe addressing the Speaker, ”speak for the present generation; but I speak for posterity.” ”Yes,” said Mr.
Clay, ”and you seem resolved to speak until the arrival of _your_ auditory.”
Revolutionary pensions were a source of frequent pa.s.sages between eastern and western members; the greater portion of those pensions being payable to eastern survivors of the struggle. On one occasion when a Pension Bill was under discussion, Hon. Enoch Lincoln (afterwards Governor of Maine) was dilating on the services and sufferings of these veterans, and closed with the patriotic adjuration, ”Soldiers of the Revolution! live for ever!” Mr. Clay followed, counselling moderation in the grant of pensions, that the country might not be overloaded and rendered restive by their burden, and turning to Mr. Lincoln with a smile, observed--”I hope my worthy friend will not insist on the very great duration of these pensions which he has suggested. Will he not consent, by way of a compromise, to a term of nine hundred and ninety-nine years instead of eternity?”
A few sentences culled from the remarks in Congress elicited by his death, will fitly close this hasty daguerreotype of the man Henry Clay.
Mr. Underwood (his colleague) observed in Senate that ”his physical and mental organization eminently qualified him to become a great and impressive orator. His person was tall, slender and commanding. His temperament, ardent, fearless, and full of hope. His countenance, clear, expressive, and variable--indicating the emotion which predominated at the moment with exact similitude. His voice, cultivated and modulated in harmony with the sentiment he desired to express, fell upon the ear with the melody of enrapturing music. His eye beaming with intelligence and flas.h.i.+ng with coruscations of genius. His gestures and att.i.tudes graceful and natural. These personal advantages won the prepossessions of an audience even before his intellectual powers began to move his hearers; and when his strong common sense, his profound reasoning, his clear conceptions of his subject in all its bearings, and his striking and beautiful ill.u.s.trations, united with such personal qualities, were brought to the discussion of any question, his audience was enraptured, convinced and led by the orator as if enchanted by the lyre of Orpheus.
”No man was ever blessed by his Creator with faculties of a higher order than Mr. Clay. In the quickness of his perceptions, and the rapidity with which his conclusions were formed, he had few equals and no superiors. He was eminently endowed with a nice discriminating taste for order, symmetry, and beauty. He detected in a moment every thing out of place or deficient in his room, upon his farm, in his own or the dress of others. He was a skilful judge of the form and qualities of his domestic animals, which he delighted to raise on his farm. I could give you instances of the quickness and minuteness of his keen faculty of observation, which never overlooked any thing. A want of neatness and order was offensive to him. He was particular and neat in his handwriting and his apparel. A slovenly blot or negligence of any sort met his condemnation; while he was so organized that he attended to, and arranged little things to please and gratify his natural love for neatness, order, and beauty, his great intellectual faculties grasped all the subjects of jurisprudence and politics with a facility amounting almost to intuition. As a lawyer, he stood at the head of his profession. As a statesman, his stand at the head of the Republican Whig party for nearly half a century, establishes his t.i.tle to pre-eminence among his ill.u.s.trious a.s.sociates.
”Mr. Clay was deeply versed in all the springs of human action. He had read and studied biography and history. Shortly after I left college, I had occasion to call on him in Frankfort, where he was attending court, and well I remember to have found him with Plutarch's Lives in his hands. No one better than he knew how to avail himself of human motives, and all the circ.u.mstances which surrounded a subject, or could present themselves with more force and skill to accomplish the object of an argument.
”Bold and determined as Mr. Clay was in all his actions, he was, nevertheless, conciliating. He did not obstinately adhere to things impracticable. If he could not accomplish the best, he contented himself with the nighest approach to it. He has been the great compromiser of those political agitations and opposing opinions which have, in the belief of thousands, at different times, endangered the perpetuity of our Federal Government and Union.