HENRY CLAY’S EXPERIENCE as a diplomat could be summarized, to 1825, by his service on the American peace commission at Ghent. Yet his interests in foreign policy ranged more broadly. His advocacy of protectionism reflected a theory of international trade; his opponents might dispute his conclusions, but they couldn’t deny the careful thought that went into them. As a war hawk he had weighed the relative dangers of war and peace in the challenge he espoused to the greatest empire in the world.
But it was Clay’s support for anticolonial revolutions in Latin America and in the Ottoman empire that set him apart from the rest of his generation in Washington. During the second decade of the nineteenth century, nationalists across Central and South America sought to win from Spain what the Americans had won from Britain in the 1770s and 1780s. Clay lauded the rebels in speech after speech and urged, at a minimum, American recognition of the independent governments they proclaimed. The spirit of liberty that had inspired Americans in 1776 now inspired freedom lovers to America’s south, he said. Americans would be false to their truest ideals not to offer aid and comfort. The Ottoman empire was a greater stretch, but when Greek rebels raised the flag of revolt, Clay pleaded on their behalf as well. Ancient Greece was the birthplace of democracy; the United States was its modern home. If self-government could be restored in Greece, he said, self-government everywhere would be strengthened. Americans owed it to the Greeks, and to themselves, to lend a hand.
John Quincy Adams, as Monroe’s secretary of state, rejected Clay’s advice. In an address on the forty-fifth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Adams proclaimed a policy of benevolent restraint. “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” he said of America. “But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Americans should focus on perfecting their own institutions. This was America’s highest task. “She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom.” America would lose its way in the chase for power. “She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
A speech by a secretary of state was important, but a presidential message carried more weight. So Adams arranged for James Monroe to address the same subject in his annual message to Congress and the American people two years later. By then several of the Latin American independence movements had achieved tentative success; what they feared was an effort by Spain, perhaps in league with France or other European powers, to restore Spanish control. Britain frowned on the idea, preferring free access to the markets of the Latin American republics. The British government proposed a joint statement by Britain and the United States that the two countries opposed any restoration of European control in the Americas, as well as any new colonization by Europeans. Russia was creeping down from Alaska toward the Oregon country, which the British and the Americans wanted to divide between themselves. Adams considered the British offer and concluded that Monroe should make the statement on America’s own. “It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our own principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war,” he told the cabinet.
The statement Adams crafted was delivered by Monroe in December 1823. The outcome of the struggle in Greece still pended; Monroe promised the nationalists there America’s good wishes. But he offered them nothing more. And in so refraining, he drew a line between the Old World and the New. America would not meddle in Europe, he said, and the Europeans must not meddle in the Americas. “The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers,” Monroe said. “We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” The American republics must remain free and independent. “We could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”
NOT FOR DECADES would Monroe’s statement be called a “doctrine” of American foreign policy. But it served its purpose of promoting hemispheric solidarity, and it prompted plans to hold a meeting of representatives of the American republics in Panama in 1826. Adams by now was president and Clay secretary of state; both supported American attendance, Clay with particular enthusiasm.
The idea provoked the ire of Southern members of Congress. Liberation in Latin America included the abolition of slavery, and the Southerners refused to lend legitimacy to any such movement. Moreover, Haiti would send a delegation to the Panama meeting. Founded in a bloody slave revolt against white masters, independent Haiti was the nightmare that haunted Southern sleep. For representatives of the United States government merely to sit beside Haitian delegates would give American slaves murderous thoughts, Southerners contended. Congress couldn’t keep the president from sending a delegation, but it could withhold funding for the trip. Southerners threw one roadblock after another in the administration’s way; debate in the House and the Senate raged heavy and hot.
John Randolph was as contrary as ever, and he took particular pleasure in stymieing the Adams administration. Randolph loathed John Quincy Adams for being a New Englander and therefore everything a Virginian detested, and he resented Henry Clay for his federalism and the slights Randolph had suffered from Clay’s political deftness. Randolph had been elevated to the Senate by Virginia Jacksonians who wished to register their anger at what Adams and Clay had done to their hero. He reached the upper house too late to try to block the confirmation of Clay as secretary of state, but the missed opportunity merely caused his bile to build. In the spring of 1826, amid the Panama controversy, he outdid himself in venomous attack. He tried to filibuster the administration’s request and failed. “After twenty-six hours’ exertion, it was time to give in,” Randolph told the Senate, according to an account circulated shortly afterward. “I was defeated—horse, foot and dragoons—cut up and clean broke down by the coalition of Blifil and Black George, by the combination, unheard of till then, of the Puritan with the black-leg.”
Had Randolph stopped after his first pair of analogies, nothing might have come of his remarks. The references were from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones; neither character was admirable but neither a monster. Yet perhaps Randolph thought his literary mot would be lost on his listeners, and he added the line about the Puritan and the blackleg. Adams couldn’t particularly object to being called a Puritan; he had been called much worse. But Clay wouldn’t stand for being labeled a blackleg: a swindler, a forger, a pickpocket.
Clay wasn’t present, but when Randolph’s words were related to him, he reacted at once. The sum of Randolph’s remarks implied, in context, that Clay had manufactured evidence submitted in support of the administration’s request; punctuated with the epithet “blackleg,” the imputation of dishonorable behavior was inescapable. Clay couldn’t let the insult pass. “Your unprovoked attack of my character in the Senate of the United States on yesterday allows me no other alternative than that of demanding personal satisfaction,” he told Randolph in a note. “The necessity of any preliminary discussions or explanations being superseded by the notoriety and the indisputable existence of the injury to which I refer, my friend General Jesup, who will present you this note, is fully authorized by me forthwith to agree to the arrangements suited to the interview proposed.”
Randolph responded with some of the hairsplitting his rivals had come to expect of him. He denied Clay’s right to challenge anything he had said on the floor of the Senate. Clay was a member of the executive branch, and the Constitution separated the powers of the executive from those of the legislative branch. Yet he went on to say he would not hide behind senatorial privilege. “Colonel Tattnall of Georgia, the bearer of this letter, is authorized to arrange with General Jesup, the bearer of Mr. Clay’s challenge, the terms of the meeting to which Mr. Randolph is invited by that note,” Randolph said.
Beneath the formality lay some confusion as to what, exactly, Randolph had said in his speech. No one had taken a transcript, and Randolph, who prided himself on his extemporaneous skills, had put nothing in writing. Journalists re-created the speech from memory. Randolph later admitted using the terms “Puritan” and “blackleg,” but he said he was expressing an opinion rather than stating a fact.
Thomas Benton was in the Senate when Randolph spoke. The Missourian was an orator, though not of Randolph’s caliber; more important, he was a duelist, with experience of actionable words. “I heard it all,” Benton said of Randolph’s speech, “and though sharp and cutting, I think it might have been heard, had he been present, without any manifestation of resentment by Mr. Clay.” Benton didn’t recall anything about Blifil and Black George. “As to the expression, ‘blackleg and puritan,’ it was merely a sarcasm to strike by antithesis.” Benton became involved in the affair as a friend of Randolph, and though he tried to get Randolph to explain that the offending phrase was merely a rhetorical flourish, Randolph refused. Randolph didn’t deny to Benton that he had been speaking for effect. But he held his constitutional ground, saying he would not explain to any member of the executive branch words spoken on the floor of the Senate.
Preparations for the duel went forward. Randolph insisted that it take place in Virginia, despite Virginia’s law against dueling. If he died, he wanted his blood to nourish the soil of his native state. Yet he concluded, after having done nothing to avert the duel, that he didn’t want to shed the blood of his opponent. “The night before the duel, Mr. Randolph sent for me in the evening,” James Hamilton recalled. Hamilton was a Jackson Republican from South Carolina and a Randolph friend. “I found him calm but in a singularly kind and confiding mood. He told me he had something on his mind to tell me. He then remarked, ‘Hamilton, I have determined to receive, without returning, Clay’s fire. Nothing shall induce me to harm a hair of his head. I will not make his wife a widow nor his children orphans. Their tears would be shed over his grave, but when the sod of Virginia rests on my bosom, there is not in this wide world one individual to pay this tribute upon mine.’ His eyes filled, and, resting his head upon his hand, we remained some moments silent.”
Hamilton tried to change Randolph’s mind. “My dear friend,” he said, “I deeply regret that you have mentioned this subject to me, for you call upon me to go to the field and see you shot down.” Randolph would not be moved. Hamilton then went to Edward Tattnall, Randolph’s second, and took him to Randolph’s room. “Mr. Randolph, I am told that you have determined not to return Mr. Clay’s fire,” Tattnall said. “I must say to you, my dear sir, if I am only to go out to see you shot down, you must find some other friend.”
Randolph remained adamant. Nothing Hamilton or Tattnall might say could alter his intent, he declared. Yet at the end of the conversation, he seemed to soften. “Well, Tattnall,” he said, “I promise you one thing. If I see the devil in Clay’s eye, and that with malice prepense he means to take my life, I may change my mind.”
On the same evening Thomas Benton visited Henry Clay. “The family were in the parlor, company present, and some of it stayed late,” Benton recalled. “The youngest child, I believe James, went to sleep on the sofa.” Lucretia Clay appeared to know nothing of the impending duel and conversed in a friendly manner. Benton, a Jackson man despite having shot and been shot at by Jackson in a gunfight a few years earlier, had been at odds with Clay since the 1824 election. He wanted to straighten things out. “When all were gone, and she also had left the parlor, I did what I came for and said to Mr. Clay that, notwithstanding our late political differences, my personal feelings toward him were the same as formerly, and that, in whatever concerned his life or honor, my best wishes were with him. He expressed his gratification at the visit and said it was what he would have expected of me.”
The duel was scheduled for late afternoon the following day, a Saturday. The parties crossed the Potomac at the Little Falls bridge, above Georgetown, and found a secluded spot on the west bank of the river. “I shall never forget this scene as long as I live,” James Hamilton recalled later. “It has been my misfortune to witness several duels, but I never saw one, at least in its sequel, so deeply affecting. The sun was just setting behind the blue hills of Randolph’s own Virginia. Here were two of the most extraordinary men our country in its prodigality had produced, about to meet in mortal combat. While Tattnall was loading Randolph’s pistol, I approached my friend, I believed for the last time. I took his hand; there was not in its touch the quivering of one pulsation. He turned to me and said, ‘Clay is calm but not vindictive. I hold my purpose, Hamilton, in any event; remember this.’ ”
Tattnall set the hair trigger on Randolph’s pistol, making it easier to fire. Randolph objected that he never used a hair trigger. And he especially didn’t want to use it on this occasion, because he was wearing gloves. “The trigger may fly before I know where I am,” he said.
This was just what happened. As the duelists took their positions, Randolph’s pistol fired by accident, while it was pointed at the ground.
Clay could have protested and claimed a breach of the dueling code. He might have counted Randolph’s fire as a first shot. But he did not. He allowed Randolph to receive a freshly loaded pistol. They took their positions, ten paces apart.
On the word, Clay fired. He missed Randolph, the bullet scattering gravel and dirt beyond Randolph’s feet. Randolph fired simultaneously. He missed also, with his ball splintering a stump behind Clay.
“The moment came for me to interpose,” Thomas Benton recalled. Benton had been privy to Randolph’s intention not to fire at Clay, and he wondered what had changed his mind. “I went in among the parties and offered my mediation, but nothing could be done. Mr. Clay said, with that wave of the hand with which he was accustomed to put away a trifle, ‘This is child’s play!’ and required another fire. Mr. Randolph also demanded another fire.”
The seconds readied another brace of pistols. Benton meanwhile spoke to Randolph. He urged him to end the affair. “But I found him more determined than I had ever seen him, and for the first time impatient, and seemingly annoyed and dissatisfied. The accidental fire of his pistol played upon his feelings. He was doubly chagrined at it, both as a circumstance susceptible in itself of an unfair interpretation, and as having been the immediate and controlling cause of his firing at Mr. Clay. He regretted the fire the instant it was over.” He said he had not aimed to kill Clay, but only to disable him and spoil his aim. He added, “I would not have seen him fall mortally, or even doubtfully wounded, for all the land that is watered by the King of Floods and his tributary streams.”
With that he returned to his firing position opposite Clay. The signal was given again. Clay fired and his ball passed through Randolph’s coat without hitting him. Randolph fired into the air, declaring, “I do not fire at you, Mr. Clay.”
Randolph immediately stepped forward to meet Clay. He put out his hand to receive that of his adversary. “You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay,” he said with a smile.
Clay took the hand. “I am glad the debt is no greater,” he said.