“My Hopes Were More than Realized”
WITHIN DAYS OF receiving his law license in Richmond, Clay packed his meager belongings, mounted his only horse, and set out for Kentucky. He traveled the Wilderness Road, the path taken by pioneers for more than two decades toward a place once called “the Dark and Bloody Ground” because Indians had so persistently fought over it. The road began west of Richmond, skirted south of the Shenandoah Valley through the Cumberland Gap along the Tennessee line, and then headed north into the heart of Kentucky. There it followed the route called Boone’s Trace because Daniel Boone had carved it from the wilderness in the 1770s. The road split at Hazel Patch, Kentucky, its northwest fork stretching toward Louisville, its north fork toward Lexington. It was still a hard journey when Clay made it in 1797. Winter added to its hazards.1
At least the road was never empty, for the lure of Kentucky hypnotically drew immigrants regardless of the season. Like Clay, some trekked to join family members, earlier migrants already attracted to fertile soil and a buzzing economy. They came by the thousands, enduring all manner of hardships, certain that their fortunes lay in this western Eden. One young traveler who had passed along the route a year earlier described his journey and the people along it as a peculiar mixture of hope and despair. A few inns along the way offered good food and comfortable beds, but for long stretches travelers suffered from appalling want and exposure. Often the only available lodging was wretched. At one stop, seventeen people, women and children included, crowded into “a small Hutt … 12 feet square.” The throngs of migrants touched his heart, for they too were often wretched. “Noticeing the many Distres.d familes,” this traveler haltingly asked, “Can any thing be more distressing to a man of feeling than to see woman and Children in the Month of December. Travelling a Wilderness through Ice and Snow passing large rivers and Creeks with out Shoe or Stocking, and barely as maney raggs as covers their Nakedness, with out money or provisions[?]”
And yet they were seldom despairing. “Ask these Pilgrims what they expect when they git to Kentuckey,” he remarked, “[and] the Answer is Land. Have you any. No, but I expect I can git it …. Here is hundreds Travelling hundreds of Miles, they Know not for what … except its to Kentucky.”2
In 1797, everything about Kentucky was new, exciting, and until recently a little dangerous, for white settlement had only lately taken root. When whites first wandered into the Dark and Bloody Ground, Indians had been hunting the region’s bountiful lands for as long as humans could remember. That was in the years before the American Revolution. These first whites were hunters too, a unique type labeled “long hunters” for their extended rambles west of the Blue Ridge that tested their resourcefulness and stamina and made them irritating interlopers to the Indians. The most famous long hunter was North Carolina’s Daniel Boone, who trekked with companions into Kentucky, lived off the land for months while collecting pelts, and returned east to sell the hides and tell stories about the lush, lovely land beyond the mountains. Soon men with money were eyeing distant Kentucky as an investment opportunity. Richard Henderson of North Carolina joined with other backers—merchant Thomas Hart was a typical investor—to purchase Kentucky from the Indians and sell it to settlers. The project took shape under the auspices of the Transylvania Company and so stubbornly ignored Virginia’s claims to Kentucky that Virginia’s courts would eventually intervene, but not before settlers had begun moving into the area to build block houses, clear fields, and clash in sharp skirmishes with Indians as unimpressed with the Transylvania Company’s claims as Virginia was.3
The American Revolution slowed settlement, particularly when the British allied with Indians intent on eliminating white encroachment. The Revolution’s end did not stop Indian conflicts, but it did prompt a new wave of white settlers. In 1792, the Virginia county of Kentucky established itself as a state of the Union, and three years later General “Mad” Anthony Wayne forced Indians north of the Ohio River to sign the Treaty of Greenville, which terminated Indian claims south of the Ohio and put Kentucky at peace. With statehood and relative tranquillity as encouragements, Kentucky’s wave of settlement became an overwhelming flood, and Henry Clay floated in on it.4
AFTER ENTERING KENTUCKY, Clay turned north along the Wilderness Road toward the Bluegrass region of the state, an area in north central Kentucky where his mother and stepfather lived in the small town of Versailles. The country was breathtaking, as fertile as it was beautiful and home to the state’s fastest-growing population. In the Bluegrass, people boasted with good reason about the hottest land speculations and the highest land prices. There was no brag if everything was fact: the place was at once lovely and affluent, affordable only for those with enough money to buy the best. It consequently became the center of a ready-made body of elite landowners and professionals, people who had fled Virginia’s practice of primogeniture and low tobacco prices but had brought many of Old Virginia’s social customs with them.5
Clay arrived at his parents’ tavern in Versailles for a joyous reunion. He had not seen anyone in his immediate family for six years, almost a third of his life, and much had changed. Some of it was sad. His older sister Sarah had died shortly after marrying their cousin John W. Watkins.6 Henry, however, found younger brother Porter eighteen years old and healthy, and he would soon see his older brother, John, a merchant in Lexington about thirteen miles away. His two oldest half siblings, Martha and John Hancock Watkins, were frozen in his memory as small children, but they of course had grown up, and he met two new half brothers, Francis Hudson and Nathaniel Watkins, who had been born in Kentucky.7
Versailles was a pleasant town of shaded streets where Watkins Tavern served as Woodford County’s social center. Future U.S. senator and Kentucky governor Thomas Metcalfe had built the impressive two-story stone building. Its second floor balcony and the frame wing off the back were its distinctive features. A popular hotel for travelers and a social and political gathering place for locals, the tavern made Hal Watkins prosperous and consequential. He was justice of the peace and owned a farm three miles outside of town, lots in Versailles, five horses, and eleven slaves. He now returned “Little Sam,” bequeathed to Henry in John Clay’s will, to his stepson.8
Founded in 1792, Versailles was certainly agreeable and even bustling in its own way, but the very success of Watkins Tavern proved that for most people the community was a place on the way to somewhere else. So it would be for Henry Clay. After visiting his family, he set out for Lexington, the seat of Fayette County, a dynamic town that described itself as “the Athens of the West” despite being less than twenty-five years old. If that claim was a bit overblown, the town did have reason to describe itself as the Rome of Kentucky, for every road in the north central part of the state passed through Lexington to connect it with villages throughout the Bluegrass. Founded during the American Revolution and named for its first battle, Lexington was also the largest town west of the Alleghenies, with one thousand citizens and counting. In fact, it would double in size during Clay’s first five years there.
Lexington was also thoughtfully arranged, representing a great deal more urban planning than many eastern cities at the time. Wide, straight, tree-lined streets met at right angles. Crowds of people moved easily along these spacious avenues where dozens of shops carried the finest merchandise from the East and Europe. Taverns and inns served excellent food, fine wines, and the kind of liquor whose quality had already made the state famous. Vestiges of rusticity were rapidly disappearing as brick buildings and handsome homes replaced the few remaining log structures. Wealthy merchants and successful attorneys lived in fine two- and three-story brick houses that fronted lovely gardens or on country estates just outside of town. Those houses were always placed near the city because Lexington’s business required regular attendance and its pleasures always beckoned.9
Virginia transplants were committed to making Lexington a vibrant cultural and educational center, giving substance to the Athenian boast. They established the Lexington Immigration Society to attract farmers and skilled artisans to the area and extolled the virtues of the region by placing advertisements in eastern newspapers. In 1795 John Breckinridge, John Bradford, Thomas Hart, and James Brown were among those former Virginians who set up a lending library on the second floor of Andrew McCalla’s apothecary shop, conscientious citizens kicking in $500 of seed money to boost the project. By the time Clay arrived, they had committed to the even more ambitious venture of turning Transylvania Seminary into the first university west of the mountains, a feat sure to burnish Lexington’s intellectual luster. Seminary students and local groups staged amateur theatricals and concerts that attracted people from miles around.10
John Bradford, one of the leaders who established the library, founded Kentucky’s first newspaper, the Kentucky Gazette, in 1787 when town trustees voted him a lot on which to set up a printing press. Bradford typified the Virginian who became a brash Kentucky booster, and the pages of his twice-weekly paper often described the state with blissful rapture. More traditional fare filled out the rest of Bradford’s paper, which regularly featured essays produced by local writers and borrowed from the works of celebrated authors, a standard journalistic practice of the day. There were advertisements, of course, and local and national news stories, particularly about politics.11
Lexington men engaged in and debated political affairs with remarkable fervor, and Henry Clay soon plunged into the discussions with enthusiasm. Shortly after arriving in town, he joined the Lexington Rhetorical Society, a club previously called the Kentucky Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge, more informally simply the Junto. Primarily composed of young men, many of them freshly minted attorneys, the Junto met at local taverns like Satterwhite’s Eagle or the Sign of the Indian King or the Free and Easy to debate whatever struck the group’s fancy. Wide-ranging discussions touched on politics, religion, law, slavery, and literature. The society sometimes held mock trials to polish courtroom skills.12
As a new member, Clay just listened. One day the debate was about to end with a vote for the best argument when he muttered to himself that aspects of the topic remained unexplored. A member sitting nearby heard him and impulsively shouted to the assembly, “Mr. Clay will speak!” He hesitated as all eyes turned to him. He stood up, a towering six feet one, and began with the incongruous opening “Gentlemen of the jury,” an obvious mistake. (In private, Clay had been rehearsing opening and closing arguments before an imaginary jury.) He paused; he even stammered; but he quickly gathered himself to repeat the phrase, “Gentlemen of the jury,” as if it were an intentional rhetorical flourish. He then launched into an exhaustive speech whose lucid conclusion brought the club to its feet, cheers mingling with prolonged applause. A member of the Junto would always claim that this first effort was the best speech of Clay’s life, but that judgment was likely caused by an impression common among listeners hearing Henry Clay for the first time. His voice sounded melodious baritone notes that were unexpectedly captivating in themselves, regardless of the words they formed. In fact, the words sometimes got in the way, which is why, we are told, that even those of Clay’s speeches that do not read well were stunning when he spoke them. In person, listeners hung on his friendly, colloquial cadence that gave the peculiar impression that he was speaking directly to each of them, giving each person individual attention, no matter how large the audience or setting, making each one feel that for Henry Clay the most important thing in the world at that moment was to talk person to person, not as to a member of an audience, but individually. It was something no amount of observation could teach or practice achieve. It was the stuff of nearly irresistible persuasion, almost like magic, sometimes like lightning, often bringing men reflexively to their feet and women to tears. It happened for the first time that evening in Lexington.13
THE YOUTHFUL CHEERS of the Junto were pleasing, but they paid no bills. To earn a living, Clay had to impress the more mature members of Lexington’s community. His Virginia law license gave him bona fides before most Kentucky courts and made the application for a Kentucky law license a formality, but Clay did not immediately enter the Kentucky bar. Instead, he offered his services to Lexington’s established attorneys in order to acquaint himself with the state’s legal system by preparing their paperwork. He chose his new mentors carefully, gravitating to former Virginians, especially protégés of George Wythe. Thus did George Nicholas, James Brown, and John Breckinridge become his guides and his friends. George Nicholas was even a Hanover County man, a resonant link for a fellow raised in the Slashes. George was also the brother of prominent Virginian Wilson Cary Nicholas, an intimate of Thomas Jefferson. James Brown attended the College of William and Mary before moving to Lexington in 1789, where he achieved eminence in the new state government and married Anne Hart, always “Nancy” to her friends, a circle that included just about everybody who ever laid eyes on her. She belonged to one of the town’s wealthiest families, its patriarch the formidable Thomas Hart, yet people would have found sparkling Nancy irresistible had she been a pauper. Her husband was eleven years older than Henry Clay, but the young man’s eagerness to learn the ropes struck James as exceptional. His initial respect for his protégé blossomed into a deep and enduring friendship.14
After two months of diligent preparation, Clay presented his Virginia license to the Lexington Court of Quarter Sessions and received a Kentucky license on March 20, 1798. Clay had already begun taking on clients and later remembered his great relief upon receiving his first fee. He had worried about getting along, but he recalled that soon “my hopes were more than realized.”15 With plenty of cases to go around, he was pleasantly surprised by how easily a determined lawyer could earn a handsome living, for circumstances made Kentuckians a litigious lot. Conflicting land claims sprouted like weeds because Virginia had never bothered to have its western expanse properly surveyed before selling portions of it. Overlapping claims abounded and usually wound up in court. Even otherwise unencumbered grants or purchases suffered from antique surveys in which trees, creeks, and boulders marked confused boundaries. Creditors and debtors were another abundant source of legal work, and out-of-state creditors were unusually good clients. Kentucky was a remote and difficult destination for such lenders, and they hired local attorneys to collect debts on commission—5 percent of the recovery was the standard fee—or to take delinquent borrowers to court, which could mean even larger fees.16
Land cases were profitable in other ways because they too based fees on a percentage, sometimes in recovered acreage. Clay’s work on one land case, for example, earned him a fee of 1,050 acres on the Licking River, a tract that he could keep for investment or sell for cash. Effective and methodical attorneys could swell their bank accounts and become squires in the bargain by specializing in debt collection and land disputes. Clay was especially methodical and effective.17
His unique talents, in fact, were most obvious in debt cases, in which diplomacy was frequently more important than legal expertise. One of his first cases required that he travel to a small town south of Lexington to collect a debt from a farmer. When he arrived, he learned that his man was at a political rally, a touchy situation that placed his quarry among friends not likely to be sympathetic to a stranger wanting money. Clay went to the meeting anyway and was not there long before someone asked what he thought of the candidates. They were all local men about whom Clay knew absolutely nothing. He did know, however, that one could never go wrong praising Daniel Boone to a Kentuckian. He commenced a stem-winder celebrating the name and exploits of Boone that soon had everyone shouting full-throated hurrahs and slapping him on the back. The farmer smiled as he handed Clay the cash.18
These occasionally dramatic instances were rare, for most debt cases were routine affairs that involved clerkship rather than confrontation. Clay also engaged in the profitable work of commercial law as he represented eastern businessmen in their relations with Lexington merchants. One wholesaler, Baltimore merchant William Taylor, paid Clay more than $7,000 in fees over a ten-year period, a sum amounting to more than $100,000 in today’s money. It was dull work, but Clay attended to its complexities with such thoroughness that other attorneys often recommended him as indispensable in such transactions. His practice grew.19
Criminal law was not lucrative enough to support an attorney in a community happily short of serious criminals. Hog stealers, horse thieves, and drunken brawlers were the norm, and murders were so infrequent that the cases could not match the large fees produced by the drudgery of land conflicts, debt collection, and business deals. Yet Clay’s magnetism was uniquely suited to the courtroom, and when a good criminal case came along, he couldn’t resist it. Sensational cases drew large crowds to court, and newspapers painted colorful performances with broad strokes. Clay’s fluency, his commanding baritone, and his uncanny ability to make each juror feel personally connected to him made him a spellbinder. When there was a jury, he seldom lost.
One murder case earned Clay early acclaim in Lexington legal circles. Doshey Phelps killed her husband’s sister in front of witnesses who saw the entire horrible episode unfold. The two had been arguing over money. As the quarrel grew more heated, Doshey fetched a musket and wordlessly shot her sister-in-law in the chest. “Sister, you have killed me,” were the victim’s last words.20
Most would have hoped only to save Mrs. Phelps from the gallows, but Clay tried to keep her from serving life in the state penitentiary as well. He employed one of the first known instances of an insanity defense, arguing that his client had been in the throes of “temporary delirium.” In a memorable closing argument, he told the jury that Doshey had been driven to uncontrollable, blinding rage and was unable to stop herself. Moreover, Doshey’s husband had forgiven the poor woman for killing his sister, Clay said. Could the jury do less? The jury, as it happened, finally decided to do a bit more, but its guilty verdict was for the lesser crime of manslaughter, and Doshey’s sentence was only five years in the Frankfort penitentiary.21
In Harrison County he defended a father and son, German immigrants, for murder. After persuading the jury to convict for manslaughter, Clay audaciously moved for an “arrest of judgment,” meaning that his clients should be set free. That was too much for the prosecutor, and it took another full day of arguments for Clay to convince the jury that his clients should not go to prison.22
Audacious tactics became his trademark. In the Abner Willis murder trial, Clay sufficiently punctured the prosecution’s case that the jury could not reach a verdict. As was customary, a hung jury sent Willis to a second trial, but at its start Clay argued that his client had already been tried for the offense and this second proceeding violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on double jeopardy. The judge promptly ruled that it did no such thing. The trial began its preliminaries, but Clay paid no attention. Instead he calmly gathered his papers and stalked out of the courtroom. Everyone—jurors, spectators, prosecutor, judge, even Abner Willis—sat in shocked silence. After pondering this novel development, the judge sent a messenger for Clay and then ruled that, on second thought, double jeopardy was indeed a factor. He released Willis from custody.23
It wasn’t the only time that Clay used a seemingly greater understanding of legal procedure and technicalities to cow a judge. He once argued that his client’s arrest was invalidated by an improperly drawn warrant. The judge studied the document, the clock ticked, and Clay and his client sat in silence. Finally, Clay turned to his client and shouted in exasperation, “Go home!” The man sat frozen. He stared at Clay in wide-eyed disbelief. Clay shouted even louder, “Go home!” The defendant scampered out of the room. The judge did nothing to stop him.24
THESE MEMORABLE COURTROOM appearances paid little, but they paid off. Ordinary folk gradually perceived Clay as the defender of the little man rather than a corporate lawyer earning hefty fees for debt collections and land cases. His following among Kentucky’s less affluent citizens was the beginning of a political base that would endure for a half century.
Clay had developed a heightened political awareness in Richmond as he moved quietly among Virginia’s political elite, listening and watching, and he took an interest in Kentucky politics from the start. Before he arrived, Kentucky was debating whether to revise its 1792 constitution. Two favorable votes in as many years were required even to assemble a convention, but the 1797 referendum seemed to quash the matter at its outset. Despite a palpable desire among many to democratize state government, a majority of Kentuckians did not want to revise the constitution. Proponents of increased democracy remained unsatisfied, though, and they became more vocal in the face of this setback. More than that, by the time Henry Clay rode into Lexington, the movement had taken up the potentially explosive issue of slavery in Kentucky.25
This early emancipation movement was fueled as much by populism as altruism. Many Kentuckians wanted to abolish slavery in order to end the large slaveholders’ monopoly on economic and political power. In short, small farmers stood to prosper if the institution of slavery went away. Clay came to this argument with views shaped by his mentor George Wythe—views that were tempered by practicality, particularly about the advantages of gradual over immediate emancipation. He approached the issue both as a humanitarian eager to resolve the conflict of slavery and freedom and as an advocate for Kentucky’s poorer farmers. He also believed that sensible men would not be threatened by the prospect of gradual emancipation, even in Kentucky’s most aristocratic, conservative county. He was wrong.
The state’s economic and political elite (really one and the same) were not opposed to the idea of democracy. Most were good Jeffersonian Republicans, just like Clay, and founded groups like the Democratic Club to show solidarity with the French Revolution. They were exuberant members of the Republican choir that criticized Federalist centralizing schemes, extolled individual liberty, and imagined that the highest Federalist of all, Alexander Hamilton, privately whiled away the hours admiring himself wearing a crown. But having controlled Kentucky’s government from the time of its formation, they bristled at the suggestion that their noblesse oblige was heavy on privilege and short on obligation. By allying himself with aggressive democratic activists, Clay was sure to upset these people and possibly even alienate new friends such as Breckinridge and Nicholas. And Clay’s public stance for democratic reforms did trouble them, but that was only half of it. It was bad enough that he wanted to eliminate Kentucky’s Electoral College that selected state senators and the governor (an elitist contrivance in the 1792 constitution), and replace it with direct election. When he started talking about doing away with slavery, he seemed to have lost his mind.26
Clay and Kentucky Gazette editor John Bradford understandably believed, however, that the relatively small number of slaves in Kentucky made emancipation socially and economically feasible, offering a unique but vanishing opportunity to strike down the institution. After all, slave owners themselves admitted that the presence of slavery mocked high-flown talk of human liberty. Yet most Kentuckians joined elite planters to condemn even the most gradual emancipation as too radical. Clay had not reckoned on a fearsome obstacle to emancipation, which was the universal desire for lofty social rank. Slaves were badges of white affluence, and those who owned the most slaves wielded the most influence. People who had never owned a slave coveted that.27 Anyone who threatened to block that avenue to riches and power had simply lost his mind.
Clay persisted, though. Using the pen name “Scaevola”—a republican legalist of ancient Rome venerated for his bravery and patriotism—Clay published in Bradford’s sympathetic Kentucky Gazette the first of his essays supporting the gradual abolition of slavery in Kentucky. Clay talked about the injury that slavery would eventually inflict on Kentucky’s democratic institutions, but most notably he denounced its cruelty. “Can any humane man be happy and contented,” he asked, “when he sees near thirty thousand of his fellow beings around him, deprived of all the rights which make life desirable, transferred like cattle from the possession of one to another … when he hears the piercing cries of husbands separated from wives and children from parents …. [?]” No, he answered, not “the people of Kentucky, enthusiasts as they are in the cause of liberty.”28 But he tempered his condemnation with practicality, for Clay disagreed with radicals calling for immediate abolition. Gradualism was not only more realistic (it would be less economically disruptive for slaveholders) but more desirable because slaves could be educated and trained in skills essential for making a living. Slaves had to be prepared for the very state of being free.29
The practicality of gradual emancipation left old heads unimpressed, and they criticized Clay as an impractical dreamer, one of a pack of “beardless boys,” according to George Nicholas, a charge that must have stung a lad just past his twenty-first birthday. John Breckinridge, a member of Kentucky’s lower house and a future United States senator and attorney general, answered Clay and other radicals by linking their calls for abolition to redistributionist land schemes. But Clay was not unsettled by the establishment’s disapproval. Instead, the “beardless boy” spit on his palms. In February 1799, Scaevola (everyone knew it was Clay by then) fired back at Breckinridge’s criticism. Nobody wanted to redistribute anyone’s land, Clay insisted, and gradual emancipation was the best way to do away with an evil that would soon be too entrenched to eliminate.30
In the first round of this bout, Clay and his reform cohort won on points when the legislature grudgingly ignored the prior year’s negative referendum and called for the election of delegates to a constitutional convention. It was scheduled for that summer, and Clay joined reformers in zestfully campaigning for the election of delegates sympathetic to their cause. Many in the ruling class had to admit that the boy had pluck, and one paid him the highest compliment a Kentuckian could receive by calling him “the best three-year-old [sic] he had ever seen on turf.”31 But Fayette County’s elite planters were determined to dominate the upcoming convention, and they handed Clay and his friends their beardless heads in the election. Voters soundly thrashed gradual emancipationists John Bradford and James Hughes to send James McDowell, Buckner Thruston, John Breckinridge, and John Bell to the convention in Frankfort. All opposed the abolition of slavery, gradual or otherwise. Fayette County’s decision was mirrored in other counties that sent comparably disposed delegations, and the result was foreordained: slavery was untouched by the new constitution.
Delegates did, however, establish direct elections for state senators and the governor. They had at least heard the voice of the people, such as it was, on that procedural point of enhanced democracy for ordinary folk. To the “piercing cries of husbands separated from wives and children from parents,” they were deaf. They remained chronically so in years to come. The impairment would cost their beloved Bluegrass State dearly one day, when families would divide and brothers would stride off in different directions to settle the matter with daggers rather than debates. Henry Clay’s sons and grandchildren would be among them.32
ALTHOUGH THEY SQUABBLED over the future of their state, Kentucky’s Democratic-Republicans found common cause in opposing the direction of the nation’s foreign and domestic affairs. In fact, such issues firmly united them, and even Clay’s drift toward the radicals on constitutional reform and gradual emancipation did not completely estrange him from the political elite. He regularly rubbed legal elbows with Breckinridge and Nicholas, and he eagerly joined other Lexington Jeffersonians who were furious with the Federalist Congress and the John Adams administration.
The European war that grew out of the French Revolution in the early 1790s always threatened to involve the United States. The two principal antagonists, Great Britain and France, were uniquely positioned to cause America trouble: Britain understandably provoked reflexive American anger, and France early invoked American military obligations under the Franco-American alliance of 1778. But George Washington steered the country to neutrality, a move that irritated Francophiles like Thomas Jefferson and his faction, who believed that Washington’s prudence ill served the cause of liberty, not just in France but for all the world. More, they believed that Alexander Hamilton—whom they accused with some justification of being an Anglophile—was pushing America into the British camp in defiance of a legitimate treaty, not to mention in disobedience to America’s commitment to freedom.
This dispute grew more rancorous at home and gradually caused political factions to harden into political parties, but it also grew more hazardous abroad. By 1798, French petulance over America’s lack of help turned to belligerence. The ensuing French naval war against American merchant shipping was undeclared (it would eventually be called the Quasi War), but it was destructive to American commerce and thereby altered the course and purpose of domestic policy. The Democratic-Republican fear that Federalists would harass pro-French Jeffersonians was realized with a vengeance in late summer of 1798 when Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. John Adams signed into law this incredible legislation, which included provisions to prosecute and imprison critics of the government. Adams gave his approval reluctantly, but reluctance made the terms no less odious. Americans, including veterans of the Revolution whose wounds still ached on cold nights, were being told by their government to shut up, or else.
When news of the Alien and Sedition Acts arrived in Lexington, it spread like wildfire and led to a spontaneous gathering at Maxwell’s Spring south of town. A smattering of Federalists came out in support of the measures, but angry Democratic-Republicans were an overwhelming majority. Lexington’s most outspoken Jeffersonian, George Nicholas, stood on a wagon bed serving as a makeshift platform and sneered at the unconstitutionality of making it a criminal offense to publish anything deemed “false, scandalous, and malicious” about the government. Nicholas proudly reminded his listeners that he had been a member of the Virginia ratification convention in 1788 and consequently knew full well what the Constitution really meant. The assembly cheered, but Nicholas was lucky to be preaching to the choir, because neither his manner nor his meaning was necessarily persuasive. People hardly needed reminding about his role in ratifying the U.S. Constitution, and his recollection about protecting unfettered political speech was chronologically off: the First Amendment did not exist in 1788.33
It didn’t matter. The crowd cheered as its outrage intensified. Out of the din, someone shouted for young Henry Clay to speak. Men lifted him up onto the wagon, where he began an impromptu address that lasted an hour and put the already emotional crowd through the wringer, making it applaud and reflect by turns, making it laugh at the absurd attempt to quash a fundamental liberty, making it tremble at the implications of losing that fundamental liberty. It was a medley in baritone, condemning Federalists’ efforts to make unnecessary war on France and predicting that they would use, if they could, the military for domestic repression. By the time he was done, Clay had won the crowd’s deafening approval, and it was in no mood to listen to rival suitors. A couple of Federalists tried to crawl into the wagon, but men rushed them with hard looks and clenched fists. Clay and Nicholas leaped up to restore calm and finally persuaded everyone that pummeling a Federalist violated the very principle they had all turned out to support. That seemed fair enough on reflection, but nobody wanted to spoil this rendezvous with an unexpectedly dashing champion by listening to Federalist rot, so the gathering adjourned in celebration. Clay and Nicholas were borne aloft on shoulders that carried them to a waiting carriage. Cheers accompanied their impromptu parade through Lexington. It was Clay’s first public address. By any measure, it had been a success.34
Lexington’s Democratic-Republicans were not alone in their alarm at Federalist actions. Rallies throughout the state protested the Sedition Act and the move toward war with France. Men wore the French tricolor cockade on their hats as they marched and cheered orations condemning the Federalists. Clay continued to speak out on the subject. And the legislature passed what became known as the Kentucky Resolutions, a formal protest secretly drafted by Thomas Jefferson. The first set of resolutions that passed in the fall of 1798 (even stronger ones followed in December 1799) were less intense than protests adopted in Virginia, but they all essentially asserted the rights of a state to judge the constitutionality of federal laws. Kentucky even declared that a state had the right to interpose its authority to prevent federal enforcement of unconstitutional legislation.35
Clay supported Kentucky’s stance, but he played a minor role in these events. He was not shy about speaking his mind, whether in support of Jeffersonian Republican protests against Federalist excess or of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, but he was young, newly arrived, and without significant family connections to the ruling elite. He threw himself into his work, hoping that success and resulting affluence would give him entrée to influential circles.
Yet he didn’t work all the time. During the winter of 1798–99, Clay began visiting the home of Thomas Hart, one of Lexington’s wealthiest citizens. Hart had also been one of Richard Henderson’s original partners in the Transylvania Company. He did not move to Kentucky until 1794, but his family had been an important factor in Kentucky’s development from the start. Hart’s brother Nathaniel blazed trails for settlers to come to Kentucky before he died fighting Indians at Boonesborough in 1782. The Harts hailed from Virginia—Hanover County, in fact, which gave him and young Clay something to talk about.36 After marrying Susannah Gray, Thomas moved first to North Carolina and then to Hagerstown, Maryland. Along the way his family grew to seven children and his merchant business grew a tidy fortune. Nancy Hart Brown, wife of Clay’s mentor James, was one of his older girls, and the youngest daughter was Lucretia, born in Hagerstown in 1781. Hart affectionately dubbed her his “Little Marylander.”37
After settling in Lexington, Hart established himself as a leading wholesaler and retailer and soon made so much additional money that he diversified into manufacturing by opening a ropewalk and nail factory. The Harts’ imposing brick house at the corner of Mill and Second streets was opulent, furnished with the finest fixtures and carpets money could buy, brought either across the Atlantic from Europe or simply across the Blue Ridge from the most skilled craftsmen in the eastern United States. The home also radiated cultural refinement, with an extraordinary library and paintings by the nation’s best artists. The Harts owned the first piano in town. Lucretia loved to play.38
Henry Clay became a regular visitor, but he had in mind something other than reminiscing about his and Hart’s boyhood home. It was obvious from the start that Clay had taken an interest in the Little Marylander.
The ritual dances of this irresistible impulse are universal for any generation, many unchanged from when apples hung in Eden. But courtship for the middle and upper classes at the turn of the nineteenth century had taken on freer forms than those of previous decades. Parents, particularly fathers, still had the ultimate say regarding whom their daughters could see in the first place and marry in the end, but the girls of Clay’s generation enjoyed more liberty than had their mothers about suitable beaux and serious intentions. Parents set general rules and daughters exercised judgment within them, making the hovering chaperone an increasingly quaint figure and priggish vigilance a disappearing custom. Courting couples could speak privately at properly supervised tea parties and dances, and they could even walk alone in the garden on brief promenades that were closely but not too obviously timed by monitors. A young man who proved himself trustworthy and relatively serious about a girl could eventually expect to see her alone for short interludes in her parents’ parlor, where pocket doors were kept just slightly ajar and conversation was supposed to be fairly constant. One day, after everybody knew what her answer would be, he would have a talk with her father.
As winter moved toward spring in Lexington that year, Henry Clay and Lucretia Hart moved through the required steps of this timeless dance, the frequency of his calls making apparent his purpose, and the awkward early silences that always mark boy-meets-girl episodes gradually giving way to the easy but exhilarating familiarity of young people who have plainly arrived at an understanding. In the parlor of the big brick house on Mill and Second, they sat alone and talked. He arranged to meet with Mr. Hart.39
Nobody ever described Lucretia Hart as a beauty. She was an angular girl in face and body. The sharp edges of her high cheeks and brow were unfashionable for her day, and her thin figure was too slight, even bony, to people of a time that put a premium on plumpness. Likely she would be more agreeable to modern times, when motion pictures value chiseled, photogenic faces, and the measure of good looks is that described by the Duchess of Windsor, who famously remarked that a woman can never be too rich or too thin—two qualities that Lucretia Hart had in abundance. Contemporaries speculated that it was her family’s money and status that attracted Henry Clay, landing a climber and a wallflower in a passionless marriage that pathetically rescued her from spinsterhood only because it would abruptly elevate him to a privileged circle. After all, her own father described her as “a fine sprightly, active girl … well accomplished in her education.”40 The less artful formulation is that a girl has a good personality, shorthand understood by boys everywhere, and at any time, to mean homely.
In cold point of fact, Henry Clay probably would not have wooed this slight, quiet girl had she not lived in a lavish house or hailed from a wealthy family. Clay’s rising star in Lexington was not an accident, and all of his actions bear the mark of calculation: his humble entry into legal circles, his associations with important men, his displays of oratorical prowess, his diligent toil in dull but lucrative casework, his flamboyant courtroom performances, even his challenging the elite on democratic reform and gradual emancipation, all indicate a young man scaling a ladder one social, economic, and political rung at a time. From that perspective, a wife from the wealthiest circle, the daughter of a community leader, would simply be another step up. It is more than likely that such a consideration is precisely what brought Henry Clay calling at the house on Mill and Second.
Yet it is unfair from that hard reality to freeze the girl who sat quietly in that parlor into the shape of a plain, humorless biddy. She was a spare girl, to be sure, and even repeated pregnancies and age would not make her stout, but Clay does not seem to have minded and in fact might have preferred it. Years later he warned the young daughter of a friend not to allow her affections to be too easily “engaged” because youth tempted the “susceptible” heart. Above all he admonished her to look beyond appearances.41 There was something about Lucretia Hart that people who took the trouble to know her—or more accurately, whom she took the trouble to know—found endearing, even captivating. Those who saw Henry Clay at all stages of his life reported that he too was physically unattractive, until he spoke or smiled, until something animated his features in a way that no portrait could really capture. For her part, Lucretia’s mass of auburn hair, her soft eyes, small hands, and girlish feet, were fetching in their own way. She was clever, educated like most girls of her social class, and especially fond of playing the piano for family and guests. As the years rolled by, she would be something of an enigma to the outside world, but never to her family and friends, for Lucretia was kind, caring, and occasionally droll. But she was also an intensely private woman married to an intensely public man. That contradiction in temperament made her and Henry Clay different but not distant. He had undoubtedly first come calling that winter looking for money and status. In the end, he found Lucretia.
On April 11, 1799, one day before Clay turned twenty-two and shortly after Lucretia’s eighteenth birthday, the two married in the parlor of the Hart home. They moved into a small brick house next door and just a stone’s throw from Nancy and James Brown.42 It was a normal arrangement that placed the Clays in the midst of a traditional system of family, a culture in which kinship through blood or marriage meant automatic acceptance in a community. Yet marriage was also in transition during these early years of the new republic. In middle- and upper-class unions, the “companionate ideal” held that couples should be friends as well as lovers, each respectful of the other’s distinctive but equally important part in creating a stable family. A husband was the head of the family and its breadwinner, but a wife’s role as manager of the home and molder of the children’s character made her contributions to a stable society prestigious and indispensable. Child-rearing methods were also changing. Enlightenment philosophy informed educated people in their belief that everyone was inherently good and ultimately perfectible. Rather than treating exuberant children like rambunctious colts in need of breaking, mothers sought to guide them toward their potential. Thus were produced responsible members of a community, dependable citizens of the country. The companionate ideal, with its emphasis on properly raising children and its goal of a stable society, made the nuclear family the growing norm in the early American Republic.43
Henry and Lucretia Clay’s growing brood epitomized the ideal nuclear family, but they also functioned within the traditions of kinship, for they both came from large, affectionate families whose ties of devotion were unaffected by time or distance. They began one of their own right away.
Clay had been busy with his legal practice before marriage, but his new father-in-law was soon steering cases his way and recommending him to other prominent Kentuckians. Thomas Hart’s large land holdings and extensive business affairs gave Clay plenty of work that further enhanced his reputation among his peers. When prominent attorney John Breckinridge entered the United States Senate in 1801, he turned over a large part of his practice to Clay, a boost in his client list that was unabated over the next ten years. Clay invested in land and business ventures himself and became a man of standing and property. He soon adopted the simple signature of “H. Clay” rather than the more elaborate one of his younger days. Status could afford simplicity.44
His taxable income in these years is a clear indication of his growing wealth and importance. When he married Lucretia in 1799, Clay owned a house, three slaves, and two horses. The 1802 tax rolls still list him with two horses, but he had increased the number of slaves he owned to five; he also owned two wheeled vehicles (perhaps a carriage and a wagon) as well as two lots in town. In 1803, his land holdings jumped to four town lots and 6,525 acres of land in several counties throughout the state. Also in that year, he owned six slaves and five horses. Two years later, he began building a brick home on one of his town lots because his family—now numbering three children—had outgrown the small house next to the Harts. By then Clay owned eight slaves, more than 6,500 acres of land, and eight horses. Reflecting a growing passion for horse racing, he would more than quadruple the number of horses in his stables over the next three years.45
Family ties extended Clay’s connections to other states. He had cousins in Virginia who became future business associates and political allies, and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 lured many Kentucky friends and relatives south to new opportunities. His older brother, John Clay, moved to New Orleans in the hope that the fresh start would help him recover from his stalled business projects in Lexington, and Porter eventually, though only temporarily, followed him. By then, John had married Julie Duralde, the daughter of prominent Creole businessman Martin Milony Duralde, establishing another important family connection for Henry Clay in the Louisiana Territory.46
Any practical benefits from these departures by friends and family were in the future. At the time, they were emotionally taxing for the young couple who remained in Lexington and watched their circle diminish. The most wrenching farewell for Henry and Lucretia was when James Brown was appointed secretary of the Louisiana Territory, meaning that he and vivacious Nancy would also be moving to New Orleans. Lucretia was close to her brothers, John, Thomas, and Nathaniel, and another sister, a widow, Susannah Price, affectionately called Suky. (Another older sister, Eliza, had married Dr. Richard Pindell in Maryland and died in 1798.) But Lucretia was especially close to Nancy.
Everybody hated to see the Browns leave. There would be visits, of course, but distance and bad roads made trips novelties rather than routines. And good health was always a delicate uncertainty in a time when even a minor illness could suddenly become something serious and lethal. Leave-taking in such a setting meant more than the prospect of missing loved ones; it could mean truly losing them. Henry Clay inherited much of James’s legal practice and was appointed to his vacated position as professor of law at Transylvania University, but he would rather have had his friend stay in Lexington.47
Clay’s appointment to Transylvania’s law professorship in 1805 continued a line of George Wythe protégés in that post that included George Nicholas and James Brown. By then the former Transylvania Seminary had been a university for six years and was a constant philanthropic project for boosters aware of its civic benefits. Clay was the school’s attorney and promoted its need for a strong faculty, which he now joined. In addition to conducting his classes, he became acquainted with all students—the school’s enrollment was small enough to make that possible—but he worked particularly closely with the little cadre of young men studying law, taking many of them into his small brick office on Mill Street after graduation to train them in the profession. Among those students who studied with Clay were future U.S. senator and Kentucky chief justice George Robertson, future U.S. congressman and Kentucky governor Robert P. Letcher, and Robert Smith Todd, whose daughter would marry Abraham Lincoln. Clay’s increasing legal and political responsibilities caused him to resign his professorship in 1807, but his strong attachment to the university kept him affiliated as a member of its board of trustees, and he often mentored its graduates in his practice.48
Meanwhile, the Clays were doing their part to boost Lexington’s population. Fourteen months after their vows, Lucretia gave birth to a little girl they named Henrietta, but she died just short of her first birthday, one of seven children they would lose over the course of their lives, heart-wrenching events that left painful emotional scars. A little over a year after Henrietta’s death, on July 3, 1802, Lucretia gave birth to the first of their five sons, Theodore Wythe Clay, named in part for Clay’s beloved mentor George Wythe. The following year, Thomas Hart Clay was named for his grandfather, and eighteen months afterward, his sister Susan Hart Clay was named for her Aunt Suky. The two-year delay before their next child was apparently the result of Clay’s absence for several months in Washington as a United States senator, but soon enough there was another daughter, Anne Brown Clay, named for her aunt Nancy who had moved to Louisiana. Finally the parents had namesakes in Lucretia Hart Clay, born in February 1809, and Henry Clay, Jr., born in April 1811. Eliza Hart Clay arrived in July 1813 and was named after Lucretia’s dead sister.
Eliza was to be the last for a while, but only because Henry was away in Europe on important diplomatic missions. After he returned in late summer of 1815, Laura Clay arrived like clockwork in October 1816, but they lost her in only a few months. One year later, James Brown Clay was born, and then in February 1821 John Morrison Clay marked the end of Lucretia’s childbearing. After all, she was forty years old by then. Nevertheless, the Clays were remarkable for their time, when many upper- and middle-class couples had begun to practice some form of birth control, such as abstinence, to limit the size of families, in part for convenience. In what has been described as their marriage of “convenience,” Henry and Lucretia Clay obviously, and repeatedly, had something else in mind.49
THE LEGAL PRACTICE and income grew along with the family. In addition to work for his father-in-law, Clay occasionally took a criminal case, his performances always drawing crowds to the courthouse. Clay also rode a legal circuit with other attorneys to county seats throughout the state to attend monthly court days, and he was often in the state capital at Frankfort representing clients before the state court of appeals and the United States District Court. When Fayette County was between regular prosecutors, he temporarily stepped into that post. His most famous case involved a slave on trial for murdering his overseer. Numerous witnesses established the defendant’s guilt beyond question; Clay easily won a conviction, and the slave was hanged. Yet Clay always regretted the episode. The overseer had been infamously brutal, and it was hard to see how justice was served by killing his killer.50
Clay’s travels throughout the state and to Frankfort gave him the chance to indulge a raucous streak, and he soon gained a reputation for heavy drinking and reckless gambling. In Richmond, young Clay had been quite the man about town, a convivial chum and boon companion, and he continued his revelries in Lexington. Out on the Kentucky circuit, he was always ready for a drink or a dance, and he could produce his fiddle in the blink of an eye or apply his rich baritone to popular songs. His gambling was legendary, and his antics with his fellow attorneys were celebrated in gossip, much of it true, if occasionally a bit embellished. On the circuit, the temptations for fun were many, and the drive to combat boredom was constant. Lawyers spent their days in stuffy courtrooms, and at night they ate flavorless food in fetid country inns and slept in crowded rooms, two and three to a bed. When the inn was pleasant and the food tasty, these lawyers could make an evening memorable, and Henry Clay was often at the center of the story. Once in Frankfort, a wild night of drink and cards stretched past dawn. Clay was due in court that morning. One of his law students was horrified to find him just leaving the card table, disheveled and bleary-eyed. He calmed his student: nothing to fret about, he said; an hour’s rest and a splash of water on his face would make him good as new. Clay appeared that morning in court and won his case.
But the most notable exploit occurred in the Frankfort tavern Sign of the Golden Eagle after a convivial supper and considerable whiskey. Everyone was preparing to rise from the sixty-foot banquet table when Clay leaped from his chair, vaulted onto the table, and began a whirling dance down its length. His fellow diners ducked and dodged as crockery and glasses and flatware went flying, dissolving into hilarity as Clay executed a graceful “pas seul from head to foot of the dining table.” The following morning the owner presented Clay with a bill for the breakage. He promptly paid the $120. It had been worth every penny.51
Such exploits soon had associates calling Clay “Prince Hal,” a reference to the wild ways of young Henry V when he had frolicked with Falstaff. His daily recreation consisted of card games such as brag in which players bet on each of three cards, a quick pastime that rewarded bluff as much as chance. He also liked poker and whist and was quite accomplished at all three.52 Lucretia once responded with a sly smile to a meddlesome matron who asked how she could abide Clay’s gambling. She did not mind it at all, she said, because “he ’most always wins.”53
When not riding the circuit, Clay spent from four to six evenings a month at local taverns treating himself to drink, games, and song. While the stakes in some of his gambling exploits could grow astonishingly high, wagers between friends were not really as alarming as the figures suggest. One night at a local tavern, for instance, he won $40,000 in IOUs from newspaper editor John Bradford. The two happened on each other the next day, and Bradford awkwardly told Clay that everything he owned would not pay half the debt. Clay instructed Bradford to give him a “note for $500” and the rest would be forgotten. A few days later, when Bradford bested Clay for $60,000 in IOUs, he took back his $500 note and called it even.54
Prudence born of maturity would gradually diminish Clay’s affinity for this sort of thing, but even in the early days he never let gambling or drink become his master, and he drew a stark distinction between the high jinks of trading thousands by way of IOUs with an old friend and the activities of professional sharps who were as likely to mark cards as count them. When a local judge in 1804 fined a professional gambler $25, Clay agreed. He even wrote to the newspapers to defend such penalties as necessary for “preserving the morals of society and suppressing [the] pernicious practice” of gambling.55 There were those, however, who did not like Clay and understandably regarded the contradiction between his pious pronouncement and profligate behavior as hypocritical.
KENTUCKY’S FUTURE SEEMED boundless in these years, but that very potential signaled looming changes. The Bluegrass region’s economic power had always made it politically dominant, but commercial progress and population increases in other parts of the state challenged that supremacy in the early 1800s. Henry Clay’s oratorical talent made him a natural choice to counter that challenge, and his Lexington friends put him forward in August 1803 as a candidate for the state legislature. Clay later claimed that he was away resting in the mountains when these friends initiated his first bid for public office and that they had therefore done so without his knowledge, but that is unlikely. He did seem, however, to approach the matter quite casually. Balloting took place in Lexington over three days in August, and Clay was nowhere to be found for the first two. He, Lucretia, and the Harts usually spent the hottest part of the summer at Olympian Springs, a resort that Thomas Hart had built forty-seven miles east of Lexington, and nervous friends wondered why he had inexplicably gone there at this crucial moment. Clay’s supporters had counted on his appeal to ordinary as well as elite voters, but all the charm in the world was meaningless if absent.56 They anxiously watched his opponents work the crowds, buying drinks and making promises. Finally, at the end of the second day of balloting, Clay appeared and mingled with voters clustered around the courthouse. He made an impromptu speech that had townspeople and rural farmers alike laughing at its folksy good humor.57 It was yet another example of how “the depth and sweetness of his voice … has no compeers; and in the gracefulness of his enunciation and manner, few equals.”58
He spent the next day making such speeches, but crowds were not always pliant. At one appearance a frontiersman clad in buckskins shouted, “Young man, you want to go to the legislature, I see.” Clay said indeed he did.
“Are you a good shot?” asked the man.
“The best in the country!” Clay answered.
“Then you shall go to the legislature,” said the man, “but first you must give us a specimen of your skill. We must see you shoot.”
All eyes settled on Clay and squinted suspiciously when he insisted that he could shoot well only with his own rifle. The frontiersman strode forward with a Kentucky rifle and handed it to Clay. “If you can shoot any gun,” he bellowed, “you can shoot Old Bess.’”
Clay paused but finally shouted, “Well, put up your mark!”
Men hurried to place a target about eighty yards in the distance, more curious now to see this boy from the city shoot than they were to hear him speak. Clay raised Old Bess to his shoulder and fired. The target was pierced almost at dead center. The crowd erupted in cheers, but one skeptic insisted that it was just a lucky shot. Clay should have to do it again. He certainly would, Clay told the man, if he could match the feat himself. The doubter skulked away. It was great theater, and it is likely that the accuracy of Clay’s aim was a piece of singular luck. Later Clay could not resist embellishing the story by chuckling over how that was the first and last time he had ever fired a rifle. It was a peculiar claim for a boy who had grown up hunting in the Slashes.59
Speeches backed by such pluck won Clay election to the Kentucky House in his first bid for public office, and in November 1803, he took the seat he would hold for the next six years. In his first session, the legislature gathered on the second floor of the stone capitol in Frankfort abuzz with rumors of looming war with Spain.60
The purchase of Louisiana from Napoleonic France had set off celebrations only months before, but soon disturbing reports began circulating that the deal was hardly certain. Spain was insistent that it had ceded Louisiana to Napoleon only on the condition that France not sell it to the United States. Cash-strapped Napoleon, however, sold the province to Thomas Jefferson’s administration so quickly that Spain was still in possession of it. Now Spain threatened to block its transfer to the United States. The entire West rose up in arms. Clay arrived in Frankfort that November as Kentucky militiamen were assembling with fight in their eyes, and he was quickly caught up in the war fever. He certainly knew that political laurels would likely result from participating in a campaign against the Spaniards, and he immediately signed on as an aide to the militia’s commanding general, Samuel Hopkins. The militia’s preparations had hardly begun, however, before word reached Kentucky that Spain would turn over Louisiana after all. The excitement died down as quickly as it started, disappointing more than a few boys who were spoiling for a fight, especially against Spaniards. Nobody liked Spaniards.61
The distraction of a possible war removed, the legislature began its work in earnest. Most of the session’s business was routine. Divorce petitions took up a fair amount of time, because a marriage could be dissolved in Kentucky only after an act of the legislature allowed the suit to be brought in the courts.62 Voting aid to veterans of the Revolution and Indian wars was a high priority, while placing bounties on wolf pelts answered farmers’ complaints about losing livestock to predators. But there was also residual rancor over old disputes with Federalists. The Democratic-Republican majority eagerly embraced any scheme to reduce Federalist clout, and Clay took a leading role in the project even though he was a new member. In fact, Clay’s first important legislative initiative was a proposal to gerrymander Kentucky Federalists out of presidential politics. Four of Kentucky’s six electoral districts would be eliminated to swallow up Federalist enclaves and prevent even a single Federalist elector from being chosen in the 1804 presidential election.63
Thomas Jefferson had handily won Kentucky in 1800 and was predicted to win the state again in 1804, but Federalist gains in the state concerned his supporters. Joseph Hamilton Daveiss was a rising star in this Federalist revival and became an irritating opponent for Republicans. Friends called Daveiss “Jo.” Clay was not among them. In fact, earlier in the year Clay had again appeared in the public prints as “Scaevola” to dispute Daveiss’s claim that he was running for Congress on Jeffersonian principles. Clay’s redistricting bill sought to make sure that such upstart Federalists could never wield influence in the state.64
More than party maneuvering roiled Kentucky politics. Frustration with Bluegrass dominance of state affairs made the region south of the Kentucky River especially restive. It was called the Southside and had able spokesmen, especially a young firebrand named Felix Grundy, whose thunderous voice and natural fluency made him a formidable opponent in debate. Clay did not encounter this fearsome adversary during his first legislative session because Grundy had recently changed districts and was not eligible to sit in the 1803 legislature. That would change the following November. In 1804, Grundy not only returned to Frankfort but also carried his part of the state’s collective chip on his shoulder.
Grundy was not just popular. His image as an ordinary man who looked out for ordinary Kentuckians earned him extraordinary regard among grateful constituents. In legislative sessions before Clay’s election, Grundy had helped to ram through measures touted as reforms, though sometimes they were nothing more than sops pandering to class resentment. For example, he played on the universal disdain of lawyers and their supposed double-talk to accuse Kentucky’s judges of being in league with elite attorneys. This demagogic indictment of the state’s legal system resulted in a “reform” that required the state circuit courts to seat two lay judges who, without a smidgen of legal training, had veto power over decisions rendered by the real judge. Common sense instead of lawyerly tricks would now decide cases, crowed Grundy’s supporters.65
Felix Grundy had an even bigger target in his sights when he reentered the state legislature in November 1804. Three years earlier, the legislature had chartered the Kentucky Insurance Company to underwrite cargo vessels on the Ohio River. Its charter, however, also allowed the firm to issue notes that could circulate as currency, a privilege that essentially made the company Kentucky’s first state bank. The scarcity of banknotes and government specie (the term for coins, i.e., minted precious metals), often made it next to impossible to do business in Kentucky. The Kentucky Insurance Company’s stable currency seemed a sensible way to eliminate primitive bartering and encourage investment. Others saw something more sinister. They perceived the company’s banking function as an attempt to concentrate all economic power in the Bluegrass region and keep down the state’s poorer sections.66
Riding such resentment, Grundy and his supporters planned to revoke the Kentucky Insurance Company’s banking privileges by arguing that many legislators had voted for the charter unaware that it contained such objectionable provisions. They never would have voted for something so contrary to republican institutions, Grundy said, and he commenced the well-rehearsed complaint that a bank concentrated power in the hands of an elite few who then imposed their will on the defenseless people.67 Clay rushed to the company’s defense. Part of his motive was regional loyalty (the company was based in Lexington), part was family allegiance (his father-in-law was on the board of directors), and part was self-interest (Clay owned stock in the company), but those factors were hardly the stuff of compelling arguments. Instead, Clay praised the company’s role in stimulating Kentucky’s economy and argued that canceling any part of its charter before it expired in 1818 would violate the constitutional prohibition on impairing contracts, an argument that anticipated a U.S. Supreme Court decision by fifteen years.68
Clay won this first round when Grundy’s proposal was defeated by one vote. James Brown congratulated his brother-in-law from New Orleans, saying that he was “happy that the Bank has had the means of resisting the attacks of that unprincipled demagogue Grundy.”69 But the one-vote margin was a troubling indication that the Bluegrass bank was hardly safe. Grundy was sure to spend the coming year organizing for the second round in the next legislative session. In the meantime, he had another plan to reduce Bluegrass power.70
Under the U.S. Constitution at that time, state legislatures chose U.S. senators, and in that matter, as in virtually all others, Kentucky’s senators were men of the Bluegrass. Senators John Brown and John Breckinridge were currently in office, and Brown was set for reelection. His mere existence irked Southsiders who rankled over Brown’s aristocratic ways (he purchased an elegant coach and four during a visit to his New York in-laws), his elegant home called Liberty Hall, and his presumption of privileged leadership. Following Grundy’s lead, they were determined to replace Brown with one of their own, nominating John Adair of Mercer County. Efforts to hold on to Brown’s Senate seat were complicated by doubts among his own supporters about his political viability. Those dissatisfied with Brown nominated Buckner Thruston, dividing Bluegrass votes and giving Grundy and his supporters a good chance to elect Adair. Clay was loosely related to Brown by marriage (John was James Brown’s brother), but he realized the danger, shifted his support to Thruston, and applied “artful management” to persuade enough legislators to give Thruston the seat. In the rough-and-tumble world of intrastate politics, Clay balanced the protection of family against the protection of regional interests. Regional interests won out on this occasion.71
Yet saving the Senate seat was a Pyrrhic victory, at least as far as the fortunes of the Kentucky Insurance Company were concerned. Thruston and Breckinridge not only represented the Bluegrass, they were both from Lexington, a fact that stoked Southside resentment and gave Grundy reason to renew his attack on Bluegrass dominance in the next legislative session. At the urging of Clay and its other supporters, the Kentucky Insurance Company tried to enhance support for its banking function by offering generous loans. Even though Kentuckians were struggling to pay new federal taxes on lands and eagerly took advantage of these liberal lending policies, resentment against the Bluegrass and anything associated with it was unabated. When Grundy returned to the legislature in the fall of 1805, he came with a crowd.72
It was clearly to be Clay versus Grundy, however, and when the House considered the disposition of the Kentucky Insurance Company’s charter, the capital hummed over the prospect of the bout. On the day the two were to address the House, the state Senate adjourned to allow its members to watch the fireworks, and as it turned out, the debate became quite a show. Grundy and Clay circled and jabbed at each other for two days, repeating earlier arguments in a display that would have become tedious had it not been so fascinating. Behind all the drama, however, lay the inescapable fact that Grundy now had the votes to strip the company of its banking function, and no amount of debate, even from the dazzling Mr. Clay, could change that. When all was said and done, Grundy’s measure passed the House, sailed through the Senate, and was dropped on the governor’s desk for his signature, a result that everyone, counting the bill’s legislative majorities, marked as certain. Much to everyone’s surprise, however, Governor Christopher Greenup vetoed the bill, citing Clay’s argument about the sanctity of contracts as the deciding factor. Grundy and his supporters railed at this executive effrontery and promptly overrode the governor’s veto in the House. The Senate, however, considered an override with more deliberation, and the pause gave Henry Clay his chance. He had one more trick up his sleeve.
As the Senate deliberated, Clay introduced a measure in the House demanding immediate payment from speculators who had bought state lands along the Green River on credit. The debt to the state was an old one, but the speculators had managed to avoid paying it because of back-scratching bargains in the legislature. The arrangement had a smell to it, and the speculators had earned the label “Green River Band” because of their shady practices that smacked of influence peddling and cronyism. The Green River Band was accordingly an easy target, but it was also an inviting one because many of its members were often in Grundy’s camp, rattling for his reforms and applauding his attacks on the privileged elite. Clay turned the tables to accuse them of acting more privileged than any Lexington tycoon, what with their sweetheart legislative deals and unpaid debts to the people of Kentucky. Clay’s initiative so alarmed the Green River speculators that they pressured the Senate to let the governor’s veto stand. The banking function of the Kentucky Insurance Company survived, and Clay quietly dropped his demand for immediate payment of the Green River debt.73 Without losing a thing, Clay had won. His deft political maneuver had old political hands tugging at their chins and reassessing the tall young man with the impressive voice. Clearly there was more to him than words. “Henry is like a lion’s whelp; who shall rouse him up?” asked one, mingling Old and New Testament verses. “The sound of his voice is terrible; yea, it is like the voice of many waters.”74
Clay saved the Kentucky Insurance Company with last-minute heroics, but many legislators had already concluded that banks were actually quite useful. They soon created the Bank of Kentucky, an institution explicitly sanctioned by the state to act as a bank. Nevertheless, Clay’s defense of banks worried some. He sometimes sounded like a Federalist, and the charge would be repeated in the years to come. Meanwhile, “that unprincipled upstart Grundy,”75 as James Brown now called him, received an appointment to the Kentucky Court of Appeals and within months became the state’s chief justice. But he soon decided to move to Nashville, Tennessee. Felix Grundy wryly explained that “Kentucky was too small for both him and Henry Clay.”76
CLAY WOULD ALWAYS be associated with the Bluegrass and its interests, but his promotion of certain other measures gradually gained him a following throughout Kentucky. To help litigants appealing to U.S. circuit courts, he pushed a resolution through the House and Senate calling for the creation of a United States circuit west of the Blue Ridge. Clay urged that Kentucky finance internal improvements to boost commerce in all parts of the state, foreshadowing his life’s work on the national scene.77 He demonstrated an ability to bring together seemingly irreconcilable factions through compromise, and he became wedded to the idea that the key to political success was to promote the possible and avoid the unattainable ideal. Often that was accomplished through sleight of hand, sometimes with the simplest solutions. When he chaired a select committee on raising revenue, for example, a bill was proposed to tax billiard tables at $200 each. It was likely that such a measure would not generate much revenue but would instead make owning a billiard table beyond the means of taverns. Clay had the amount reduced to $50 but with an amendment naming the bill “an act more effectually to suppress the practice of gaming.” Critics groused that he was more interested in saving billiards than promoting morality, but the tables survived, and the treasury profited.78
There were a few missteps. He offended Frankfort’s citizens by repeatedly trying to have the state capital moved to Lexington. Frankfort was too small, he said; it lacked the radiating road system for which Lexington served as a hub. All of this was true, but it was impolitic to say so. Clay was never able to muster the two-thirds vote necessary to move the capital, but it was not for want of trying.
It was only one way in which he tried to boost Lexington’s fortunes, only one facet of the project of civic improvement that he would pursue for the rest of his life. Clay was unabashedly proud of Lexington. He watched with satisfaction as the town grew in sophistication, population, and prosperity. By the early 1800s, it had become the center of education, commerce, and culture for the entire state. Lexington had three boarding schools for young ladies, several day schools for boys, and Transylvania University. Numerous taverns catered to every imaginable taste, offering freshly brewed beer, aged wines, whiskeys, and cordials. Gentlemen of the town had even established a coffeehouse, a euphemism for a tavern, that served the upper class, where a yearly rate of $6 could buy subscriptions to forty-two newspapers and periodicals from all over the United States. Henry Terrass ran this upscale tavern and also operated a public garden behind his house. Called Vauxhall, the garden was canopied by “a most luxuriant grape arbour.” On Wednesday evenings, he hired musicians for dances.79
By 1805, Lexington had about five hundred houses, and the smell of freshly cut lumber, the sound of saws and pounding hammers, and the bustle of new houses and businesses springing up gave evidence of a prosperous place on the move while remaining a delight for the eyes. “The country around Lexington, for many miles in every direction,” said a keen-eyed observer, “is equal in beauty and fertility to anything the imagination can paint.”80 Another traveler described the streets as “wide and airy.” Moreover, the town was “as handsome” as Philadelphia but with a prettier countryside surrounding it. People in Lexington had “a glow of health, and an animation to their faces.” Something about the air, something about the water, something about the place made its girls pretty and its boys strong.81
Henry Clay would never be able to bring himself to call any other place home. James and Nancy Brown beckoned him to move his family to New Orleans with alluring descriptions of waiting fortunes and balmy winters, but the Clays would not leave Lexington. Clay’s economic and political future looked bright, and the town’s destiny seemed a metaphor for his own. He was among the top attorneys in the state and could charge fees that even Virginia lawyers would have considered steep. In 1804, he began purchasing land outside of town to build a country home even as construction continued on a larger house in Lexington for his growing family. The twin projects strained the family’s finances, but that was the price of living as a gentleman in the Bluegrass.82
The acreage outside of town and the house on it would be his “Ashland,” a name he took from the large forest of ash trees that shaded the property. He situated the house on a gentle rise of land from which he could see the cupola of Lexington’s courthouse and the steeple of Christ Church, home of the town’s Episcopal congregation that Clay had helped to establish but would not join himself until forty years later. In 1805, on that gently sloped hill, a graceful house arose in the Federal style that Clay would remodel and add to in coming years, most notably by attaching two flanking wings to its center. He would also put up numerous outbuildings, for Ashland was to be a working farm. It was to be even more: Clay intended for it eventually to be a refuge, serene with shaded lawns, pleasing with native and imported plants. Its barns and pastures would be home to fine livestock, its stables full of fast horses, its fields lush with rows of hemp, wheat, and corn, and its pastures covered in the thick-bladed, hearty bluegrass that made cows fat and soil rich.83
Eventually all of that would happen just as he imagined it. For now, he watched the house and the first of his ideas grow from the ground. Because of Ashland, he would later count himself more fortunate than Moses. “He died in sight of and without reaching the Promised Land,” Clay would say. “I occupy as good a farm as any he would have found had he reached it.”84