Whig
CLAY’S RETURN TO Ashland in early April 1833 came not a moment too soon. He was emotionally and physically drained. Despite his fatigue, after only days he was thinking about a summer trip. Travel always invigorated him, and a northern journey would allow him to escape Lexington’s summer heat. It would also afford the opportunity to visit political friends, though as always Clay wished to avoid the appearance of politicking. Instead, he framed his plans as recreational and intended to include as much family as could accompany him. Their destination was to be Boston to see James, who at sixteen and far from home was lonely. Yet Clay would quietly court support there for another effort to recharter the Bank in the upcoming Congress. The BUS had three years remaining on its charter, after all, which seemed plenty of time to change enough minds to make Jackson’s objections immaterial.1
That spring, however, cholera came to Kentucky and altered his plans. Called Asiatic cholera because of its origins on the Indian subcontinent, it began its inexorable spread in the early nineteenth century along trade routes to Russia, Western Europe, and England, achieving a global and deadly reach as a pandemic that claimed millions of lives a year. By 1832, it was in North America.2
Kentucky had been spared so far, but deaths in more populous places such as New Orleans and New York were sufficiently numerous to terrify the country. Jackson opposed an effort to set aside a day for “general humiliation and prayer” because he said it violated the separation of church and state, but most suspected that Clay rather than the Constitution was behind Jackson’s stance. The Kentuckian had successfully promoted the move in the Senate.3
In 1833, cholera found Lexington, and many residents fled what quickly became a ghost town. Those who remained stopped venturing out. Stores closed, and larders went bare. Newspapers ceased publication, isolating Lexington from news of the outside world except for what could trickle in through the post office. The Erwins moved from the Woodlands to Ashland, where the entire family gathered as though under a medieval siege. In the first three days, fifty people died in Lexington. After two weeks, that number had swelled to 350, and by the time the epidemic ended, the town had lost almost 10 percent of its population. Ashland weathered the siege, fortunate in its relative isolation and access to untainted water. No one at Ashland, black or white, got sick.4
That spring, Clay did lose a dear friend, though not to cholera. At 5:00 A.M. on May 19, the Lioness, a Red River steamboat, was forty miles above Alexandria, Louisiana, when crewmembers in the hold accidentally touched off a cargo of gunpowder with a candle. The explosion blew the boat apart and killed fifteen people, seven of them passengers. Josiah Johnston was traveling with his son on the Lioness to visit family, and though the boy survived, his father did not. Clay could hardly believe the news. Johnston had been a staunch friend from their earliest days in the House of Representatives, informally managing important aspects of Clay’s 1824 bid for the presidency and loyally standing by him in its aftermath to become an invaluable supporter in the Senate. As one of Clay’s “truest and best of friends,” Johnston had been that rare entity in politics, the person who never wavered, was always sincere, and was invariably reliable.5
Clay fretted about the fate of Johnston’s widow, Eliza, a Washington belle noted for her “bewitching grace & dignity.” Eliza had not made the trip with her husband, having just given birth to another son, Josiah Stoddert Johnston, Jr. For years, she had been mildly infatuated with Henry Clay, feelings he had always inferred but had treated as nothing more than the eye-batting flirtations common among coquettes at parties and in innocuous letters. Others were not so sure. Bob Letcher once remarked that if Clay were to die, Eliza Johnston would go into deep mourning. “She would most certainly devote the residue of her life to grief and melancholy,” Letcher said, only half joking. For his part, Clay traded harmless verbal trifles with Eliza as he did with other belles such as Olivia Walton LeVert, some of them strikingly beautiful. It did not matter if they were pretty, though, for Clay enjoyed the game of gallantry in itself. He liked the company of women and personified the description of the gentleman as the man who winks at a homely girl. Winking at young widows, however, invited unseemly talk, and after offering traditional expressions of condolence, he had little contact with Eliza. Two years later, she moved into the enemy camp by marrying a confirmed Democrat, becoming Mrs. Henry D. Gilpin, her new husband destined to serve as Martin Van Buren’s attorney general.6
THE LENGTHY QUARANTINE at Ashland canceled Clay’s plans for his trip, and by the time he could again consider it, other events prevented the family from accompanying him. Both Anne Clay Erwin and Julia Prather Clay were expecting, and Lucretia wanted to be with them when the babies came. Clay understood, and he put off his departure until she could go with him. On July 20, Julia gave birth to Henry Clay III; but Clay must have been able to persuade Lucretia to leave before Anne’s lying-in, because she, Johnny, and Henry Clay Duralde accompanied him when he left Ashland on September 26. Anne had still not delivered her baby, but if Clay intended to enjoy any political benefits from the trip, so often postponed, he had to get started. While Clay was trapped at Ashland, Jackson had spent the first part of the summer touring New England to court support in a National Republican stronghold. A few communities mildly protested the Bank veto, but mostly Jackson enjoyed a cordial reception. He was warmly greeted in Massachusetts, and Harvard made him an honorary doctor of laws, much to the chagrin of John Quincy Adams. More than ever, Clay believed his trip to the region was necessary.7
Both Clay and Lucretia likely regretted leaving when they did, however. Anne gave birth to a boy on October 2, but the baby died so quickly that he was never named. The traveling Clays did not receive the news until they were en route from Baltimore to Philadelphia, and their grief over the loss was mingled with relief when James Erwin reported that Anne was sad but safe. Clay was pleased that she would remain at the Woodlands rather than return to New Orleans for the winter.8
Political observers were mindful of the large, enthusiastic crowds Clay attracted throughout the journey to New England and were not in the least deceived by his insistence that he was merely on vacation. John Quincy Adams, already sour over ovations given to Jackson, grumbled that “the fashion of peddling for popularity … is growing into high fashion.” He acidly noted in his diary that “Mr. Clay has mounted that hobby often, and rides him very hard,” but Adams routinely disparaged the success of others. Any objective assessment would have judged the trip a popular triumph.9
It was also productive. Clay met privately with influential people and mended some political fences. Rancorous relations had marred his association with Josiah Quincy for years, but Clay called on him anyway. Quincy, who as Harvard’s president had been given the impossible task of reconciling Adams to Jackson’s honorary degree, was intimately acquainted with Massachusetts’ political establishment. Clay was charming and Quincy cordial throughout their meeting. On the other hand, Daniel Webster’s absence during Clay’s visit to Massachusetts caused talk of an irreparable rift, which had some merit. The two had recently exchanged friendly letters, but their sharp words during the tariff debate would forever place a wall between them.10
As he left New England for the opening of Congress, Clay could mark the undertaking as an overall success. Admirers on every leg of the trip had presented the Clays with gifts ranging from simple tokens to expensive livestock. Citizens of Newark, New Jersey, gave Clay a handsome carriage that became one of his most prized possessions. (It still resides in the carriage house at Ashland.) When the Clays arrived in Washington, however, news from Lexington was mildly distressing. Thomas had returned from a failed farming venture in Indiana and was drinking again. The asylum had tried to release Theodore for longer periods as a test of his stability, but Henry and Anne finally found their brother’s moods too unpredictable and became apprehensive enough to arrange his renewed detention. The Clays rented a small house in Washington, and he tried to handle the crises through the mail, with limited success. He was also concerned about Lucretia. That winter, she always seemed to be ill, barely recovering from one ailment before falling prey to another. Already spare by nature, she began to lose weight, and his concern gradually gave way to alarm.11
AS THE TWENTY-THIRD Congress opened, National Republicans tried to counter another attack by President Jackson on the American System. Jackson correctly judged that BUS supporters were still aiming to renew its charter. Angry about Clay’s receiving credit for the compromise tariff, especially in the South, Jackson intended to destroy the Bank before Clay had a chance to use that political capital to pass a new bank bill. The result was a series of events that continued the contentiousness of the veto, an episode known as the Bank War.12
Suspecting that Biddle would resort to anything to stave off the Bank’s impending demise, even manipulating credit to the country’s detriment, Jackson looked for ways to hobble the Bank and settled on removing its federal deposits. At first, he considered stopping deposits while steadily reducing government money held in BUS vaults by using it to discharge the government’s routine expenses. Slowly drawing off the government’s funds would not only debilitate the bank’s power, it would guarantee its end when its charter expired in 1836. The plan was long in the hatching, and Jackson began discussing it with Vice President Van Buren, his cabinet, and other advisers shortly after his second inauguration. He dismissed out of hand the recent congressional investigation that pronounced the Bank a sound, efficient financial institution. Amos Kendall had always been able to read the signs that indicated Jackson was closing his mind on an issue. “Little is gained by attempting to manage the old man,” he once said. This was one of those times.13
If anything, Kendall and Francis Preston Blair urged an immediate rather than a gradual withdrawal of federal funds. Van Buren, however, persisted in the recommendation that any such move be measured, fearing that cornering Biddle would self-fulfill Jackson’s prophecy by goading him into contracting credit. In any case, removing the deposits was easier said than done. The BUS charter stipulated that only the Treasury secretary had authority to withdraw money from the bank, and Louis McLane doubted that doing so was legal before the charter expired. When Jackson appointed McLane secretary of state, it was a fortunate move for him, because his opinion would have put him at odds with the president, never a prudent position for someone in Jackson’s cabinet. Jackson chose William Duane to succeed McLane at Treasury in part because he was a vocal critic of the Bank and presumably agreeable to the removal of federal deposits, but Jackson made the irritating discovery that Duane had the same reservations as McLane. By the time he returned from New England that summer, Jackson had decided on immediate withdrawal and wanted the process completed before Congress convened in early December. When Duane resisted, Jackson asked for his resignation. Duane refused, his defiance resting on the traditional view of cabinet ministers as more councilors than subalterns. Jackson promptly fired him. Attorney General Roger B. Taney, a staunch opponent of the Bank and among those eager to remove its federal money, became the new Treasury secretary. Federal funds from that time forward were placed in several dozen state institutions, soon dubbed “Pet Banks” by administration critics because they were apparently being rewarded for supporting Jackson. Biddle soon fired back. Losing the federal deposits forced him to retrench, but he gratuitously called in such a large number of loans that he inadvertently validated the Jacksonian denunciation of the BUS as too powerful and hopelessly corrupt.14
National Republicans were livid over these developments, but the drastic steps shocked many Democrats as well. Clay came into the Senate in December spoiling for a fight and soon got several. Not only was Jackson destroying the BUS, he launched an attack on distribution with a blistering denunciation of Clay’s land bill that he had pocket vetoed the previous spring. Clay was undeterred on both fronts. He planned to reintroduce distribution and began organizing opponents of the administration to counter its policy on federal deposits. His most innovative tactic in that regard was the fight to wrest from Vice President Martin Van Buren the authority to appoint Senate committee members and designate their chairmen. By a 22 to 18 vote, the Senate changed its rule to allow members to select committees. That the administration was stripped of this seminal power did not bode well for Jackson’s policies in the Senate.15
Clay immediately used his growing momentum to challenge the administration’s assault on the BUS. A rumor that in September 1833 Jackson had read a justification for removing the deposits to his cabinet caused a stir, and Clay demanded that the president produce that document. Jackson sternly refused, claiming executive privilege. Clay had expected as much and would have moved more quickly to his next tactic except that he wanted to wait for a few absent senators to arrive in Washington. He was also worried that Webster’s misplaced loyalties on display in the previous Congress might still be in force to make him friendly toward the administration. By Christmas, his worries over Webster were allayed. Not only was “the Godlike Dan’l” repelled by Jackson’s executive overreach, Biddle had put him on an Olympian retainer. Webster’s loyalties were misplaced no more.16
Clay was careful but also bold, for he intended to pursue an audacious course. On December 26, he stood in the Senate to read a series of startling resolutions. They urged the censure of Jackson for exceeding his authority and the reprimand of Taney for removing the deposits. Clay’s concern over the economic consequences of Jackson’s actions was second only to his dismay over the broader issue of executive usurpation. He regarded Jackson’s effort to destroy a congressionally sanctioned agency as disgraceful and dangerous, regardless of when that agency’s charter would expire. He also disputed Jackson’s right to fire a Senate-confirmed department head simply because that man had refused to break the law.17 Jackson’s use of the veto, his corruption of the civil service with the Spoils System, and his attempt to grasp all government money imperiled “the very existence of Liberty.”18
Clay spoke on these issues for two full days in late December, exploring in every possible way how Jackson had seized power, violated the Constitution, and trampled the laws of the nation. He compared Jackson to Caesar and Duane to the tribune Metellus, whom that earlier despot had also dismissed simply for enforcing the law. He warned that if this new despotism took root in their equally vulnerable republic, Congress would “die—ignobly die,” its members reduced to “base, mean, abject slaves.” They would earn “the scorn and contempt of mankind” and would die “unpitied, unwept, unmourned!” Spectators in the gallery hung on every word as Clay’s baritone drew each word in a steady cadence and rose in a dramatic crescendo. Instantly upon his last syllable, they erupted into such loud cheers and applause that Van Buren ordered them removed. The censure fight was on, however, to consume the next three months with arguments, counterarguments, and much invective. Clay became a dynamo of debate, speaking more than sixty times to defend his resolutions and repeat his warnings. Friends cautioned that Jackson partisans might physically assault him. “The scoundrels dare not approach me,” he growled. “Their assassination is of character, not of persons.”19
Administration men such as Benton and Felix Grundy defended Jackson’s actions, and Jacksonian newspapers ginned up popular prejudice against the patrician Biddle and his hydra-headed monster of corruption. Clay and his allies presented petitions from citizens begging for a return of the deposits and the recharter of the Bank. Each side accused the other of causing the country’s growing economic distress, but neither offered real solutions. Everyone preferred to make speeches.20
Jacksonians had a majority in the House, but Clay had the votes in the Senate, where members who were not pro-Bank deemed Jackson’s removal of the deposits irresponsible. There, all Jackson’s minions could do about censure was delay it. After defending Jackson’s conduct proved ineffective, they resorted to technicalities, arguing that the Constitution did not give the Senate power to censure the executive. If National Republicans thought that Jackson had broken the law, they should introduce articles of impeachment in the House. Clay would not take that bait. The last place he wanted to pass judgment on Jackson’s conduct was the pro-Jackson House of Representatives. He continued to push for a vote in the Senate.21
On March 7, Webster endorsed a petition from Philadelphia mechanics decrying the failing economy, and Clay concurred. Obviously playing to the gallery, he made a dramatic appeal to Van Buren, who sat placidly presiding at the front of the Senate. Clay turned toward the vice president and affected an air of anxiety. “If I shall have been successful in touching your heart, and exciting in you a glow of patriotism, I shall be most happy,” Clay entreated. “You can prevail upon the President to abandon his ruinous course, and, if you will exert the influence which you possess, you will command the thanks and plaudits of a grateful people.” Clay sat down, and the chamber fell into a surprised hush as Van Buren rose from the dais, stepped down, and slowly walked toward Clay’s desk. The Little Magician nonchalantly asked him if he might have a pinch of Clay’s fine snuff. Clay nodded; his half smile revealed that he, and possibly he alone, understood Van Buren’s gamesmanship. The vice president helped himself and wandered slowly back to his chair.22
As the Senate neared the moment of decision on censure, Clay’s relations with the vice president took on an uncharacteristically serious tone. Van Buren proposed a wager of “a suit of clothes” on the New York and Virginia state elections. Clay replied that if those states approved of Jackson’s behavior at the polls, it would mean “that our experiment of free government had failed; that he [Van Buren] would probably be elected the successor of Jackson; that he would introduce a system of intrigue and corruption that would enable him to designate his successor; and that after a few years,” the government would “end in dissolution of the Union or in despotism.” Van Buren cackled at what he called a preposterously “morbid” set of predictions, but Clay was quite serious. He “replied, with good nature” that he “deliberately and sincerely believed” what he had said.23
On March 28, the Senate voted 26 to 20 to censure Jackson for exceeding his authority in removing the deposits and 28 to 18 to condemn Taney for doing Jackson’s bidding without appropriate cause.24 The longest debate in the Senate up to that time accomplished nothing but Andrew Jackson’s embarrassment. The censure did nothing to restore the deposits, and later resolutions instructing Jackson to put them back were useless. Clay won this battle, but Jackson won the war.
Rather than saving the BUS, Clay made Jackson’s behavior an issue to unite Jackson’s opponents. Accomplishing that goal, if only temporarily, was no small achievement. Many who voted to censure Jackson would never vote to recharter the BUS or support Clay’s American System, but they could at least agree that Andrew Jackson was dangerous. In a speech to the Senate on April 14, 1834, Clay likened the opposition to Jackson to British Whigs’ opposing the dictatorial policies of their king.25 Clay was not the first to call Jackson’s antagonists Whigs, but his use of the label in this speech struck a chord because of the growing impression that the Democrat Old Hickory was becoming “King Andrew.” This loose coalition of allies would henceforth be called Whigs.
Calling themselves Whigs instead of National Republicans made it easier to attract southerners to their ranks. National Republicans were associated with northeastern business interests, but Whigs could claim a pedigree that stretched back to the American Revolution to describe patriots fighting the abuses of the British crown. A few southern states’ righters had already compared their resistance to growing federal power under Jackson to that revolutionary struggle and had begun calling themselves Whigs. Southern and northern opponents of the administration thus achieved unity under this newest old appellation. The second American party system was aborning.26
Clay and Martin Van Buren had always gotten along and often traded good-natured banter at social occasions. One story had Van Buren presiding over a state dinner attended by foreign diplomats and members of Congress. In the course of the lively conversation, everyone agreed that British Tory governments could be more flexible toward the United States because, unlike Whigs, Tories did not have to dodge accusations that republics beguiled them. Clay turned quickly to Van Buren and asked permission to propose a toast. Van Buren told all to charge their glasses. Clay stood, his wineglass raised, and called out, “Tory ministries in England and France, and a Whig ministry in the U[nited] States.” Everyone laughed, but Van Buren appeared ill at ease. Clay later recalled that poor Van Buren “had no tact in warding off a sally or joke.”27
THE CENSURE ENRAGED Jackson. He fired off protests to the Senate, claiming that it, rather than he, had violated the Constitution by presuming the power to censure the president. Clay was dizzy over his victory and chortled that Jackson should quite literally have his head examined: he suggested that Jackson consult with phrenologists (so-called scientists who claimed the shape of the head revealed character traits) who would “find the organ of destructiveness prominently developed.” Clay’s tongue carried him so far as to have him injudiciously declare that the president’s protest would be “the last stroke upon the last nail driven into the coffin,” and then he realized what he was saying and stopped himself to add quickly, “not of Jackson, may he live a thousand years!—but of Jacksonism.” The Senate voted 27 to 16 to reject Jackson’s protest. For the next two years, vindication was the principal goal of the administration. Jackson was resolved that he would not be denied it.28
Congress adjourned not a moment too soon, for Clay had grown tired and testy, even with his friends. One night he had Benjamin Watkins Leigh, Robert Letcher, and John M. Clayton to his rooms to discuss a draft of a distribution bill. A nice supper, a bottle of wine, and a crackling fire soon had his guests nodding off while Clay read the bill aloud. He continued, oblivious to his dozing audience until Letcher started snoring. Clay’s voice boomed in an expletive-laden reproach that awoke everybody. “Old Jackson himself was never in a greater passion,” chuckled Clayton, “nor ever stormed louder.”29
Clay was alone at the close of the session because he sent Lucretia to White Sulphur Springs in the hope that the waters would restore her health. Lucretia was obviously cheerful about leaving Washington, but everybody could see that there was something physically wrong with her. Clay had watched her waste away over the winter as her appetite vanished and she had shed so many pounds that her slight frame had become skin and bones.30
The stay at the Springs made no difference, and Lucretia became so weak after returning to Ashland that Clay feared she would die. He did not travel that summer because he refused to “separate myself from her.” No doctor could make a credible diagnosis, and no treatment could revive her appetite. Then in late summer she showed a gradually improving interest in food and began taking nourishment. In the fall, her weight loss stabilized and then reversed itself. A flood of relief swept over the entire family, especially Lucretia’s husband. Nobody could ever say what was wrong with Lucretia Clay for most of 1834, but her chronic dyspepsia and appetite loss suggest that she of the calm demeanor but turbulent heart had worried herself into an ulcer. At the haven of Ashland, she mended and was soon herself again.
As things returned to normal at Ashland, Clay arranged to send thirteen-year-old John Morrison Clay to a college preparatory school at Princeton, New Jersey, an establishment he found promising enough to warrant the enrollment of the Duralde boys the following year. James, who had come home to go back to school, soon proved an indolent student, however, and decided a radical change was in order. Clay reluctantly consented to his plan to become a farmer in Missouri. Clay provided the land, but he suspected the venture was an ill-advised project for an eighteen-year-old who had so far shown little direction or purpose in life.31
RESULTS FROM ELECTIONS held in late summer and early fall were mixed. Whigs made gains in western states such as Kentucky and Ohio and in parts of the South, and Jackson had to exert pressure even in Tennessee to bring followers into line. But Whigs were disappointed by Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Clay rightly worried that his new coalition was still too fragmented. An apparent alliance with extreme states’ righters like Calhoun was brittle at best. They recoiled from the American System. Calhoun never saw himself as a Whig.32
The shaky coalition meant that Clay could never count on a reliable base to support his programs, and for the rest of Jackson’s presidency he was on the defensive. The victory scored with the censure proved fleeting. Senators might oppose Jackson on any number of issues, but they did not necessarily agree with Clay. He strained to produce a compromise that would satisfy nationalists and states’ righters, hoping his plan to distribute federal land revenues to the states would be sufficient for nationalists and palatable to southerners. Yet even his friends showed little enthusiasm for the idea.33
In addition, it seemed that Jackson was on the verge of going to war with France over its delinquent depredation claims. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clay took under advisement the part of the president’s annual message that dealt with deteriorating Franco-American relations.34 He knew the particulars of the dispute all too well, for it had troubled his tenure at State, one of the several unresolved problems he had handed off to Van Buren. Unlike the British trade issue, the French nut remained impossible to crack. Arbitrators had declared that France owed the United States money, and France had signed a treaty agreeing to pay, but the French dithered and then hinted that they might just forget the entire matter. Jackson’s impatience turning to anger bubbled up in his annual message with threatened reprisals against French property and a request for additional discretionary funds to beef up the military. The implication was clear.35
Clay criticized Jackson’s belligerence and opposed giving him any money, but the stand seemed more partisan than scrupulous. As secretary of state, Clay had made similarly aggressive recommendations to Adams, who had prudently disregarded them. To Clay’s relief, much of the Senate, including many Democrats, chose to respond with similar caution to Jackson’s rattling saber.36 Instead of endorsing Jackson’s call for reprisals, Clay’s committee recommended a policy of wait-and-see. If the French continued their noncooperation, then would be the time to consider retaliation. Later in the session, Clay used his influence in the House of Representatives to kill a measure that would have given Jackson $3 million in discretionary funds. Aside from the unprecedented grant of unfettered money, Clay argued that giving it to Jackson would make it appear as though the country were preparing for war. In his experience, he observed with unintended irony, such preparations often caused a rush to war.37 When Congress adjourned, Clay hoped Jackson would be unable “to goad his party into war” before it met again.38
CLAY HAD LITTLE desire to return to Congress that fall.39 The prospect of renewed arguments about France, the fight over distribution, the unflagging Democrat effort to expunge the 1834 Senate censure, all made him weary. As the presidential election year of 1836 loomed, Whigs appeared in complete disarray as they tried to choose a candidate to run against Jackson’s handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren. Clay also had personal reasons for delaying his departure for Washington. On November 2, Anne gave birth to her fourth son, Charles Edward Erwin, at the Woodlands. It marked the end of her eighth pregnancy in twelve years of marriage, but something was different about this one. The baby was healthy, but she was not. Instead of bouncing back quickly as she had always done in the past, she became quite ill and could not leave her bed. Her condition did not improve in the days after the baby’s birth, and everyone soon became desperate with worry. Clay had planned to travel to Princeton to visit John and the Duralde boys at their boarding school, a detour that would require an early departure if he were to arrive in Washington in time for the opening of Congress. He nevertheless delayed his trip while Anne remained in any danger. By mid-November, though, she was clearly mending, and the scare passed. Clay began his trip on November 18, but he had forebodings. The next day he wrote Lucretia from Maysville that he felt “very uneasy about our dear daughter.”40
Clay swung through New Jersey to visit the boys and then made his way to Washington, arriving with a bad cold in the second week of December. His friend John J. Crittenden was joining him in the Senate for the Twenty-fourth Congress and had left Kentucky later than Clay. Crittenden reassured him that the doctors had declared Anne out of danger. Clay remained uneasy, however, and confided as much to Lucretia. She was the only person to whom he could unburden himself, and across the miles, he revealed his deepest fear: “Our only daughter, and so good a daughter—there is no event that would so entirely overwhelm us as that of her loss.” The next day he begged James Erwin for the latest news. A letter in Anne’s own hand telling him she was better would be best. Despite his premonitions, Clay received a steady stream of good news from home, and gradually he relaxed enough to turn his attention to politics.41
It was late in the afternoon of December 18. The Senate had adjourned for the day, and Clay lounged at his desk in the chamber laughing and talking with several friends. A clerk brought in the day’s mail. Clay shuffled through his stack looking for letters from home. There were two. He lit up while reading the first, a cheerful account of Anne’s steady improvement. Her recovery was advancing so rapidly, in fact, that she planned to return with James to New Orleans in only a few weeks. Clay picked up the other letter. It was from Kentucky’s Episcopal bishop, Benjamin Bosworth Smith. Clay’s friends, talking among themselves, were startled to hear him seem to choke. His face had turned ashen. He tried to stand, but the room whirled and his legs buckled. His colleagues caught him as dead weight. As he opened his eyes, he quietly murmured, “Every tie to life is broken.” Anne had died suddenly on December 10.42
Clay went into seclusion at his boardinghouse. He poured out his grief in a letter to Lucretia: “Alas! my dear wife, the great Destroyer has come.” He “would have submitted, cheerfully submitted, to a thousand deaths to have saved this dear child. She was so good, so beloving, and so beloved, so happy, and so deserving to be happy … the last of six dear daughters.” He could never recover from this loss. “One of the strongest tyes [sic] that bound me to Earth is broken—forever broken. My heart will bleed as long as it palpitates. Never, never can its wounds be healed.” He could not stop weeping. “This dear child was so entwined around my heart; I looked forward to so many days of comfort and happiness in her company.” He begged Lucretia to “kiss my dear grandchildren for your affectionate and afflicted husband.”43
Losing Anne gutted Henry Clay. Indeed, losing Anne devastated every Clay from Princeton to Missouri. James Erwin could not bear to remain at places that reminded him of her, and he fled the Woodlands immediately after her funeral. He took the two older boys with him, but the younger children, including the baby, remained with Lucretia. James Clay was in Missouri starting his farm when he received the sad letter announcing the death of his “last sister.” Henry Jr. had taken Julia and the children on a European tour and for a long time remained blissfully unaware of Anne’s death. Fourteen-year-old John at school in New Jersey wrote poignant letters to his mother that also turned out to be prophetic. Reflecting on “how much the death of my poor sister should humble us all,” he told his mother to be kind but firm with Anne’s children, certain from his own experience that the kindness would be abundant, the firmness only occasional.44
“Borne down by the severest affliction with which Providence has ever been pleased to visit” him, Clay stayed in his rooms until he nearly went mad. He finally returned to the Senate—he reintroduced his distribution bill—but everyone was startled at how broken he was. Otherwise, he kept to himself and wrote home frequently. He confided in Lucretia about his crushed spirit; he admonished Thomas not to add to her burdens. She was certainly busy caring for three small children, one an infant, her little girl’s last laughing gift to the world. In their small faces, Lucretia could see Anne.45
ONLY SUPERHUMAN WILL saw Henry Clay through the weeks that followed. He became fixated on passing the distribution bill, particularly because he saw its success as tied to the humanitarian project of colonizing freed slaves. Slave states could use the money to implement a different sort of internal improvement. Rather than building roads, they could fund gradual emancipation. Clay remained convinced that only that process could persuade slaveholders to eradicate the institution, and colonization would shield freed slaves from mistreatment. On this issue too he embraced the center, publicly declaring the immorality of slavery while trying to find the compromise that would appeal to fellow moderates. He did not believe that the federal government had the constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the states, but he recognized Congress’s right to abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., and federal territories, though he did not believe it should do so. To his thinking, the Missouri Compromise had settled the territorial issue. Because Maryland had ceded the land for the District of Columbia, to abolish slavery there without the consent of Maryland, as well as bordering Virginia, would be inappropriate. Washington’s citizens should also have a say in the matter.46
Extremism on slavery alarmed Clay. Calhoun had actually begun a crusade to have the Senate automatically table any petition requesting the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, a move that ultimately resulted in the derisively labeled “Gag Rule.” Calhoun also wanted to prevent the post office from delivering abolitionist material in the South. Both initiatives disgusted Clay as obviously counter to constitutional protections regarding the right of redress and free speech. Agitation for or against slavery sharpened sectional differences to a cutting edge capable of cleaving the Union while making moderate solutions increasingly unlikely. Abolitionists generally denounced colonization, and southern proslavery advocates were wary of it, but Clay continued to insist that it was the only reasonable way to end slavery. He supported the American Colonization Society and became its president in 1836.47
In the spring of 1836, Texas won its independence from Mexico. American immigrants in Texas had staged the revolution, and it was rather a foregone conclusion among them that American annexation would automatically follow Texas independence. Despite his satisfaction with the event, Jackson paused in his response. The administration was in the midst of a dispute with Mexico over American claims, but more important, Americans were deeply divided over the wisdom of adding the vast slave domain of Texas to the Union. Jackson even preferred to leave to Congress the decision about recognizing Texas as a sovereign republic. In the early summer of 1836, Congress debated that question and laid bare northern qualms about recognition as a step toward annexation.48
Clay presented the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s report in June 1836 that recommended recognizing Texas when the president judged its government to be stable.49 On the other hand, southern agitation for annexation—an obvious ploy to add new slave territory to the Union and increase the South’s political clout—disturbed Clay. Not until the end of his term did Jackson recognize Texas. Old Hickory left it up to a future administration to decide about annexation.50
DURING THE WINTER of 1835–36, politics increasingly revolved around the upcoming presidential election. Democrats had already held a convention the previous spring to rubber-stamp Jackson’s choice of Martin Van Buren. Democrats appeared to be united behind Van Buren, but significant issues—such as monetary policy—actually divided them. When a group of New York laborers who opposed the Pet Banks’ inflationary policies tried to air grievances at a Democratic meeting in Tammany Hall on October 29, 1835, conservatives shut down the gaslights, hoping that darkness would silence the protests. Instead, the dissidents continued the meeting by striking matches called “loco focos.” Whigs soon began calling all Democrats “Locofocos.” The label had a nicely disparaging ring to it.51
Democrat disunity, however, paled compared to Whig disarray, a symptom of that loose coalition so worrisome to Clay. Unable to unite on issues or on a single candidate, Whigs had resorted to running three regional candidates in an effort to appeal to distinctive constituencies. Clay initially thought the plan laughable. If every faction of a party insisted that a candidate perfectly fit its principles, “there can be no union or harmony.”52 Yet that is what had happened. Northeastern Whigs supported Daniel Webster, northwestern Whigs supported William Henry Harrison, and southern Whigs supported the former Jacksonian Hugh Lawson White. In the midst of this willy-nilly stumble, Clay was occasionally urged by his friends to run, but even before Anne’s death he had had no heart for the race and certainly had none for it after December 1835. The best the Whigs could hope for was that the multicandidate approach would fragment the Electoral College and throw the question into the House of Representatives.53
Clay attempted to remain aloof from the election while nevertheless supporting the Whig cause. He preferred Webster for best exemplifying Whig principles. Despite Clay’s patronage of William Henry Harrison during the military hero’s early political career, he had come to see Harrison as vain, posturing, dim-witted, and unqualified for the presidency. Clay liked Hugh Lawson White but accurately assessed him as more inclined toward states’ rights than a nationalist program. To his consternation, though, it gradually became apparent that Harrison was the most popular and consequently the most electable of the three.54
Because he so wanted to see the Democrats defeated, Clay set aside his low opinion of Harrison and endorsed him. Ordinarily Harrison’s flaws would have made more compelling the entreaties from Clay’s friends that he should enter the contest. Yet Clay was unmovable. Even had Anne lived, the humiliation from 1832 was still too fresh for him to risk another such embarrassment this soon. He insisted that he could not accept a nomination unless he was certain that the people wanted him. There did not appear to be such a groundswell for his candidacy.55
By removing himself from the contest, this consummate political animal appeared to have lost interest in not just politics but life. He certainly hoped Whigs would prevail and had forebodings for the country should Van Buren win, but his old fire was gone, his heart a fading ember.
His overwhelming grief over Anne’s death never really subsided, and other concerns mounted as well. In New Jersey, John was miserable—neither the prep school nor Princeton had agreed with him—and wanted to come home. He also became quite ill with typhoid fever while visiting Clay in Washington during the late spring of 1836. For two weeks, Clay and Charles Dupuy took shifts to watch over John each night, and a female nurse spelled them during the day while Clay was in the Senate. Henry Jr. arrived from Europe and immediately pitched in as well, and to everyone’s relief, John began to improve. He gradually recovered from his dangerous illness, but he wanted to be at Ashland. Lucretia, discovering how dangerously ill her youngest child had been at the worst of his ordeal, never again wanted him far from her side. She soon had her baby boy home.56
CLAY FINALLY DECIDED to retire from public life and dedicate his remaining years to his family and farm. His letters were steeped in resignation and inclined to despair. All his efforts to stop Jackson from destroying the American System had been futile. The conflict with France still hung fire, and Clay suspected that Jackson wanted war if for no other reason than to spend the growing surplus and doom Clay’s hope of distributing it to the states. He was pleasantly surprised to be wrong about this at least. Jackson never apologized for his earlier belligerence, but he did declare that when he had threatened France, he had not meant to threaten France. The French realized that that was as good as it was going to get with Andrew Jackson and paid the claims. There was no war, and the surplus was preserved.57
Clay still hoped to distribute that money to the states for internal improvements and colonization. Widespread support for distribution included some Democrats under political pressure from constituents eager to receive the money. Yet western senators persisted in their wish to reduce the price of federal lands, a move sure to endanger the surplus, and Clay had to fight them at every turn. Even worse in his view were the growing instances in which people simply expropriated public lands by showing up in advance of government surveyors. At the end of March 1836, he stoutly opposed Robert J. Walker’s plan to reduce land prices for people who had settled on public property. Walker wanted to grant them “preemption,” which meant exclusive rights to purchase land at bottom dollar. Clay called these people squatters, a term Walker found objectionable when applied to those he claimed were the backbone of the nation, the very men who had fought under Jackson at New Orleans. Walker exclaimed that if the men Clay derided as squatters had been in Washington in 1814, they would have saved the city from the British torch. The gallery loved this sort of talk, and it greeted Walker’s tribute to patriotic American yeomanry with loud applause. Clay waited for everyone to settle down. He innocently claimed no disrespect to squatters but impishly added that he “hardly thought they would have saved the Capitol unless they had given up their habits of squatting.”58
Calhoun and Clay worked together to push a distribution plan through Congress. They described the money being divided among the states as a loan in order to satisfy the constitutional qualms of opponents, but this transparently semantic dodge fooled nobody. The states would never pay back the money. In addition, the Deposit-Distribution Act, as its name indicated, required the initial deposit of money in state banks before distribution to state governments. Even worse from Clay’s perspective, the bill provided for only a single act of distribution and did not tie the policy permanently to the sale of federal lands. Most expected Jackson to veto it, but to everyone’s surprise he signed the bill into law. Old Hickory judged the large majorities that had favored the bill as veto-proof, and he was careful to avoid hurting Van Buren’s election in the fall by opposing a popular measure.59
Jackson instead tried to offset the impact of distribution by reducing federal revenues from land sales. His plan was to announce a new Treasury policy by way of the Specie Circular, a change recommended to him by Thomas Hart Benton, whose preference for hard money gained him the alliterative nickname of “Bullion” Benton. The Treasury would accept only specie rather than banknotes for land sales. The administration meant for the Specie Circular to be a crafty method of lowering western land prices by discouraging speculation. Instead, ordinary investors inferred that Jackson’s pronouncement meant the government had no confidence in the nation’s banks, and they began to pull their money from dubious and healthy banks alike. As depositors scrambled to withdraw gold and silver, banks nervously curtailed loans in order to sustain their reserves. Meanwhile, wealthy speculators continued to dominate the land market because only they had specie on hand or the necessary credit to obtain it. The alarming rate of withdrawals, the removal of federal funds under the Deposit-Distribution Act, and the arbitrary demand for specie to purchase land made for an extremely unstable fiscal situation. By spring 1837, major Pet Banks in the Northeast, once flush with government deposits, had seen their specie reserve depleted by two-thirds. The state of affairs verged on financial catastrophe.60
Meanwhile, the Whig hope that the presidential election would go to the House proved unfounded. Van Buren took a majority in the Electoral College with 170 votes to 124 for the other candidates. Harrison, however, finished with a respectable 73 electoral votes, even with the divided Whig field, showing strength in the West, Mid-Atlantic, and Upper South. Some in the party started thinking about Harrison and 1840.
More immediately, the rapid glide toward an economic Niagara continued as Congress opened its session in December 1836. Clay led the Whigs to assail Jackson’s lack of judgment, but he also offered a practical compromise. The government should stop transactions with unhealthy banks and accept banknotes exclusively from reputable institutions, meaning only those that had sufficient specie reserves to back their paper. Clay warned that if Jackson’s specie policy remained in place, not only would American businesses suffer, but the American people would have a first-class panic and lingering depression on their hands. A bill containing most of Clay’s plan passed Congress near the end of the session, but Jackson pocket vetoed it. The rapid glide continued.61
Clay had only reluctantly returned to Washington. Van Buren’s victory had deeply depressed him, and the unrelenting battles with Jackson had left him exhausted. He had all but decided to quit after his term, but when the Jacksonians commenced what he regarded as the most contemptible gesture in American political history, they sealed his decision. From the moment the Senate in 1834 had censured the president for removing the deposits, Jacksonians had worked to have it expunged from the legislature’s official records. For Old Hickory, this drive for vindication became all-consuming and summoned the worst of his vindictive enthusiasms. He and his lieutenants exerted pressure on legislators in Democrat-controlled states to pass resolutions instructing their senators to vote for an expunging resolution. In states evenly divided between Whigs and Democrats, Jacksonians worked tirelessly to elect Democrat majorities.62
The authority of state legislatures to instruct House and Senate members had always been as controversial as it was uncertain. In 1811, Senator Henry Clay had cited the Kentucky legislature’s instructions as a prime reason for his opposing the renewal of the first Bank of the United States, yet in 1825, Representative Henry Clay had disregarded the legislature’s instructions to vote for Andrew Jackson. Clay was not alone in obeying or ignoring such directives according to circumstances, and clearly the case rather than any firm principle guided most members of Congress. Those who steadfastly held that state legislatures had the right to instruct congressional delegations drew a line between senators and representatives. Legislatures elected senators to represent the entire state, while voters divided into districts elected House members. Yet the notion of senators serving in Washington as essentially ambassadors from their states and consequently subject to state control was nevertheless vague. When a Jacksonian majority gained control of the Virginia legislature, it told Senators John Tyler and Benjamin Watkins Leigh to vote for expunging the censure. Tyler resigned rather than comply; Leigh refused to vote to expunge, but he kept his seat, at least until the end of the session, when he resigned for personal reasons.63
By the final congressional session of Jackson’s presidency, the unflinching labors of his supporters had produced the necessary votes in the Senate for his vindication, and a weakened opposition could only delay the inevitable. In this task as in others, Thomas Hart Benton piloted the administration’s project by proposing the resolution to expunge the censure.
During debates over previous resolutions of this sort, Clay had always said little. In this debate, he remained silent until the final day, and because common knowledge had it that he planned to speak, the gallery was packed. He rose from his desk, and the crowded chamber went silent. He reminded everyone that he was the author of the censure and thus felt compelled to oppose Benton’s effort to erase it from the Senate’s official records. His silence in all previous debates on this measure had rested on the assumption that nobody could seriously have expected the Senate to mutilate its own annals—but, he added sarcastically, the Jacksonian majority was apparently capable of anything. Clay refrained from rehashing his reasons for the censure but emphatically declared that everything contained in it was true. Obliterating it would not change what had actually happened.64
It was a caustic speech, and Clay showed more than his usual contempt for the administration and those senators doing its bidding. As he prepared to conclude, he asked, “What patriotic purpose is to be accomplished by this expunging resolution? Is it to appease the wrath and to heal the wounded pride of the Chief Magistrate?” He mocked Benton’s resolution for directing that “Black lines!” be physically drawn through the censure. Clay wanted the pen used to draw those lines to go to Democrats as a tainted trophy. He recommended that they create a new mark of American aristocracy to commemorate their “noble work.” They could style it “the Knight of the Black lines.” He whirled on his colleagues and roared for them to go to their homes and tell their constituents “that, henceforward, no matter what daring or outrageous act any President may perform, you have forever hermetically sealed the mouth of the Senate.”65
The vote to expunge passed 24 to 19. As the Senate secretary pulled the journal out to draw the black lines, Clay and opposition members stalked out of the chamber. The secretary marked out the censure and scratched into the journal the words “Expunged by order of the Senate, this 16th day of January 1837.” Spectators in the gallery hissed and booed, and the presiding officer, Senator William King of Alabama, was about to have them evicted when Benton began to have qualms: the sergeant-at-arms, he suggested, should remove only “ruffians” who objected to the Senate’s vote, the implication being that the majority of spectators approved of it. The men who had redressed the supposed wrong done to Jackson brazened it through, for they had little choice. Clay’s sarcasm became reality. They presented the pen that had drawn the black lines to Jackson, who promised to preserve it as one of his “precious relics.” Irony was lost on the old man.66
IN THE AFTERMATH of this event, Clay all but ceased participating in Senate debates. The expunging resolution had been for him the final blow to degrade Congress and demoralize the country. He liked Van Buren personally but doubted he would markedly differ from the man who had handpicked him for the presidency.67 Clay told Frank Brooke that he would leave the Senate “with the same pleasure that one would fly from a charnel-house.” His next birthday would be his sixtieth, and he had never felt so old, so tired.68
Inauguration day was sunny and mild. The Senate assembled to see the new vice president, Richard Johnson, sworn in before moving to the East Portico for Van Buren’s oath and address. Visitors mingled with senators as they awaited the official party. Clay spied Thomas Ritchie, the editor of the Richmond Enquirer. The two had been close when they had first met as teenagers in Richmond but had grown apart after the War of 1812, primarily because of Ritchie’s disapproval of the American System. They remained cordial until Clay’s decision to support Adams in the House vote of 1825 completely estranged the editor. Ritchie’s Enquirer became a relentless critic of Clay and everything he advocated. They had not seen each other in over a decade. Francis Preston Blair had said that Clay never abandoned a friend, and that inauguration day, he proved it by crossing the chamber with his hand outstretched. Clay was willing to risk the rebuff, and Ritchie was unwilling to exact it. He took Clay’s hand and genially remarked “that Time had laid his hands so gently upon” the Kentuckian. Clay laughed and lifted his hands as if to hold something back. He promised that he would “keep the Old Fellow off as long as” he could. They continued laughing and reminiscing until Van Buren and Jackson entered arm in arm and the spell was broken. Henry Clay and Thomas Ritchie would not say a single word to each other for another thirteen years.69
Van Buren’s day was festive, although not as raucously celebratory as his predecessor’s. Clay gauged the crowd descending on Washington from Van Buren’s New York as being “as great as it was from Scotland, when James [VI] ascended to the throne of England.”70 The country, at peace and apparently prosperous, witnessed another quiet passing of power, the end of Jackson as president if not of Jackson as a force within the great party engine the new president had created. Van Buren’s inaugural address promised to keep the country at peace and pledged its continued prosperity. He lauded moderation, especially regarding slavery. He pointedly deprecated the growing agitation by abolitionists to ban slavery in Washington, D.C., which was his first misstep as president.71 It would not be his last, for with that remark he made instant enemies of abolitionists on the first day of his administration. Relations with Britain proved more fragile than anyone realized. Worst of all, the rapid glide to economic disaster had almost reached the steep falls, perversely waiting until the Little Magician became president, an office that seemingly robbed him of his wand.
Late that spring, the economic current plunged the country over the brink. Banks began to fail, and major businesses that relied on credit to operate began to close their doors. Banks that survived suspended specie payments on their notes and called in loans, some good, some bad, all increasingly uncollectable. The Panic of 1837 had many causes, some related to the ill-judged policies of Jackson’s administration, some completely beyond the control of any president or any government. True enough, banks were short of gold and silver because of the Specie Circular and because of Jackson’s insistence on paying off the national debt (much of it held by foreigners) in specie. Yet great and silent forces beyond anyone’s power were also in play. In the early 1830s, abundant Mexican silver inflated prices and lubricated the machinery of global trade, as promoted by British banks and British firms, especially as it reached around the world to the Orient. After 1835, however, the Texas Revolution and U.S. claims against Mexico dramatically diminished the supply of Mexican silver. While that was happening, the value of American cotton failed to keep pace with the rising prices of European goods, and those British firms that customarily extended credit to southern planters and cotton brokers abruptly halted the practice as they surveyed the weakening world economy. Under pressure to loosen credit domestically, British bankers confronted the costs of an abysmal grain harvest that forced Britain to stave off famine by importing significant amounts of European wheat. Not only did those British bankers stop southern credit, they called in loans from American banks, whether good or bad, and some of these too went uncollected. These accumulating events reached a critical mass in early 1837, just as Van Buren was being sworn in. Panic shot through American financial markets, shattering the banking system and throwing the general population into disarray as a tide of business failures swept over the country. By summer, America had simply stopped working, and forlorn crowds of hollow-eyed men clustered at the doors of more and more banks, trying to get their money, wandering away dazed as those doors closed early, the vaults empty, their contents vanished.72
At first, the crisis seemed to paralyze Van Buren. Earlier financial downturns had never been so thorough and smashing, and earlier nostrums of government inaction had seemed sensible. Jackson told Van Buren to let the markets sort themselves out, but the deepening disaster gave rise to demands for some sort of government intervention. Finally, Van Buren felt he had no choice. He concluded that banks were the fundamental problem, especially the Pet Banks so long favored with federal deposits and now deprived of them. Actually, Van Buren was in error. Most banks, even the Pet Banks, had behaved responsibly, had not heedlessly extended credit, and had maintained healthy reserves. That Van Buren and his advisers erroneously blamed banks for the financial catastrophe goaded them into hastily formulating a plan of action. They especially wanted to act before annoying Whigs could raise the specter of the BUS. Van Buren summoned a special session of Congress for September 1837. He planned to present to it a proposal for a “Subtreasury” or “Independent Treasury.” It was to be a “divorce,” as the president portentously called it, of all government funds from private banks.73
AS THE ECONOMY imploded, Clay spent the spring and summer at Ashland, far from the tumult. He had planned a trip to St. Louis to inspect his Missouri lands and visit James, but Van Buren’s call for a special session intervened. As Clay tracked the financial crash through newspapers and correspondence, he was certain that Jackson’s policies had caused it. Hearing the rumor that Van Buren intended to cut all connections between the government and the nation’s banking system, Clay was horrified. The move, he warned, would further diminish confidence in banks and worsen bad policies that had already gone far toward destroying the country’s financial structure. The only hope rested in that summer’s state elections giving Whigs a congressional majority. They could then reverse the madness, block any additional folly, and enact a sensible program to restore credit and repair the economy. Clay prepared for the worst, however. He made plain that he could at least acquiesce in a reasonable administration plan to relieve the country’s suffering, but he left home in August very doubtful that one would materialize. In fact, reports that Jackson in Nashville was behind Van Buren’s rash plan to abandon the banking system disheartened him.74
Van Buren wanted not only a “divorce” of federal funds from the banking system but also the issuance of specie and federal notes backed by the Treasury. Yet critics pointed out that federal notes competing with banknotes could only depreciate the value of the latter, further damaging the banks themselves. Whigs criticized the plan as a very messy divorce indeed, one certain to deepen the chaos in American commercial centers. They also saw a sinister political result in devaluing banknotes: the party that controlled the Treasury would control the monetary system.75
Several factors hobbled Whig efforts to block the proposal, however. The most damaging was John C. Calhoun’s defection to the administration, a move that stunned Clay and Webster. They judged it a treacherous betrayal that confirmed Calhoun’s lack of principle and his shameless intention to further his own political fortunes by whatever means at hand. Just at that moment, Martin Van Buren seemed to be the handiest way for Calhoun to rise, and the strange alliance between the two—between the president and the man who had chortled over killing him “dead” in a Senate confirmation proceeding—substantiated all the unseemly features of the new politics.
Confronting the administration’s formidable phalanx, Clay put up a stout fight in the Senate, but the numbers were clearly against him. When he repeated that only the American System’s promotion of strong banking could revive collapsed markets, everyone might have noted he was going blue in the face. He nevertheless pointed out the inconsistency of Van Buren’s establishing a government bank by any name—“Independent Treasury” seemed the most fashionable at the moment—while blaming banks for causing the disaster. He derisively compared the proposal to blaming the bullet rather than the triggerman for killing the victim. The administration nevertheless had the votes in the Senate, especially because of Calhoun, and the Subtreasury plan passed. The House of Representatives, however, turned thumbs down, and witnesses reported Clay as shouting “Hurrah!” when he heard the news. The special session closed. Neither executive nor Congress had realized a single accomplishment to alleviate the country’s distress or solve the government’s economic plight.76
The futile special session left Clay little time to visit Ashland before he had to return to Washington for the regular session in December. Lucretia stayed behind. Nobody knows whether she made a flat declaration of her intention never to return to Washington or it simply worked out that way, but she never set foot in the capital again. Her absence gave rise to stories about her being an eccentric recluse, tales that created the impression that she was withered and desolate, a shade wandering the halls of Ashland like a timid cat, silent and with lowered eyes. Eventually, people would forget that she had ever come to Washington and would even claim that she never had. They would not recall the quiet woman whom fashionable Margaret Bayard Smith had for years valued as a dear friend, the two in a carriage making calls, tending each other’s children, mingling at the Wednesday levees at Decatur House. In Washington, Lucretia had loved to play the piano with the children dancing around it, and she still played, only never again in Washington. Far from being a shrouded mansion, Ashland rang with Lucretia’s music, her motherless grandchildren now the dancers, her friends from her church her companions, the activities of the community and the work of her dairy filling her days.
In short, Lucretia Clay was too busy to bother with nonsense in Washington. The Duralde boys mostly lived at Ashland when not in school, and Anne’s younger children were a constant presence as James Erwin traveled on business. Theodore was just miles away, of course, and Henry with his dear Julia and their growing family frequently visited, requiring rooms to be readied and treats to be prepared for the little ones. John loved Ashland and was off to its stables first thing in the morning to tend to the swift horses he found both fascinating and friendly. They apparently returned the feeling.
Thomas had worried his parents sick, but he gradually found his way by finding a girl. In storybook fashion, she lived next door and had grown up with him and his siblings. Her parents were the French immigrants Augustus and Charlotte Mentelle, who operated a boarding school across the road from Ashland where most of the Clay children had received their earliest education with other local youngsters, including little Mary Todd, future wife of Abraham Lincoln. Clay was away at the special session, but Thomas had not postponed his plans to take Mary Mentelle for his wife that fall. The Clays were delighted to have her join the family. She had been a fixture at Ashland as a small child, one of those people who grows up on the edge of a family as a sort of mascot, and now she had agreed to be Thomas’s lucky charm. Bright and cheerful, she chattered in person and bubbled in letters, and Clay adored her for loving his boy, once lost, now found.77
Coming just weeks after the wedding, Ashland’s Christmas that year was happier than it had been in quite some time. Yuletide celebrations were different in those days, but the day still held special significance for family. Children laughed and danced at cheerful parties, such as one at the Wickliffes’ where Clays and Mentelles joined other guests to feast on roasted turkey. Henry and Julia’s family rounded out the complement along with Aunt Suky and her daughter, Nanette Price. Lucretia with Julia, and Mary with her mother Charlotte, staged large family dinners of their own, complete with mince pies, cakes, and candy. “Your Ma,” Mary wrote to James, and then corrected herself to say, “our Ma is not lonely, as there are [sic] always someones [sic] comfort to look after.”78
Lucretia had her little Creoles and the Erwin youngsters charging about excitedly, but she missed James, who was away in Missouri trying to get started as a farmer, and she worried about him. He was lonely and confessed to his mother that he was a little lovesick over not being in love. “You said you wanted a woman,” little Martin Duralde bluntly wrote him. “Why there are lots of them.” Apparently there were not any of them where James was, though, and Lucretia worried about him alone during the holidays. She found his flute and sent it to him, enclosing fifty dollars in the package. She claimed to have found it tucked among his things at Ashland, but this was obviously money from her dairy business. It was Christmas.79
Lucretia missed her husband as well, since he was gone this Christmas as he had been for so many others, a casualty of the legislative calendar that always saw Congress in session during December. Two years earlier, when Anne had been ill but seemingly recovering, Clay had left for Washington with such reluctance that he had committed to retirement. He had told Lucretia that he hoped “that this is the last separation, upon earth, that will take place, for any length of time, between us.”80 Then Anne died, and his world collapsed.
Everything paled in the wake of that loss, but as it darkened his life, it had the oddly compensatory effect of putting everything else, including politics, into perspective. The immutable law that all things change and the certainty that the passing of enough time will partly restore the spirit, if one is willing, partly lifted the veil. But it was the economic panic, which suddenly made the Whigs relevant and made possible their becoming a coherent party, that sent breath across the fading ember in his heart. Whig victories all over the country in the summer and fall elections partly lifted the veil too. For the first time since Anne’s death, Henry Clay gradually came into focus. He squared his shoulders and set his jaw. He would not retire. It was time “to see the Goths expelled [from] the Capitol.” There was work to do.81