“Death, Ruthless Death”
ELECTION POSTMORTEMS DEEPENED Whig despondency. Stories of rampant fraud came in from all over the country. Louisiana had been lost because the Democrats cheated in places like Plaquemines Parish, where they managed a 970-vote majority even though the parish had never tallied more than 340 votes in previous elections.1 New York, however, had decided the election, and there the fraud was simply unbridled. Democrats had openly baited Roman Catholics, immigrants, and abolitionists, but their secret operations in voter fraud had been no less obvious. The Central Clay Committee in New York City spent $5,000 investigating the matter, but nothing came of it.2 The thousands of illegal votes were those of immigrants, impossible to trace and, given the slipshod records and loose checks of the time, impossible to invalidate. Clay was thus “cheated out of his election by vote fraud,” wailed Leslie Combs.3
On December 4, Combs came to Ashland as one of Kentucky’s twelve presidential electors. The day before in Frankfort they had unanimously cast their votes for Clay and Frelinghuysen and now had come to Lexington to pay respects to Clay. Governor William Owsley and citizens of the town accompanied the group to Ashland. The electors gathered at the base of the house’s front steps, and Clay slowly emerged through the large front door. Joseph Underwood read prepared remarks lauding Clay and Whig principles while lamenting his loss, bitterly denouncing it as “fraud upon the election franchise.” Clay was gracious in his response. Their gesture touched him deeply, he said, and he was equally grateful for the privilege of living in Kentucky, now for more than forty years. He flatly stated he would not condemn the Polk administration and was silent on the issue of election fraud. Instead, he expressed confidence that Whig principles would endure, just as the country would, although both temporarily faced discouraging prospects. “I have the high satisfaction to know that I have escaped a great and fearful responsibility,” he said, and he spoke of the “peace and tranquility” he looked forward to in retirement.4 His voice was still strong and rich, but he looked very old and very tired. Some of the electors pulled out handkerchiefs as he spoke. Clay was clearly exhausted, and his visitors now had confirmed what they had suspected. He was saying good-bye.
Even from a distance the scene was affecting. In Washington, John J. Crittenden confessed that newspaper accounts of it made him “quite melancholy.”5 When Clay told him that he merely wanted to spend “the remnant of my days, in peace and retirement” at Ashland, Crittenden at last believed that he meant it.6 Possibly at the time Clay believed he meant it too.
They both should have known better.
EVEN IF CLAY really intended to retreat for good from public life, the public would not retreat from him. Accolades from his admirers never ceased, and the material proof of their affection arrived almost daily at Ashland. In Philadelphia, a hat made especially for Clay from the finest Rocky Mountain beaver was put on display and became a tourist attraction before its dispatch to Kentucky. And while many of the gifts were small and charming, some were so generous they were discomfiting. Lucretia, for example, received “a brilliant bracelet studded with diamonds” that Clay gratefully acknowledged but she would seldom if ever wear.7
Yet it was Clay who received a series of spectacular gifts during the spring and summer of 1845 that left him speechless. He faced a grave crisis in his financial affairs; in fact, his money woes eroded his customary optimism more than his political disappointments ever had. For almost a decade, the gradual depletion of his assets had been more than alarming, reducing his net worth by more than half since 1839. He had trouble paying his 1844 taxes. Helping Thomas absorb the failure of his hemp and bagging business saddled Clay with an unexpected $20,000 obligation. Added to that were the costs associated with closing his friend John Morrison’s estate. In addition, there was the loan from John Jacob Astor, making the sum of Clay’s total indebtedness a staggering $40,000 (more than a million dollars in today’s money). He tried to reduce that figure by selling off lands he owned in Missouri and Kentucky, but he could barely manage to keep up with the interest, let alone shrink the principal. At the beginning of 1845, his financial emergency reached a critical point. Clay had offered his beloved Ashland as collateral to save Thomas from bankruptcy. Now he was certain to lose it.
Then in mid-February, Clay received a letter from John Tilford, the president of the Northern Bank of Kentucky, which held the bulk of his notes. Tilford had peculiar news: the bank had received from donors, who wished to remain anonymous, $5,000 to apply to Clay’s debt. They wanted, Tilford reported, “to render your remaining years free from pecuniary cares.” Furthermore, they felt their gesture repaid “only part of a debt they owe you for your long and valued Services in the cause of our country and its institutions.”8 A few days later, Clay received another note from Tilford informing him that an additional $5,000 had arrived. Clay was at first astonished. Then he was embarrassed. Although Tilford never revealed the benefactors’ identities, Clay could readily guess their names. He sought to explain directly to a few how he had become so insolvent, candidly citing Thomas’s troubles as the primary cause.9 But most of all, Clay was profoundly touched. Tilford’s strange but happy role as go-between for these singular acts of generosity continued, and through him Clay profusely thanked his nameless friends for their kindness, especially for “the delicate manner in which it has been rendered.” He hoped that it had not caused anyone the slightest financial hardship, and he wanted all to know that if the situation had been reversed, he too would have rushed to their aid.10
The money continued to pour in from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans and was deposited in varying but substantial sums over the course of March and April. In short order, every penny Henry Clay owed the Northern Bank of Kentucky was paid off. Then in the months that followed, his friends began paying off his Astor loan as well. Clay protested that this was really too much, but he was gently told not to worry. It was, said William N. Mercer, the least his friends could do.11 Yet Clay insisted. Continuing the pretense of ignorance, he told Tilford, who continued to execute the group’s financial wishes, to inform his friends they had done more than enough. He would repay Astor on his own; they should send no more money.12 “I am not rich,” Clay told a correspondent who was unaware of his financial rescue and was writing to offer help, “but I am now nearly free from debt, and I possess a competency to enable me, to live in comfort during the remnant of my days, and to fulfill some of the duties of hospitality.”13
The matter was handled quite deftly and kept as private as possible, but the story was too good to remain undisclosed for long. Newspapers soon reported it, and eventually imparted to the episode a more theatrical flair: Clay, the story went, appeared at the Northern Bank to make a payment when the cashier handed him the note and told him it was entirely settled. Clay was said to have wept. None of this happened. Clay clearly first learned of his friends’ generosity from Tilford’s letter.14
Unencumbered by debt for the first time in years, Clay flourished. His estate did too. Visitors admired its “profusion of venerable forest trees, evergreens and shrubbery” that adorned the main grounds, a nucleus of fifty acres surrounded by the larger working farm. A winding carriage road snaked through a shady grove to the house from which radiated an abundance of walking trails lined with dogwoods, periwinkles, and redbuds. Mockingbirds and whip-poor-wills filled the trees. The house was equally inviting, modestly but comfortably furnished and containing “many choice and valuable evidences of the respect of his countrymen.”15 Ashland had become the showplace Clay had always imagined. Lucretia’s dairy thrived and boasted cheese and butter houses constructed of cool, insulating stone. There were also chicken coops, dovecotes, barns, and sheds, all trim and well maintained. The stables housed handsome horses, increasingly the focus of John’s life. Lucretia, who also cultivated ornamentals in a spacious greenhouse, supervised a four-acre fruit and vegetable garden. Beyond this prosperous farm, Ashland became a sprawling six-hundred-acre plantation of cultivated fields devoted to wheat, rye, corn, and hemp. Pastures of fabled bluegrass fattened lowing cows and pedigreed sheep. All fences were in good repair, and weeds were regularly hoed down in their corners as well as amid the crops those fences protected.
The routines of the estate were pleasantly consistent. Lucretia rose early to organize the day’s work in her gardens and the dairy and to see to the sale of her butter and cheese to Lexington markets and households. The “milk and egg” money that resulted was hardly a trifle; her enterprise brought in about $1,500 a year. She would also make certain that any guests in the mansion were comfortable. “Mrs. Clay is one of the best hearted women I have ever known,” reported one. “She is all attention to my wants.”16
Clay rose early too and usually dressed plainly in clothes of American manufacture. He might attend to some improvement to the main house—he raised the roof line at the dining room during these months, for instance—and nurture the array of plants he had carefully situated over the years for the best aesthetic effect.17 Shortly after his retirement in 1842, he had resumed practicing law, both to deal with his debt—“I am not at all unwilling to receive liberal fees,” he joked18—and to help James establish himself at the bar. After his debts were no longer an issue, he still spent several hours a day at the office, a plain establishment with “no cushioned chairs, carpeted floors, mahogany book cases and desks.”19 He strode through Lexington swinging a gold-headed cane and puffing on a cigar. A little girl established a charming ritual with Clay: she placed her sunbonnet on the counter of her father’s store, and Clay would drop a silver ten-cent piece in it as payment for a kiss on his cheek. He might stop by to see Leslie Combs or go to the courthouse to trade yarns with young attorneys. On Saturday evenings, he often visited the market in downtown Lexington, where crowds gathered around him at vegetable stalls to shake his hand or discuss the weather. “I believe he really is,” said one visitor, “one of the happiest men on earth.”20
His greatest delight came from watching his land blossom and his livestock fatten. Clay was always a serious farmer. His goal was to make Ashland a model of husbandry boasting the best and most improved stock breeds.21 He was an early advocate of scientific agriculture and experimental breeding. He varied his crops and saw to their methodical rotation to prevent soil exhaustion. He also replenished his fields with liberal applications of natural fertilizers and planted nitrogen-fixing legumes. His work with hemp growing earned him renown, and he published articles describing successful methods for cultivating and harvesting the plants; his discourses on the methods of rotting hemp fiber from stalks filled pages.22 He dug a large canal, a quarter of a mile long, three feet wide at the bottom and six feet wide at the top, and two and a half feet deep, to drain the low ground, and built vats to water rot his hemp. Convinced that properly prepared American hemp was the equal of its Russian counterpart, he boasted he would rig the sailing ships of the entire U.S. navy with cordage made from Ashland’s crop.23 Meanwhile, his work as a stockman gained him notice for pioneering efforts to improve the bloodlines of cattle, sheep, and horses. He bought animals in Europe, sparing little expense when he found a promising prospect to develop a superior breed.24
OUT OF PUBLIC office since 1842 and defeated in 1844, Clay remained in the public eye through his work as an attorney. He was involved in two of Kentucky’s most notable courtroom dramas during these years. The first was the murder trial of Lafayette Shelby, son of James Shelby and grandson of Isaac Shelby, the scion of one of the state’s most prominent families. Young Shelby, hotheaded and touchy, knew Henry M. Horine only as a fellow lodger at a Lexington hotel, but on January 10, 1846, he took Horine’s customary chair at dinner and then took exception to Horine’s objections. Shelby accosted Horine in the street for his impertinence, tried to provoke a fight, and then shot him dead. Shelby was held without bail, and the family appealed to Clay, who took the case.25 “It is a very hard case,” Clay remarked in considerable understatement, for his client had clearly murdered the man, “but for the sake of his numerous and highly respectable connections, I hope to be able to secure his acquittal.”26 As the trial commenced at the end of June, Shelby was in such despair that he wanted to kill himself, but his “highly respectable connections” as well as Clay’s dramatic courtroom presence befuddled the jury to indecision.27 Shelby’s defense rested in part on his being provoked by Horine’s insolent stare in the dining room. Years later, Judge R. A. Buckner recalled how Clay showed that a mere look could be more offensive than words by forming “such an expression to his countenance of withering contempt and hate that all confessed that it was more insulting than any other form of expression.”28
The news of the hung jury caused a small riot in Lexington, where a mob, incensed by the obvious favor shown to Shelby, burned judge, jurors, and Clay in effigy.29 Clay was slated to defend Shelby in a second trial scheduled for September 1848, but the defendant was not willing to press his luck and fled to Texas. He did not return until 1862, and by then the Civil War had made him and the murder old news. He never answered for killing Horine.
The Shelby affair was Henry Clay’s last criminal case, but his last notable court appearance was in a civil trial over a contested will. The case involved the enormous estate of Mary Bullitt, known as Polly, the daughter of Alexander and Mary Bullitt. Both had children by previous marriages, representatives of Kentucky’s most important families whose blood and marriage ties broadly linked them to other prominent families in the state, including the Clays. Polly’s mother was a Churchill (of Louisville’s Churchill Downs), and Mary Churchill’s first husband, Richard Prather, was a distant relation of Henry Clay, Jr.’s late wife. Their daughter, Eliza Prather, married James Guthrie, a wealthy Louisville businessman, leader of the state Democratic Party, and railroad promoter.
It was into this web of interlocking families that Polly Bullitt was born, and that would be the cause of all the trouble later on. Alexander and Mary had two other children together, but it was soon clear that Polly was severely retarded, and they consequently arranged a considerable inheritance for her care.30 When the Bullitts both died in 1816, Polly was only eight, and her half sister, Eliza Guthrie, as her guardian, sent her to the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, a Catholic convent near Bardstown. Polly lived with the nuns until she was nineteen and then lived in James Guthrie’s home. Failing health and increasing mental debility eventually required her to live at the St. Vincent Infirmary, and there her brief, sad life ended in 1843 at age thirty-five. Yet it was claimed that she had dictated a will bequeathing her entire Bullitt fortune to her Guthrie nieces, James and Eliza’s children, Mary, Augusta, and Sarah. The Bullitt children by Alexander’s first marriage immediately challenged this will, charging that Polly, unable to count, unteachable, and irritable to the point of tantrums, had not been mentally capable of crafting such a document. They accordingly claimed that the will was a transparent manufacture of the Guthries.31 When the court upheld the will, the Bullitts appealed and hired Henry Clay to represent them. The case was heard again in 1849 and instantly became sensational theater for the same reasons it would be for any time: it featured prominent, affluent families in dispute, it had at its center a mentally disabled child and at its periphery a Catholic convent with nuns attesting to Polly’s competency, and it offered the prospect of loving nieces being rewarded and rightful heirs being cheated. And it showcased Henry Clay, a lion in winter to be sure, but a lion nonetheless.
The complaint against the will hinged on Polly’s fitness to make it, and Clay consequently attacked those who defended her competency, which required him to challenge the priests and nuns, especially Catherine Spalding, the formidable mother superior of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. Clay knew the order well—he had handed out diplomas at Nazareth’s first commencement—but he was unrelenting in cross-examination and characteristically biting in his demeanor.32 Over the course of a week in late April and early May, he performed for a courtroom packed with “the most distinguished ladies” of Louisville.33 His final appearance drew an outsized crowd of women, young and old, who began to arrive at eight in the morning, hours before he was to speak. The judge ordered one bench cleared to accommodate the ladies, then another, and another, until the only males remaining were the lawyers, the jury, and a little boy curled up on a windowsill who refused to budge lest he lose the chance to hear Clay. One lady sat in Clay’s chair as soon as he rose to speak, and others squeezed into the jury box. Clay wore a black suit and a white cravat, “stood as erect as a flag-pole, spoke with great deliberation and distinctness, and held spellbound the attention of the judge, bar, and jury, as well as the crowded court-room.” They listened as he swelled his rich baritone to emphasize a point or occasionally mutter in mock resignation under his breath, though quite audibly, “Guthries, Guthries, Guthries—always there are Guthries.”34
Finally handed the case, the jury deliberated for three hours before notifying the court that it could not reach a verdict. As in the trial of Lafayette Shelby, Clay had managed to plant enough doubt to cause a jury to stall in indecision, but in this instance, it meant a defeat for his clients. The previous ruling upholding the will was allowed to stand. Yet nobody would ever forget Henry Clay striding and gesturing before that court, befuddling one witness into doubting his own signature, causing fits of hilarity to rock the assembly, his biting sarcasm delivered with a smile, the judge himself quietly shaking with laughter before reluctantly gaveling the proceedings back to order. Nobody would ever forget that they had seen a lion, impressive in any season, making the mundane memorable, winning the crowd if not the case.35
“I AM ENDEAVORING to separate myself as much as I can from this world,” Clay told a friend in early 1845, “but, in spite of all my wishes for seclusion, great numbers call to see me at this place.” He did not have the heart to turn them away.36 In fact, Ashland hummed as a center of warm hospitality. Visitors showed up out of the blue, and sometimes as many as a half dozen people, strangers to each other as well as to Clay, would appear on his doorstep, always expecting him to do most of the talking and saying virtually nothing themselves.37
One of the visitors to Ashland that summer attracted wide notice. George Peter Alexander Healy, a gifted young American artist who had been studying in Europe, came with a special commission from “Louis-Philippe, the king of the French,” as he styled himself to denote his distance from monarchical pretense. Louis-Philippe fondly recalled his four years of residence in the United States during the turmoil of the French Revolution, and he dispatched Healy to paint portraits of America’s aging statesmen, including Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay. In May 1845, Healy arrived in Boston aboard the steamer Hibernia and hurried first to Nashville because reports accurately told of Andrew Jackson’s imminent death. The artist then traveled north to Ashland, bringing with him the Jackson portrait, which he had only just completed before Old Hickory’s demise. If Clay regarded this as some sort of portent, he didn’t say so, although as he sat for Healy—“a most unpleasant occupation,” he complained—he wasn’t feeling very well, nor was Lucretia. Yet both liked what Healy was doing, and Clay judged him “an artiste of real talent.”38
Everyone, including Clay, had commented on the apparent inability of even the most practiced artists to capture a decent likeness of him. Portraits of Clay were like the “body without the Soul—the Head without the mind.” In short, his features required animation to make them express his personality. “Clay in calm repose,” a friend concluded, “was not Clay at all.”39
Many artists did try to capture the fire that animated Clay’s features, and some came close. Matthew Jouett painted several portraits of him. Several years before Healy’s visit, the Philadelphia artist John Neagle had come to Ashland to paint one of the most famous likenesses of Clay ever produced, a full-length portrait that Neagle boasted broke from the tradition of simply sticking a head on a prepainted body. It was instead actually a full representation of Henry Clay.
Healy’s labors, however, were of a different class, and the portrait that resulted was a testament to his skill. Clay was shown full-faced and gazed steadily with his mouth set in what appeared to be the start of a smile. His features were less sharp and his eyes were softer. Some family members would recall that Healy had considerable difficulty getting the eyes right, and not all of them liked the result. Not only did he not capture the color (a very pale blue), he “failed absolutely to get the expression or the fire,” they said.40 It was always Lucretia’s favorite likeness, however. Healy presented a copy to her as a gift, and she had it framed and mounted at Ashland. When admirers proposed to take it to Frankfort, she would not “part from it.”41
Extended family was a constant presence at Ashland. Grandchildren often filled the house with chatter and laughter, eager to see Grandmama and Grandpapa, who were generous with treats and hugs.42 In addition to Henry and Lucretia, John remained in residence, and while their houses were being built, Thomas and James with their families lived at Ashland too. Even after the older sons moved their families to their new houses, they remained nearby, and social routines kept the house full. Thomas and Mary always came to dinner on Sunday afternoons, for example, as did Henry Jr.’s children, Nannie and Tommy.43 Henry Jr. remained in Louisville, but he often came to visit the children, who were living in Lexington with cousin Nanette while going to school. Clay repeatedly tried to get Henry to move back to Lexington, even to live at Ashland, but he would not. Henry was hard to make cheerful. Julia had been dead for five years, but for the young widower, her passing might have happened only yesterday.44
Clay hovered over his children when they were near him and clung to them when they were distant. When he traveled, he wanted regular letters and complained when they were not forthcoming. It was important to him that everyone stay in touch, and Clay thought it odd when others did not. When, during his extended stay at Ashland, artist John Neagle did not receive any letters, Clay observed, according to Neagle, that “my family did not seem to care for me.”45
When Clay was in ready proximity to his children, he could be smothering. Losing all his daughters filled him with dread about the children who survived. In addition, he had always treated his girls differently. For them he had always been full of praise and encouragement, an attitude that extended to his daughters-in-law as well. James’s wife, Susan, became Clay’s confidante and informally his private secretary, the keeper of the documents and, according to conjecture, destroyer of same if they were potentially unflattering. “I never knew a man more loved—adored in his family than Henry Clay,” Susan Jacob Clay would remember. “I never heard him speak an unkind nor even a hasty word to any member of his household.”46 That sort of reverence could be endearing, but it also emphasized for his sons that their father cast a long shadow.
Because they had been allowed to grow up largely undisciplined and at considerable liberty—a custom of the times as well as a result of their parents’ indulgence—all of the boys came uncertainly and unevenly to the burdens of adulthood. Theodore’s insanity placed extra expectations on his brothers. They naturally chafed under them, which prompted even more hectoring from their father. Clay could never shake off his inclination to run things and manage people, and his sons never fully escaped his watchful eye nor were spared his advice in matters great and small. Henry Jr. stubbornly remained in Louisville, but when he considered running for Congress from that district, his father was ready with counsel as well as encouragement. He was soon suggesting that Henry Jr. move in at Ashland to save money and be near his children, possibly to go into business with Thomas. Henry Jr. would have none of it.47
Thomas and James were often unhappy as they and their families lodged at Ashland waiting for their houses to be finished. James was practicing law, but his father showed up frequently at the office with suggestions for improving this brief or that argument. Clay had advice about how to raise and educate his grandchildren too.
These boys became young men under the nearly impossible circumstance of being the sons of a great man of considerable renown and achievement. Living up to that standard was daunting enough without its exemplar’s constantly, reflexively offering guidance. Worse, what Clay considered fatherly devotion could be stifling and was sometimes hurtful. Thomas was under no illusion that his father always regarded Henry Jr., serious and talented and bookish, as the most capable of the sons. Thomas was solemn enough all right, but he was never quite able to manage a success. He had launched his hemp and bagging business with high hopes and his father’s generous capitalization, but the hopes had been dashed and his father nearly ruined when the business failed. In debt to his father for $20,000 (an obligation never repaid and finally forgiven in Clay’s will), Thomas eventually embarked upon another business, a sawmill, but the equipment was second-rate, and he had to depend on his father again to come up with the $600 necessary to improve it. Thomas lived at Ashland, cheerless and irritable, eager to move in to his own house, even if it was only minutes away. He quarreled with John frequently, and the arguments could be heated enough to send one or the other stomping out. The subsequent truces were awkward and halfhearted.48
The arguments were usually John’s fault. As the baby of the family, a child who came to Henry and Lucretia after so much loss and heartbreak, he was terribly spoiled by his parents and so petted by Lucretia that John’s brothers tended to be jealous of him and mildly resentful of her. “I think you do your mother[’]s heart wrong in supposing it engrossed by John,” Clay admonished James, adding what he knew to be true: “I believe that she affectionately feels for all her children. Her manner does not always truly indicate the intensity of her actual feelings.”49 Nevertheless John’s brothers had a point, for Lucretia was doggedly blind to the boy’s faults.50 He could be petulant and temperamental. Any good behavior on his part was such an unexpected treat that his parents were apt to characterize it as exemplary.
“John looks very serious,” Clay reported to Lucretia when he and his son were on their way to enroll him at Princeton in 1837, “but has conducted himself well.” In only a few months, though, John’s experiment at college went awry. “John has lately given me great pain,” Clay admitted, “and I almost despair of him.” After John visited Ashland in the spring of his freshman year, the boy’s level mood and good conduct encouraged his father, but upon returning to Princeton, John began disappearing for days at a time on drunken sprees in New York and Philadelphia. It was clear that when far from home, he could not resist indulging “his frailties” of strong drink and careless gambling. In March 1839, Clay himself requested that Princeton expel John from the junior class. The college was more than happy to oblige.51
And so it went. Clay next enrolled John in Washington College in Washington, Pennsylvania, with his grandson, Henry Clay Duralde, hopeful that a relative’s companionship and the watchful eye of the headmaster would settle both boys down (Henry Duralde had his own problems). Clay confidentially informed the headmaster that John lacked “the will to study,” a shortcoming he had cheerfully admitted to his father. “He has a high and irascible temper,” Clay warned the school, but added that he was “easily acted upon by kindness and persuasion.”52
John’s hair-trigger temper continued to be a problem, but in the spring of 1845, his demeanor took an ominous turn. Over the course of several weeks his behavior grew increasingly unpredictable. By early April, Clay openly worried that John was becoming “more and more deranged” and at last broached the unthinkable: Would his youngest son, like his oldest, have to be committed?53 As with Theodore—hardly a comforting comparison—the ostensible cause was a girl: “His passion for Miss J—— revived,” Clay explained, “and yesterday [April 4] he attempted to see her, but she, being advised of his situation, properly declined to receive him.” Unrequited, John roamed the woods into the wee hours and became “wild and boisterous in his language,” even “incoherent.” At least he, unlike Theodore, had not threatened anyone—yet. After John’s failed attempt to see the girl, Clay made the arrangements, and John went “quietly to the Hospital, without any resistance.” Lucretia was heartsick.54
A week passed, but John was no better. If anything, he was worse. “I am afraid,” Clay sadly confessed, “that John’s case is hopeless.” He was even more unhinged than Theodore had been when they first put him away. Clay found the state of affairs unbearable. He tried to comfort himself by making certain that Theodore and John, suddenly unexpected roommates, were as comfortable as possible in a building full of lunatics. He stationed a family servant in their room to see to their needs. But the matter preyed on his mind, especially because John retained enough rationality to suffer from his confinement but not enough to justify his freedom. Theodore at least had slipped into a catatonic state that shielded him from his hopelessness. (Fanciful stories that described Theodore as thinking he was George Washington and holding presidential levees for the other inmates at the asylum were complete fabrications.55) John’s slender thread of lucidity, however, also gave Clay hope that his son could possibly come home. By the end of April, Clay was considering just such an experiment, and in early May, John finally returned to Ashland. He seemed better—in fact, better than his old self—but neither Clay nor Lucretia would ever again be easy about the boy. When John traveled alone and did not stay in touch, his parents always worried.56
John eventually found himself, and found a girl (if an unlikely one). For decades John remained a bachelor horse breeder. Hearing that his nephew Eugene Erwin, Anne’s third son, had been killed while serving as a Confederate colonel at Vicksburg, he wrote to console Eugene’s young widow, Josephine Russell Erwin. Their letters eventually assumed a warm, tender tone, and Josephine came to Lexington with her three daughters. John and Josephine married, with the result that Anne’s little brother would raise her grandchildren as his own children. Thus would John eventually find his place as a stockman and breeder of horse racing champions and father to his little nieces. John would be all right. He even came to affectionate terms with Thomas. “You cannot imagine how much I was gratified at hearing of your visiting at Thomas’s and talking kindly together as brothers,” Clay wrote to John.57 When he penned that letter, Henry Clay was in Washington, dying, still worrying about them all.
JOHN’S PLIGHT WAS only one source of family trouble for the Clays during these years. James and Susan’s little girl was born in 1844 with a spinal defect so severe that everyone feared she would die, or at least be unable to walk. Lucy survived and turned out to be a cheerful child despite the chronic problems that filled her life with doctors and painful braces. It hurt her grandfather’s heart, and he was always eager to pet and spoil his brave little Lucy. He often picked and peeled figs for her breakfast, arranging them on a tray with a freshly cut rose.58
Contemplating the situation of his beloved Anne’s children also made Clay sad. Anne’s widowed husband, James Erwin, remarried in 1843, taking as his second wife Mary Margaret Johnson, niece of Clay’s old friend and nemesis Richard M. Johnson. When he married, Erwin left behind a trail of financial irregularities in New Orleans. He died in 1851, having had two more children with his second wife. He also left no will. The picture of James Erwin that afterward emerged was indistinct but unsettling. He had pretended affluence or poverty for best effect, depending on the situation. Family had served as particularly easy marks. Anne’s nephews, the Duralde boys, were left flat broke by Erwin’s frauds.59
It was cold comfort that Erwin had treated his and Anne’s children just as shabbily. He had squandered their share of Anne’s inheritance and died owing them $37,000, not counting years of interest—money that none of them would see, since the second Mrs. Erwin proved tenacious in claiming her and her children’s share of the meager leavings.60
Under these shadows, the Erwin children remained a troubled lot. James Erwin, Jr., died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in New Orleans. Henry Clay Erwin died in 1859 at the Galt House in Louisville of tuberculosis. Andrew Eugene, always “Eugene” to the family, was placed in a mercantile house in New York by his grandfather, but the work did not agree with the boy, and he soon went to California. He did well there and married Josephine Russell, whose widowhood would later throw her together with Eugene’s uncle John. More or less cast adrift by her brothers and father, Lucretia Clay Erwin married Frederick Cowles, a “very poor, altho’ a very good person,” according to her grandfather.61
In similar fashion, the Duralde grandchildren presented an unbroken chronicle of misfortune. Martin and Henry Clay Duralde seemed to enjoy visiting Lexington, but as he grew older, Henry Clay Duralde bounced from one private academy to another before retreating to his native New Orleans. He emptied his already meager purse and neglected his family, including his grandfather, whom he ignored during Clay’s visits to the city. Finally Henry Duralde fled to California on the St. Mary, a schooner that rounded Cape Horn and paused at Valparaiso, where he wrote his grandfather a long apology confessing his profligacy and vowing to turn over a new leaf once he reached the West. In less than a year Clay received word that his grandson had drowned in the Sacramento River.62
And then there was Martin, the little boy who had come wide-eyed to Lexington after his mother’s death, able to speak only a few words of English. Martin became a midshipman in the navy and in spring 1839 was slated to sail on the Constitution to the Pacific. He was ill, however, and the navy was wary about sending him. Martin’s complaint was respiratory and real, but Clay wondered if the illness was actually the result of Martin’s reluctance to go so far from home. After all, said Clay, his grandson had no ancestral history of consumption. And with this first mention of that time’s dreaded word for tuberculosis, Clay acknowledged the possibility that something might be irremediably wrong with his grandson. Clay suggested another ship to a more salubrious destination, perhaps the Mediterranean, and Martin did eventually sail on the Brandywine to that duty station. But the signs were on him, and soon there was no denying that he was very ill.63
Returning to the States, Martin was clearly unable to continue in the navy. In late 1844 he suffered a serious hemorrhage and began a sad descent, wandering in search of a place to breathe better and cough less. He went to Cuba before returning to Ashland in early 1846, but soon he left for the sulphur springs in Virginia that summer. In early July 1846 he paused at Blue Sulphur Springs, which catered to consumptive invalids. By this time, the stout boy whom Clay had once helped outfit with a new wardrobe was almost a skeleton. Martin tried to ride in the mornings before breakfast and said hopefully that the waters were helping.64
His optimism was fleeting. He moved to Red Sulphur Springs, but upon reflection, he judged it as only a place where consumptives came to die. On July 18, he left for the resort spa at White Sulphur Springs, not to take the waters—he was finally convinced they did no good—but to find a more cheerful setting to “let Nature pursue its own course.” Martin told his grandfather, “I have become a confirmed case of consumption and can only hope to linger out a life of much suffering.”65
And suffer he did. Seeking warmth, he moved through Richmond on his way to Old Point Comfort in Hampton, Virginia. He told his grandfather that he would continue to write as long as he could, but there were only a few more letters from him, and then nothing until word came from a doctor in Philadelphia. Martin, he said, had died on September 17, 1846, at the Columbia Hotel. His possessions included a pocket watch and a trunk with some clothes. His wallet contained $143 in southern banknotes, a deposit slip for $1,300 on a New Orleans bank, and a lottery ticket. Clay asked that the money be used to bury Martin and pledged to supply any additional funds that were necessary. “Death, ruthless death,” he bitterly mourned, “ … has now commenced his work of destruction, with my descendants, in the second generation.”66
Clay had not even known that Martin was in Philadelphia. He had wanted the boy to return to Ashland for his last days, but Martin had declined. So Susan’s boy, aged twenty-three years, died in a hotel room surrounded by strangers and flanked by his small possessions. He had hoped even at the end that his luck could still change. He had bought a lottery ticket.
“YOU ASK ME if I am happy?” Clay wrote a friend in the months after the election of 1844. “Ah! my dear friend, who on earth is happy? Very few, I apprehend, if any.”67 Certainly he had reason to be discouraged by the course the Polk administration had pledged to plot in both domestic and foreign policy, but in the meantime he watched the closing days of the Tyler presidency with growing dismay. The annexation of Texas had become an obsession for John Tyler, and his efforts to accomplish it remained stalled by the impasse of slavery. The annexation forces simply did not have the two-thirds majority in the Senate to ratify a treaty with Texas, but Tyler and Secretary of State John C. Calhoun contrived the idea of bypassing that constitutional procedure with a joint congressional resolution, which required only simple majorities in both houses. Clay was bitterly amused by these doctrinaire interpreters of strict constitutional construction essentially disregarding constitutional rules. When the House of Representatives fell in line with Tyler to give his resolution a 22-vote majority, Clay cried, “God save the Commonwealth!”68 The Senate was not quite as pliable, but the unrelenting persistence of annexationists finally delivered the goods in that chamber too. The clock was ticking away the final hours of Tyler’s presidency when he finally signed the resolution annexing Texas, but sign it he did, the crowning achievement, in his estimation, of an otherwise failed administration.69
It was, in a way, a gift to the incoming Polk administration. It at least spared Polk the political brawl that annexation threatened, which would have been a blemish on the traditional honeymoon with the legislature. But the gesture hardly guided Polk out of the territorial woods, and in some respects it blocked his path even more. The Mexican government, livid about what it described as the simple theft of its property, broke off diplomatic relations. Furthermore, Texas had never established its southern border with Mexico, claiming it to be the Rio Grande, while Mexico insisted it was fifty miles farther north, on the Nueces River, which had been the provincial Texan border when it was indisputably Mexican territory. The Rio Grande/Nueces disagreement made slight difference on its eastern end, but the western portion was quite another matter. There, as the Rio Grande snaked northward a good five hundred miles farther to the west, it would give a considerable part of New Mexico to Texas, and there Mexico drew the line—or more accurately, Mexico refused to let Texas draw any such line. Polk supported Texas’s claim and thus created yet another point of contention with Mexico City.
Polk also inherited another territorial dispute that the Tyler administration had not been able to resolve in the slightest, and it had the potential to be very serious because it put the United States at odds with Great Britain, which many correctly noted was definitely not Mexico in terms of military power and international influence. The argument was over the vast Oregon country, a region in the Pacific Northwest that dwarfed even Texas in its expansive potential. Polk came into office, of course, saddled with a Democrat expansionist impulse that would find expression in the absurdly belligerent slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” a fetchingly alliterative phrase fraught with grave diplomatic consequences. Would James K. Polk really clench the country’s fists to secure the bulk of western Canada, despite Britain’s impeccable territorial claims to much of the region? Antislavery advocates certainly wanted him to, for a larger (free) Oregon coming to the United States served as a counterweight to (slave) Texas, and Polk found himself caught between angry abolitionists who did not trust him and the thigh-thumping, gallus-popping expansionists who formed the core of his political support. Watching all this unfold from Ashland, Clay was more alarmed for the country than amused by Polk’s dilemma. The former War Hawk now judged the prospect of hostilities with Britain a “calamity”; the erstwhile expansionist who had eyed the plum of eastern Canada now deemed its western regions “a territory so distant from them both [America and Britain], and at present so unimportant to either.”70
Efforts to negotiate an Oregon boundary proved fruitless, and when Polk gave the required one-year notice that he intended to end the Anglo-American joint tenancy arrangement in the Oregon country, a pact in force since 1818, Clay was dismayed.71 Yet he should not have been. Irresistible forces fated the peaceful resolution of the Oregon controversy. “I do not think,” predicted a sagacious observer, “nor have I thought from the first that we will have war with England.”72 Fighting was in neither country’s best interest, and a treaty ultimately settled the boundary at the 49th parallel, considerably south of the 54° purportedly worth fighting for—an American concession, but far enough north to give the United States possession of the Columbia River, a British compromise of some note.
Antislavery men howled over the perceived surrender, but Polk had good reason to embrace the arrangement. Great Britain, after all, was not Mexico. The latter was a much more attractive and likely prospect for a war of conquest, which by the time the Oregon Treaty was signed had already started.
Polk wanted the grand bay at San Francisco in order to promote American interests in the Pacific, and a considerable number of Americans imbued with a sense of “Manifest Destiny” felt foreordained to extend their dominion from sea to shining sea. To that end, Polk tried to compel Mexico to negotiate by making the border dispute with Texas the center of all controversies. He ordered General Zachary Taylor to march south of the Nueces River and plant the flag in the disputed region, and he sent an envoy to Mexico City to purchase California. Taylor’s move was provocative, the envoy’s cause was hopeless, and the Mexican government was provoked by the one and intractable with the other. Inevitably there was an incident on the border, and Polk used it to ask Congress for war. Hectored and goaded by the administration’s claims that American blood had been spilled by an invader on American soil, Congress agreed on May 11, 1846, to make war on Mexico. Fourteen Whigs in the House voted against the declaration of war. Eventually they would be lionized as “the Immortal Fourteen.”
Congress called for fifty thousand volunteers to join Taylor’s forces, and the country responded. Within a week a mass meeting in Lexington produced two organized companies of mounted infantry, and Governor William Owsley’s May 17 proclamation exhorting Kentuckians to form volunteer companies drew responses from all over the state, including the Louisville Legion, which became the 1st Kentucky volunteer infantry. Private citizens were already doing their part. Henry Clay, Jr., cheered the Louisville Courier, “can raise in an hour as noble and brave a band as ever shouldered a musket or thrashed an enemy.”73 In only five days, Kentucky had filled its requisition of troops. Everyone’s blood was up regardless of political affiliation or partisan policies. Daniel Webster’s youngest son, Edward, helped to raise a regiment in Boston. And Henry Clay’s namesake became second-in-command of the 2nd Kentucky volunteer infantry.74
Clay did not want his son to go to war in Mexico. His opposition was not because the duty was sure to be dangerous; he regretted that the war itself was not “more reconcilable with the dictates of conscience.”75 Clay’s was a widespread Whig sentiment. “Who would be glad at this time,” asked the Lexington Virginian, “when the war clouds are gathering around the horizon, to see HENRY CLAY at the head of affairs?”76
Meanwhile, Henry Clay, Jr., helped to drill his regiment in Louisville. His decision to join the fight in Mexico was complicated, but it essentially distilled to several essential and inescapable motives. He had lacked purpose ever since Julia’s death, and his return to his military commission at this moment offered not only direction but meaning to what had become an aimless life unfulfilled by legal briefs, unsuccessful runs for Congress, or dithering about in the state legislature at Frankfort. True enough, he volunteered in defiance of his father’s wishes—the only time he had ever disregarded his father’s wishes about an important matter—but in that defiance he was ironically adhering to the most basic lesson learned from his father: the love of country expressed not just in words but deeds. So he donned a uniform and spent the scant days before he and his men left for Zachary Taylor’s army teaching them the rudiments of army life. He showed them how to fight as a unit and how to behave like soldiers, things he had learned at West Point years earlier but had never practiced himself in the field.
In June, the Kentucky volunteers began departing from Louisville by steamboat, first to Memphis, then overland to Little Rock, Arkansas, and on from there through Texas to the Rio Grande. They followed Taylor’s tracks into Mexico to swell his army along with the legions of volunteers from other states.77 Henry managed to write often because Taylor’s invasion was uneventful after a victory at Monterrey in September, a fight the Kentucky volunteers had missed while making their way overland. By early 1847, Taylor had moved his army farther south from Monterrey, camping it some twenty miles south of Saltillo at Agua Nueva, about a hundred miles from the Rio Grande. There it had little to do but drill and get into trouble, the small number of regulars doing most of the former and the volunteers almost all of the latter. Henry assured his father that reports about undisciplined antics by the 2nd Kentucky, especially its unbridled drunkenness, were exaggerated. It was true, he admitted, that his immediate superior, Colonel William R. McKee, could be lax with the men and drank himself, sometimes to excess. But everyone was bored, and Henry found himself in the unenviable position of taking up the slack with the regiment. He longed for the carefree life of a private, but mostly “for a battle that it may have an end.”78
The prospect for a decisive engagement seemed less likely because Taylor’s army was shrinking. In fact, it was already a greatly changed force by the time the Kentucky volunteers joined it. President Polk was angry about Taylor’s handling of the victory at Monterrey—the general had made a bargain that allowed defeated Mexican forces to retreat unmolested—and he was troubled that Taylor’s growing popularity would make him a political enemy with influence. The president decided to redirect operations in Mexico by stopping Taylor’s campaign and promoting another invasion led by Winfield Scott, who would land at Vera Cruz and march from there on Mexico City. Scott’s operation drew off all available men, including those in Taylor’s army, who were being sent to join the new American force assembling at Tampico. “Taylor is very sore about late proceedings in Washington,” Henry observed at Agua Nueva. “He was not mentioned in the President’s message and has been supplanted in command by Scott in a very cavalier manner.” Furthermore, Henry confided to his father, Taylor “was not free from ambition” regarding the presidency.79
Taylor was, however, lacking a force of regulars. He sat exposed in a forward position with a diminished army composed almost exclusively of untested volunteer regiments. He brooded over slights and prepared to do whatever was necessary to save a reputation obviously under attack by political forces at home. When newspapers reported that he had quarreled with his staff at Monterrey, he worked to counter the rumors, young Clay joining the effort to declare that “none but the most amiable relations have existed” between the general and his subordinates.80 Young Henry was “in bad spirits” at Agua Nueva, his father told the family, “owing to his having no prospect of active service.”81 The absence of the prospect suited the elder Clay just fine. Shortly after arriving in Mexico, Henry had injured his right arm, either by dislocating or breaking it, according to various accounts, and had been assigned to Taylor’s staff while on the mend. The news was mixed when Henry told them his health was fine and he was returning to the 2nd Kentucky, his arm still in a sling. Then in mid-February, one of his letters casually mentioned in a postscript that Santa Anna was rumored to be approaching their position with twenty thousand men.82
For a time, particularly as his son marched to join Taylor, Clay was caught up in the patriotic fervor of the war himself. On an extended visit to New Orleans at the end of 1846, he dined with the New England Society of Louisiana, where some members were preparing to embark for Scott’s expedition. “I felt half inclined to ask for some little nook or corner in the army,” Clay told the gathering, “in which I might serve in avenging the wrongs to my country.” Perhaps it was the wine that made him say this. Possibly the burst of enthusiastic applause that greeted this incredible statement prompted Clay to go on: “I have thought that I might yet be able to capture or to slay a Mexican,” he said to another appreciative ovation. The assembly loved the sentiments, and Clay basked in his customary ability to say just the right thing to the right group. His old friend Christopher Hughes, however, read about Clay’s remarks and cringed.83
HENRY JR. LEFT his two youngest children in place at Nanette Smith’s home in Lexington, but he deposited his oldest, Henry III, with James and Susan Clay, who had trouble with the boy from the start. This youngest Henry Clay had concerned his father for a long time. He took his mother’s death understandably hard and developed a withdrawn and sullen attitude that was simultaneously passive and defiant. Modern adolescents have perfected to a near science the art of facing the world with a mixture of contempt and indifference, but such behavior was novel for Henry Clay III’s time, and though everyone could understand its likely cause, everyone found it increasingly tedious. His father had tried to offer guidance, but he inevitably slipped into the habits of his own father in doing so, his words framing lectures and his approach chiding.84 Away in Mexico, he continued his efforts. “Nothing gives me more pleasure than to learn that my children are happy,” he wrote young Henry from the camp at Agua Nueva. “True happiness consists not a little in the discharge of duties.”85 The boy’s grandpapa would not have said it any differently.
Henry III was under gentle but firm instructions to mind his Uncle James and Aunt Susan, but they had their hands full with their difficult, insolent charge. “The faults which Henry Clay displays with you, he had developed at Ashland,” Clay explained to his daughter-in-law. After Julia’s death it had been impossible to take a firm hand with the grieving boy, and the result was now plainly unfortunate. Clay regretted it. “We must do the best we can with him … until his father returns, which I suppose will be next summer, when I hope he will take some decisive course with him.”86
Clay commiserated with Susan from New Orleans, where he was visiting with William Mercer, as was his custom during the winter, and this first one of the war was no different.87 He was preparing to return to Ashland when he heard that Zachary Taylor had fought a large battle and suffered heavy losses. Some reports had the casualty figures as high as two thousand men, but Clay hastened to reassure Lucretia that he doubted the fight was as big as that.88 He did have to assume, however, that whatever had taken place near Agua Nueva that February had involved Henry. There was his son’s troubling postscript, after all, about Santa Anna and tens of thousands of men.
On March 29, Clay returned to Ashland and found the farm running smoothly, in better shape actually than he had expected it to be. The weather was glorious with the air full of lovely fragrances and warmed by a soft spring sun. It was good to be home, and Clay spent the next day settling back into his routine. At midafternoon, the families gathered in Ashland’s dining room for a welcome home dinner, chattering and laughing, the children eager to hear of Grandpapa’s adventures on his trip. James entered the room, and everyone paused because he had a peculiar, drawn look. He told them the news.89
IT WOULD BE hailed as a great victory and its author, Zachary Taylor, would be lauded as a staunch patriot and stalwart soldier, the man who had faced incredible odds to hand Americans a victory as unlikely and as significant as Andrew Jackson’s at New Orleans. It would instantly make Taylor a national champion and a political prospect of the first order. Yet the fight at the hacienda of Buena Vista was a meaningless battle that Taylor had recklessly invited to happen and had bungled at its start by depending on terrain to make up for his paltry numbers. The Mexican army commanded by Antonio López de Santa Anna numbered at least twenty thousand men, likely more. Zachary Taylor did not have five thousand men. He had only one organized brigade and a motley collection of untested volunteer units. Taylor’s withdrawal to Buena Vista as the Mexicans entered Agua Nueva puzzled Santa Anna, who finally concluded that Taylor was in panicked retreat and decided to attack with his vastly superior numbers despite their fatigue from a forced march. Taylor was not in retreat. He wanted this fight to reclaim his reputation. He had deployed his men on a series of fingerlike plateaus that extended from a steep mountain face. The fifty-foot-deep arroyos that separated these plateaus made it hard for the Mexicans to mount an attack. They also made it nearly impossible for the forward units of Taylor’s army to execute a retreat.90
Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clay, Jr., and the 2nd Kentucky volunteer infantry were part of these forward positions, and when the Mexican attack began in earnest on February 23, they bore the full force of it. The fighting became confused and vicious, “the hardest fight that has been fought in Mexico,” according to one soldier. “We lost a great many officers.”91 The 2nd Kentucky soon found itself isolated when other regiments began retreating. As some four thousand Mexican lancers hurtled toward them to cut off any additional escape, the Kentuckians plunged into “a deep ravine … with rugged banks to climb.”92 Trapped, they suffered terrible casualties as Mexican artillery winnowed their ranks. Colonel McKee staggered to the ground where Mexican bayonets would finish him. Lieutenant Colonel Clay hit the ground with a serious wound too, but his men appeared out of the smoke and whistling shells to bear him up and carry him to the rear. They had gone only a short distance before a burst of Mexican grapeshot knocked three of them down dead and tore additional wounds in Henry. The noise was horrible, deafening, confusing, concussive, but Henry was shouting at his men and managed to raise his voice above the din, commanding them to leave him and save themselves. They looked at his broken body. They ran. Shortly the Mexican assault reached where he lay, and Santa Anna’s soldiers repeatedly speared him with their lances until he was lifeless.93
Americans deeper in the rear, near Buena Vista, finally stood firm, and upon them the Mexican army broke its will. As Santa Anna retreated toward Agua Nueva and from there to Mexico City, Taylor’s army gathered its dead from the barren countryside. There were no trees, so burial parties broke up wagons for makeshift coffins and crude grave markers. The Kentucky dead, Henry Clay, Jr., among them, were buried near Saltillo. One of Henry’s comrades snipped a lock of his hair and sent it to Ashland with the assurance that Henry would not be left in Mexico. When the war was over, he would be brought home for burial.94
It was only one of many letters that began to arrive at Ashland “from every quarter, in every form, and in the most touching and feeling manner,” Zachary Taylor wrote from Agua Nueva.95 “He gave every assurance that in the hour of need I could lean with confidence upon his support,” he said, professing that “to your son I felt bound by the strongest ties of private regard.”96 The many expressions of sympathy helped a bit, but not much, especially when detailed reports of Henry’s last minutes reached Ashland. “We have been tortured,” Clay said, “by account after account, coming to us, as to the manner of his death, and the possible outrages committed upon his body, by the enemy, whilst he had temporary possession of it.”97
In the weeks that followed, Clay pondered the solace that Lucretia found in her faith. The compassionate attention from the Christ Church congregation and the kind words of the Reverend Berkeley were surely supportive, as were the comforting rituals of worship. But for Lucretia there was obviously more to it than that. She was both devastated and at peace, blasted by grief and placidly reconciled to it, salved by a spiritual grace that was mysterious and appealing, a fortress of faith, a gift. For years Clay had wondered at Lucretia’s resilience as it was repeatedly tested by tragedy, but after this latest calamity he suddenly wanted sanctuary in that fortress too. From within it he might better bear the memories of the dead daughters, the slain son, even see without tears the crooked back and awkward gait of brave little Lucy, her twisted spine no longer a mockery but part of a meaningful plan in which suffering and sorrow cloaked something else, something glorious, everlasting.
Clay had never been irreligious, but he had avoided joining a church, even Lucretia’s, which he had helped found forty years earlier. Yet he had always believed in a higher power, and he often explained times of baffling hardship as the work of a benign Providence. Confronting tragedy or disappointment, he sought solace and meaning by studying theological works and occasionally queried clerics about sin and salvation. A prominent Methodist minister recalled that Clay had been “a good deal concerned on the subject of personal, experimental religion.”98 Besides the fact that Clay was nearing the end of his life, Henry’s death gave him even greater reason to see meaning and comfort in a formal declaration of faith. Sincerity was crucial to his entering any church. Clay was raised in a Baptist home, his father a preacher and his mother devout, and a staple of their religious belief was that an insincere conversion was a grievous sin. It stained with pretense a powerfully private matter between God and man, usually for base public effect. Clay could have joined a church dozens of times over the years when it would have done him political good, but he could never bring himself to wear in his soul that stain. His actions after Henry’s death were heartfelt in the truest sense, and even writers inclined to view his behavior with skepticism do not think his embrace of Christ Church at this critical moment in his life was anything but genuine.99
On June 22, 1847, the Reverend Berkeley read the ritual of baptism in the parlor at Ashland, dipping his hands into an enormous cut-glass vase to flick the consecrated water onto Henry Clay’s brow.100 Lucretia looked on as her husband laid aside the prayer book to respond to the ritual from memory—he had been studying. Mary Mentelle Clay and her children joined him in receiving the sacrament, their knees also bent and bodies bowed, the huge portrait of Washington and his family forming the backdrop for Clay and his family as they entered the community of Christ. Two weeks later, Clay received communion at the Chapel of Transylvania University for the first time, Lucretia with him, her mighty fortress large enough to shelter all the world, but for now enough to shelter her family, particularly for her two Henrys, for the son who had perished so far from home and for the husband next to her, a gift.101
On Tuesday, July 20, Clay took Henry III, Nannie, and Tommy to Frankfort to join the twenty thousand people who had gathered for the burial of Kentucky’s fallen heroes, among them his son, their father, who had all been brought home by Kentucky’s emissaries. The ceremonies included a speech by John C. Breckinridge, a service by the Reverend John H. Brown, a 21-gun salute, and an impressive tribute by the Masons. But all of this was eclipsed by what happened after the caskets were lowered into the ground. The surviving Kentucky volunteers formed behind Colonel Humphrey Marshall and marched slowly by the graves, not to a dirge or a muffled drum, but in absolute, mesmerizing silence, an unplanned, impulsive, unexpected homage. Inspired by the scene, twenty-seven-year-old Theodore O’Hara, himself among those volunteers, penned a requiem he entitled “The Bivouac of the Dead,” a poem that achieved such widespread fame that it would be etched into monuments years later to honor the dead of another war, one that Henry Clay dreaded as much as he loathed the one that had killed his boy.102
Despite the comfort of his faith, Clay remained bitter about a war he excoriated as “calamitous, as well as unjust and unnecessary.”103 And despite his firm belief that God could heal the wound of his loss, he suddenly found Ashland’s blossoming glories profoundly depressing. Everything about it was “associated with the memory of the lost one. The very trees which his hands assisted me to plant, served to remind me of my loss.”104 He could not bear it. Four days after the funeral in Frankfort, he fled his home for White Sulphur Springs with plans to travel on to Cape May with William Mercer.105 Lucretia remained at Ashland, of course, as did his other sons and their families. Clay salved his wound with prayer, but he ultimately resorted to his habit of travel as therapy.
His poor troubled grandchildren had suffered terrible, indescribable tragedies in the deaths of their mother and now their father. Under the terms of Henry Jr.’s will, which he had prudently drafted just weeks after leaving Louisville on the way to Mexico, he made official and permanent his informal arrangements for those children: Nannie and Tommy remained with Nanette Smith, in whom he reposed “much confidence and love” with good reason, for the two Clay children embraced this kind, smiling guardian and called her mother; James was to raise Henry III.106 Nannie wept over her father’s memory and explained best how they could all make their way. “Yes we have lost our dear Father,” she told her brother. “Now we are poor little orphans indeed and must love one another with all our hearts.”107 Nannie was only nine. Her grandpapa at seventy would not have said it any differently.