GEORGE GLEIG HAD seen thousands of soldiers in battle, but he had never seen any perform more disgracefully than the Americans assigned to defend Washington in the summer of 1814. “No troops could behave worse than they did,” wrote Gleig, an officer with a British force attacking the American capital. “The skirmishers were driven in as soon as attacked, the first line gave way without offering the slightest resistance, and the left of the main body was broken within half an hour after it was seriously engaged.” The British hadn’t dreamed that their assault would proceed so swiftly; they had barely engaged the defenders before the path to the city lay wide open.
The British commander, General Robert Ross, sent a flag of truce from the edge of Washington. But the bearer of the flag was fired upon from a window of a house, and his horse was killed beneath him. “You will easily believe that conduct so unjustifiable, so direct a breach of the law of nations, roused the indignation of every individual, from the General himself down to the private soldier,” George Gleig continued. “All thoughts of accommodation were instantly laid aside; the troops advanced forthwith into the town, and having first put to the sword all who were found in the house from which the shots were fired, and reduced it to ashes, they proceeded, without a moment’s delay, to burn and destroy every thing in the most distant degree connected with the government. In this general devastation were included the Senate-house”—the Capitol—“the President’s place, an extensive dock-yard and arsenal, barracks for two or three thousand men, several large store-houses filled with naval and military stores, some hundreds of cannon of different descriptions, and nearly twenty thousand stand of small arms.”
A spirit of righteous retribution moved the British in their sack of Washington, for earlier in the war American troops had gratuitously torched British government buildings in York, Canada. “All this was as it should be,” George Gleig said of the British reprisal. “And had the arm of vengeance been extended no farther, there would not have been room given for so much as a whisper of disapprobation. But unfortunately it did not stop here. A noble library, several printing offices, and all the national archives were likewise committed to the flames, which, though no doubt the property of government, might better have been spared.”
Years later Gleig recalled the awesome spectacle of Washington afire. Night was falling as the last of the British regiments marched into the city. “The blazing of houses, ships, and stores, the report of exploding magazines, and the crash of falling roofs informed them, as they proceeded, of what was going forward. You can conceive nothing finer than the sight which met them as they drew near to the town. The sky was brilliantly illumined by the different conflagrations; and a dark red light was thrown upon the road, sufficient to permit each man to view distinctly his comrade’s face. Except the burning of St. Sebastian’s”—in Spain during the Peninsular War—“I do not recollect to have witnessed, at any period of my life, a scene more striking or more sublime.”
THE BURNING OF Washington made Henry Clay look a fool. He had spearheaded the campaign in Congress in favor of the war against Britain and predicted a rapid victory. His drumbeating had started as soon as he entered the House of Representatives in 1811, when he earned the unprecedented—and never repeated—distinction of being made speaker of the House on his first day in the chamber. American grievances against Britain dated to the Revolutionary War. Britain had been slow to honor the treaty that ended that war, retaining posts near the Great Lakes, obstructing American commerce, and generally according the United States little of the respect due the independent nation America had become. The troubles escalated when war broke out between Britain and France in the early 1790s. American merchants and shipowners argued that they ought to be able to trade with both countries, since America was a neutral. But neither Britain nor France bought the argument, even as each continued to purchase the goods the Americans were selling, while trying to prevent the other from doing so. British ships seized American vessels bound for France and confiscated their cargoes; French seized American ships bound for Britain.
The American government complained, although the direction of the complaints depended on which party held power. The founders had uniformly decried parties as baleful manifestations of the selfish opportunism that had characterized British politics and prompted America’s bolt from the empire; they prayed their infant republic would be spared. But the new federal government was scarcely up and running before parties began to form, and the first divisive issue was the European war. Thomas Jefferson looked favorably on France, contending that revolution was usually a good thing and that France, having aided America in America’s hour of need, deserved American support now. A faction, then a party, of like-minded Francophiles coalesced around Jefferson and called themselves Republicans. Alexander Hamilton preferred Britain, citing ties of commerce and cultural affinity and detesting revolution on principle. American Anglophiles followed Hamilton and called themselves Federalists.
When the Federalists were in power the finger of American blame for ship seizures pointed at France. Indeed the Federalist administration of John Adams fought an undeclared naval war against France over the issue. When the Republicans took charge, Britain bore the brunt of American anger. The administration of Thomas Jefferson attempted diplomacy, then an embargo of American foreign trade, to end the seizures. Neither worked, and the seizures continued into the administration of Republican James Madison, who held the presidency when Henry Clay became House speaker.
A second issue intensified American anger at Britain. The British navy was desperate for seamen, and its officers had orders to man their vessels by any means possible. Service in the British navy was notoriously hard, and British sailors were chronically tempted to jump ship. Some did so in American ports, where British craft resupplied, and disappeared into the wharf-side populations. Not infrequently they then signed on with American merchantmen. British officers, alert to the practice, intercepted American vessels when they could and reclaimed the deserters.
The searches and seizures alone rankled Americans, as violations of American sovereignty. Even more infuriating was the British habit of seizing sailors who had never been in the British navy, on specious claims that they had been. This was nothing less than kidnapping and was condemned by Americans as intolerable.
The British provocations grew more egregious over time. In 1807 a British warship fired on an American navy vessel, the Chesapeake, within sight of the Virginia shore. The commander of the British vessel had called for the Chesapeake to stop and allow a British search party to board. The American commander refused, and the British officer ordered his gunners to blast a broadside into the unready American ship. Three Americans were killed and more than a dozen wounded, including the commander.
The attack outraged American opinion. Americans were shrewd enough to realize that the owners and captains of merchant vessels were making a gamble when they put to sea against the British; sometimes the gamble paid off and sometimes it didn’t. But an attack against a ship of the U.S. navy was an affront to the entire country.
Still another issue angered Americans toward Britain. From bases in Canada, British traders provisioned Indians living in the American Northwest. The provisions included weapons some of the tribes used to attack American settlements and kill American citizens. Westerners (in particular) resented the British role in the violence, and many demanded that Canada be seized and the British evicted from their last North American redoubt.
HENRY CLAY WAS one of those Westerners, by adoption. His birthplace was Hanover County, Virginia, and his earliest memories included the looting of his boyhood home by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War. The image would stick in his head as he grew older and dispose him to think the worst of Britain. More important at the time was the death that same year—1781—of his father, a Baptist minister and middling planter. Clay’s mother inherited the farm and a score of slaves; Henry and his brothers got two slaves each. Henry’s mother remarried, and Henry’s stepfather moved the family to Richmond, where he introduced Henry to George Wythe, a prominent jurist, signer of the Declaration of Independence, delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and mentor of Thomas Jefferson. Wythe saw promise in young Clay akin to what he had seen in Jefferson, and he made Clay his personal secretary. Clay read law in Wythe’s office and was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1797. He was twenty years old.
Richmond was thick with lawyers, leaving little room for a novice, even one with friends like George Wythe. So Clay did what generations of ambitious young Americans had done and would do: he headed west. Kentucky had been part of Virginia until 1792, by which time the trans-Appalachian portion of the Old Dominion had attained sufficient population to qualify for admission to the Union as a state of its own. It also had gravity working on behalf of statehood. In the 1790s, and indeed until the introduction of steamboat service on America’s rivers, the West began at the apex of the Appalachians. Cargoes floated downstream with ease and upstream with expense; rivers that flowed to the Mississippi made Westerners of the farmers and merchants who lived in their valleys.
Henry Clay crossed the mountains and became a Westerner. He settled in Lexington and commenced trying lawsuits, probating wills, drafting contracts and contesting them, and arranging the purchase and sale of real estate and other property, including slaves. Currency in the West was scarce, and his clients often paid in land or horses. He acquired a farm he called Ashland, for the trees there. He married Lucretia Hart, a daughter of one of Kentucky’s earliest settlers. Neighbors pointed him out as one of their community’s most promising young men.
Yet he stepped on toes. Kentucky’s first try at a constitution didn’t suit all the important political actors in the state, and various groups supported a new constitutional convention. Clay joined them, and in doing so challenged the state’s single most powerful interest. Slaveholders feared that a convention might threaten slavery in Kentucky. The existing constitution prohibited the legislature from tampering with the institution; certain proponents of a convention wanted to undo this prohibition. Northern states were freeing their slaves, and some Kentuckians thought their state should follow suit.
Clay agreed with the emancipationists, despite being a slaveholder himself. He thought slavery did harm to masters as well as slaves. The latter lacked freedom, the former pride in honest labor. “All America acknowledges the existence of slavery to be an evil,” he declared, “which while it deprives the slave of the best gift of heaven, in the end injures the master too, by laying waste his lands, enabling him to live indolently, and thus contracting all the vices generated by a state of idleness.” Kentucky had a chance to start anew, to rid the state of this curse. “If it be this enormous evil, the sooner we attempt its destruction the better,” he said.
Yet Clay was a realist. The dismantling of slavery must be gradual, even if it should begin at once. Otherwise slaveholders would be unfairly divested of their property in slaves, and elderly slaves thrown out of their homes and onto an uncaring world. Gradual emancipation was unfolding in several Northern states; Kentucky should try something similar.
Clay won his skirmish yet lost the battle. A convention was called, but it left the safeguards around slavery in Kentucky in place. In fact it reinforced them, by withdrawing from Kentucky’s free blacks the right to vote. Clay had hoped to push slavery toward dissolution. He still held that hope, but he realized the struggle would be harder than he had thought.
HE RAN FOR office as a Republican. His choice of the Republicans reflected his admiration for Thomas Jefferson, his animus toward Britain, and his judgment that the Republicans were the party of the future. Jefferson and the Republicans swept into office in Washington just as Clay was testing the political waters in Lexington; Kentucky Republicans fared comparably well. Clay jumped aboard.
He wore his Republicanism on his sleeve and defended it with vigor. He won election to the Kentucky legislature and tussled with remnant Federalists there. One, Humphrey Marshall, ridiculed Clay for slavish devotion to Jefferson. Clay called Marshall a poltroon; Marshall pronounced Clay a liar. Clay demanded a duel; Marshall obliged. The affair followed the punctilious code of honor of the venerable practice, specifying the ground rules with lawyerly precision:
Each gentleman will take his station at ten paces distance from the other, and will stand as may suit his choice, with his arms hanging down, and after the words Attention! Fire! both may fire at their leisure.
A snap or flash shall be equivalent to a fire.
If one should fire before the other, he who fires first shall stand in the position in which he was when he fired, except that he may let his arms fall down by his side.
A violation of the above rules by either of the parties (accidents excepted) shall subject the offender to instant death.
Clay was no duelist. He lacked pistols and had to borrow them. He didn’t shoot often enough to have any confidence in his ability to hit his antagonist. But he had been called a liar and must go forward. Dueling was illegal in Kentucky, as it was in most states, but authorities in one state rarely pursued duelists into another. For this reason Clay and Marshall traveled to Ohio to settle their dispute. On the appointed day the two, with their seconds, some friends and a surgeon crossed the Ohio River near Louisville and repaired to a level spot on the north bank. The ten paces were taken and the duelists assumed their positions. “Attention! Fire!” was called out.
Each man fired. Marshall’s first shot missed Clay completely. Clay’s ball nicked Marshall, who had turned sideways to shoot, in the abdomen. The rules said nothing about how many shots would be exchanged. The practice was to keep firing until one or both could no longer fire or until they agreed that injured honor had been assuaged.
Marshall and Clay weren’t finished. They reloaded. Marshall fired again, once more missing Clay. Clay took aim and pulled the trigger. “My damned pistol snapped,” he said in disgust afterward. Under the rules, this counted as Clay’s second shot.
They reloaded again. Marshall fired a third time, hitting Clay in the fleshy part of his thigh but sparing the bone. Clay’s third shot missed Marshall.
Clay wanted another round. But Marshall had had enough. So had the seconds, whose job included bringing their principals home alive, when possible. They talked Clay into accepting an end to the matter.
Because the purpose of duels was to demonstrate courage and devotion to honor, seconds typically concluded their function by delivering a report. The seconds in this duel filed theirs with Kentucky’s newspapers. “We deem it justice to both the gentlemen to pronounce their conduct on the occasion cool, determined and brave in the highest degree,” they declared.
Clay’s fellow Republicans were more enthusiastic. “Worthy Friend!” hailed one. “Your firmness and courage is admitted now by all parties. I feel happy to hear of the heroism with which you acted.” Their mutual enemies would take the lesson. “This will serve to stop the mouths of all snivel faced Tories.”
IN FACT IT did nothing of the sort. Clay continued to tangle with Federalists, including Joseph Daveiss, who had been appointed by John Adams to be United States district attorney for Kentucky. Clay and Daveiss regularly traded barbs in newspapers, and they went toe-to-toe in the courtroom. Clay had engaged to defend former vice president Aaron Burr, who had survived his own duel, with Alexander Hamilton, but whose political career hadn’t long outlived Hamilton’s death in that duel. Daveiss got it into his head that Burr was engaged in treasonous activity designed to separate the West from the United States. Thomas Jefferson dismissed the charges against Burr as too monstrous to believe. Clay shared Jefferson’s opinion. He also valued the opportunity to represent a famous client in a high-profile case.
Clay defended Burr before a grand jury Daveiss had summoned. He ripped into Daveiss for waging partisan war against Burr. “You have heard of inquisitions in Europe,” Clay said. “You have heard of the screws and tortures made use of in the dens of despotism, to extort confession; of the dark conclaves and caucuses, for the purpose of twisting some incoherent expression into evidence of guilt. Is not the project of the attorney for the United States a similar object of terror?” Clay professed faith in the jurors’ ability to see through Daveiss’s conspiracy mongering. “All the art of the attorney will not effect his purpose.”
Clay won the case, and then some. The grand jury not only refused to indict Burr; it joined locals in treating Burr as a Republican hero. A ball was held in his honor, with Republicans coming from miles around to congratulate Burr and Clay on defeating Daveiss and malicious Federalism.
Within months, though, Clay wished he had never met Burr. Jefferson received new information that caused him to change his mind entirely about his erstwhile number two. The president himself now leveled against Burr the very charge Clay had ridiculed as Inquisition-like. Jefferson didn’t immediately share the new evidence, but Clay deemed it prudent to take the word of Jefferson against that of Burr. “It seems that we have been much mistaken about Burr,” Clay wrote to Thomas Hart, his brother-in-law. He hoped his friends would accept that he had made an honest mistake. He concluded that the best thing for him to do was to keep his head down until the furor passed.
OR UNTIL ANOTHER furor took its place. War has long been a rite of passage, with new generations feeling a need to prove their courage and earn the right to supplant their elders. Clay’s generation grew up on the hero tales of the American Revolution—the stories of boldness in the political arena and valor on the battlefield. Often implicit in the stories, as in the stories of every generation of elders, was skepticism that the younger generation had what it took to match the elders’ feats. Where was the George Washington of the younger set, the general who could smite the British as Washington had done at Yorktown? Where were the Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, whose words inspired a nation and brought down an empire? Where the James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the framers of a new government for the new nation?
Henry Clay had heard the stories and felt the skepticism. He was burdened with no conspicuous sense of personal inferiority, but he reckoned that an ambitious young politician could do worse than demand that the country complete the work commenced by the generation of the founders. Britain had been the enemy then; Britain would be the enemy now. Clay didn’t fancy himself another Washington; military service didn’t appeal. But he could emulate Patrick Henry, the great orator of American independence, and could dream of following Jefferson into political leadership, perhaps even to the White House.
He argued for war from the moment he took up the gavel as House speaker. Congressional Federalists, representing the commercial classes of America in opposition to war, asserted that the British seizures of American ships were a mere tactic in Britain’s struggle against France, and not an existential threat to America. Clay rejoined that the Federalists couldn’t be more wrong. “The real cause of British aggression is not to distress an enemy but to destroy a rival,” he said. British merchants and shippers saw America as a mortal rival in the trade of the Atlantic region, and were bent on its destruction. The Federalists gravely underestimated Britain’s malevolence. “She sickens at your prosperity and beholds in your growth—your sails spread on every ocean, and your numerous seamen—the foundations of a power which, at no very distant day, is to make her tremble for naval superiority.”
Clay’s words grew sharper with passing time. “All hope of honorable accommodation is at an end,” he told the House in April 1812. “Where is the motive for longer delay? The final step ought to be taken, and that step is war.” Faint hearts feared for America’s safety. Yet courage dictated focusing not on what might befall America but on what had befallen it already. British policies systematically worked to America’s mortal harm. “They violate the rights, and wound deeply the best interests, of the whole American people. If we yield to them, at this time, the cause may be considered as abandoned. There will be no rallying point hereafter.” American patience had been pushed to the limit; the crisis allowed but one resolution. “It is by open and manly war only that we can get through it with honor and advantage to the country. Our wrongs have been great; our cause is just; and if we are decided and firm, success is inevitable. Let war therefore be forthwith proclaimed against England.”