“The Best & Almost Only True Friend”
CLAY LEFT WASHINGTON on August 5 and that evening arrived in Philadelphia, where citizens “shouted him, hurrahed him, and made him address the multitude, sorely against his inclination.”1 Two days later he was on his way to Newport via steamboat. A large, cheering crowd greeted his arrival in New York City, and as he tried to board the Empire State at Pier 3, authorities had to control the surging multitude before he could reach his stateroom. Late that night, he arrived in Newport, and the next day he was honored at a reception in Bellevue House. The journey had the look of a triumphal tour. Clearly nobody blamed Clay for the failure of the Omnibus. “Clay has come out more nobly than ever,” Robert C. Winthrop, who had filled Webster’s Senate seat, observed, “and has evidently proved that his courage is of the sort that mounts with the occasion.”2
Because Clay remained in Newport for most of August, it was easy to conclude that he had nothing to do with the ultimate success of the Compromise of 1850.3 True enough, during Clay’s absence from Washington, Democrats led by Stephen A. Douglas broke the Omnibus into its separate parts and relied on shifting majorities to pass the individual bills.4 And it was also true that the bills Clay cobbled together during the spring and early summer had already been formulated by Douglas’s Committee on Territories. In addition, by making the passage of one dependent on the passage of all, Clay had simply adopted Foote’s plan. He abandoned his earlier insistence on Mexican law and agreed to popular sovereignty, a Democrat prescription for nonintervention. Taken in sum, such an evaluation reduces Clay’s role to a secondary one at best; and considering the apparent mistake of pushing the Omnibus, which failed, rather than pursuing Douglas’s successful strategy of securing its components’ individual passage, Clay actually posed an obstacle to resolving the crisis. From that perspective, Clay failed to grasp the situation because he was too old or too ambitious or too egotistical or too out of touch. Worse, he was too stubborn to admit it.5
But all such criticisms stem from hindsight and treat the tactics that were ultimately successful as part of an obvious strategy. Those criticisms ignore the paralysis that greeted Douglas’s initial attempts to bring his bills to a vote in the previous Congress. They ignore the passions that turned debates into shouting matches, impeded the election of a Speaker, and increasingly isolated the president from his own party. When Clay visited Webster and then introduced his resolutions at the start of 1850, Congress was adrift. Clay gave it direction. For the next six months, his speeches on the floor and his careful maneuvers between hostile camps and seemingly irreconcilable factions kept the idea of compromise alive during dark days that saw an elder statesman’s death, a pistol drawn in the Senate chamber, and a dagger pointed at the heart of the Union. Clay’s Omnibus failed, but Clay’s idea of compromise did not. He was persuasive in ways that others could never match.
An incident in New York illustrated the unique power of his personality. The celebrated Mathew Brady asked him to sit for a photograph. Clay found this new, fascinating method of portraiture so much more convenient than tediously posing for a painter that he readily agreed. But he was in a hurry, and special arrangements had to be made to accommodate his schedule. The sitting was to take place during a break at a public reception in City Hall. The chief of police gained permission to tack up curtains in the Governor’s Room, and the photographer set up his bulky camera. Because he was about to receive a delegation of ladies, Clay was well dressed in a satin stock and standing collar, and he was pleased that the room was quiet, for the corridors were packed with noisy crowds. Just as he prepared to pose, however, a throng of officials bustled into the room for their lunch break. The hubbub that arose when they spotted the famous visitor created a distraction sure to ruin the photograph. Suddenly, Clay raised his hand. The room immediately fell silent. He then rested his clasped hands in his lap and stared into the camera’s uncovered lens. The seconds ticked by as the crowd remained perfectly still. As soon as the lens was covered and Clay stood, everyone broke into prolonged applause, a tribute to the man who could command instant silence with a wave of his hand.6
The people of Clay’s time knew the truth of it back then. When news of the breakthrough on the compromise reached Newport, it only increased his celebrity. He attracted crowds on the beach when he ventured into the surf, and his walks on the resort’s streets were met with spontaneous applause peppered with shouted hurrahs. He came back to Washington on August 27 to an enthusiastic greeting from fellow senators.7 Stephen Douglas perceived what had happened through a partisan lens. “I must say,” he noted, “that if Mr Clays name had not been associated with the Bills they would have passed long ago.” He thought that Taylor had been jealous of Clay and that some Democrats did not want Clay to receive credit for the compromise. A contrasting figure in every way physically, Douglas stood almost a foot shorter than the old man; he was swarthy to Clay’s gray pallor, and stout to Clay’s slimness. Douglas was already “the Little Giant” to supporters, and his ego could match any man’s, including Henry Clay’s. But he gave the Whig devil his due: “let it always be said of old Hal that he fought a glorious and patriotic battle. No man was ever governed by higher & purer motives.”8
Everyone’s vision was limited in the gathering night of America’s struggle over slavery. The compromise that passed in 1850 was deeply flawed in many ways. It did not accomplish a single one of its objectives except for admitting a free California. Slaves continued to be bought and sold in the capital because of loopholes. The complicated $10 million payoff to Texas to adjust the New Mexican border was never delivered to the state in a meaningful way. New Mexico and Utah’s organization under popular sovereignty did not benefit the South. And the Fugitive Slave Law proved impossible to enforce as northern states thwarted it with personal liberty laws.
Just how blind the politicians of 1850 were to the real mood of the North was made most apparent by the Fugitive Slave Law. They had never thought it was anything more than a sop to southern extremists. The law, however, became the compromise’s linchpin as southerners insisted that its enforcement was crucial to their continuance in the Union. Northern objections to it consequently raised anew the specter of southern secession, and Clay joined others in signing a congressional petition calling for its enforcement, in itself a gesture that highlighted the law’s futility.9 Any sense of political finality for this overarching moral controversy was illusory. Stephen Douglas informed the Senate just before Christmas that he had “determined never to make another speech on the slavery question,” as though ignoring it would quiet the clamor. Such an attitude raised the question of just who was really blind to reality as the American dream gradually edged toward nightmare.10
By the time the Little Giant uttered his absurd statement, Clay had gone home. He had been heartened during the summer to hear that Lucretia was healthy and “enjoying more of society than she had been accustomed to.”11 He was eager to see her. When he arrived in Lexington on October 22, a large crowd escorted him to the Phoenix Hotel. What had once been Postlethwaite’s Tavern was the site of many triumphant returns to Kentucky for Clay over the years, and the assembled citizens intended to make it yet another in gratitude for Clay’s saving the country. His speech was brief, though, and after he assured the gathering that the Union was safe, he cut short his remarks. He stretched his hand toward Ashland. “But there lives an old lady about a mile and a half from here,” he said, “whom I would rather see than any of you.”12
Everyone laughed. Henry Clay was not joking.
CLAY WAS VERY proud of James, although his son’s diplomatic mission to Portugal had ended in failure. Taylor’s secretary of state, John Clayton, had sent the young man on the impossible errand of resolving a quarrel with the Portuguese that had been in dispute since the War of 1812. The disagreement had perplexed more experienced men than James, and Clay fretted, when he was not popping vest buttons with pride, hopeful that James had at last found his way. He hovered too, admonishing James to master French and scrutinizing his dispatches, which Clayton obligingly made available. Clay corrected their grammar and recommended that James soften their tone. Susan was receptive to the advice, even enrolling herself and the children in the French lessons along with James and dutifully reporting on everyone’s progress. But James soon bristled. He was trying very hard to follow Clayton’s instructions and live up to his father’s expectations, but he found the Portuguese rude and dismissive. He thought that Clayton was behaving “as though cracked or drunk” and that his father was meddling—which he was, even covertly negotiating with the Portuguese consul general in Washington and asking British minister Henry Bulwer to lend assistance as well.13
Clayton had told James to take a threatening tone in order to break the deadlock with the Portuguese, and by the spring of 1850 a naval vessel was on the way to Lisbon to collect him. His instructions were to demand a final answer and if disappointed to ask for his passport.14 All of this was unfolding as Clay labored to maintain good relations with the Taylor administration while preparing his committee’s compromise report, and some have suggested that only after it was apparent that James’s mission had failed did Clay break with the administration. There is, however, no evidence for this conclusion, and the concurrence of the two events was apparently coincidental.15
James was defensive about how things had played out in Lisbon. By the time Taylor died and Webster replaced Clayton at State, James and his family were heading home by way of London. Fillmore and Webster had nothing but praise for him, and Clay tried to help bring about a successful close of the Portuguese claims that could include James, even considering the possibility of his son’s negotiating an agreement upon his return to Washington. Despite the peculiarity of someone other than the secretary of state concluding a diplomatic convention on American soil, Webster was not opposed to the idea, though Clay insisted that both his and James’s wishes should be “entirely subordinate to convenience, and the public interest.”16 Time and distance thwarted Clay’s plan and Webster’s gesture, however, and James was not back in time to participate in the resolution of the dispute.
Clay meant well, but his constant suggestions, guidance, and tendency to hover irritated James in Lisbon just as they had in Lexington. As his son returned to America, Clay tried to help yet again, this time by selling James’s house and finding him a better place to live. He conducted the transaction with James’s consent, but the sale of the house was bungled to James’s financial disadvantage, and Clay could not find a suitable replacement. He considered selling Ashland to James, but timing and finances quashed those plans. James moved his family to Missouri in 1851, settling near St. Louis, where he reported to his father that Thomas Hart Benton was befriending him. The information mildly wounded Clay, the implication being that Benton was a more competent mentor, and he warned that unless James became a Benton supporter, the young man and Old Bullion would not long be friends.17
Possibly James wanted to wound his father, but in only months, the young man’s real sentiments were revealed when it became apparent that Clay was dying. James wrote to his mother a heartfelt admission: “He has been to me the best of fathers, and in losing him, I shall also lose the best & almost only true friend I have ever had.”18
AFTER HIS STRENUOUS labors of the previous month, Clay was so persistently ill in the fall of 1850 that he feared death was near.19 The weeks at Newport had not restored him as before, and he returned to Ashland exhausted and worried. Little rest awaited him in the days that followed, for Kentucky intended to celebrate his role in the compromise. Even before he left Washington, Lexington was planning a barbecue, and Clay supplied a list of dignitaries as well as all the state’s representatives and senators to invite.20 On the appointed day, an enormous crowd gathered at the fairgrounds to listen to speeches and feast on succulent meats that had turned for hours over glowing pits.
When Clay arrived, a great cheer erupted, and everyone flocked to the stand to hear him, but it appeared that the weather was going to disappoint everyone as inky clouds darkened the scene. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled louder as the storm let loose a downpour. Not a soul moved. They all stood in the drenching rain, staring at the speaker’s stand, and when Clay finally mounted it, their cheers mingled with the booming thunder. Holding an umbrella over Clay, Governor Thomas Metcalfe stood uncovered, his long white hair tousled by wind and matted by rain. Clay tried to stop after fifteen minutes but gave in to cries of “Go on! Go on!” When he shouted, “If you can stand it, God knows that I can,” the cheer that rose in response was so deafening it bested the thunder. And by the time Clay finished forty-five minutes later, the sun was out. As the crowd headed to the pulled pork, everyone realized that they had seen something remarkable and heard in that voice itself something memorable, regardless of its message or meaning. The message now was always the same: Union forever, the country saved by reason and conciliation, and both abolitionism and secession condemned.21
Great anticipation surrounded Clay’s appearance before the Kentucky legislature on November 15. Almost a half century had passed since he first entered that body as a freshman legislator to begin his public career, and its invitation touched him as much as any tribute ever had. He spoke at length about the state of the country and expressed optimism that the cooperation between Democrats and Whigs in the recent crisis marked a trend rather than a temporary circumstance. The speech revealed profound changes in Clay’s political sentiments about the place of party in the country’s increasingly fragile scheme of things. He evinced little affection for the Whigs, and praised the Democrats for behaving with high patriotism in the recent crisis. He plainly announced that the moment the Whig Party took up abolitionism, he would cease to be affiliated with it. Alarmed by agitation over the Fugitive Slave Law, he believed that it could lead only to the creation of two parties, one for the Union and one against it. He would cast his lot with the Union Party.22
For his entire career, Clay had worked to earn the respect of his colleagues, but at the end of it, he was more interested in their affection. All ambition, he declared, all aspiration was in his past. “I want no place whatever,” he said, and then paused. “I beg pardon, sir, there is one place only which I desire, and that is a warm place in your hearts.”23
He finally had that wish granted, even among long-standing foes, at least for that afternoon. The members on the floor and the spectators in the galleries were on their feet applauding. Women wept. Men did too.
CLAY RETURNED TO Washington at the end of 1850 in time to attend Jenny Lind’s capital concert on December 16. The renowned “Swedish Nightingale” had charmed audiences in the Northeast. Her tour was sponsored by the tireless promoter and occasional humbug artist Phineas T. Barnum, but everything about Miss Lind was genuine, especially her talent. Clay sat with Webster at the performance, and though Webster afterward met the singer with an elaborate show of gallantry, it was Clay she wanted to see. She arranged to hear him argue a case before the Supreme Court and found his voice in speech as captivating as the world found hers in song. Clay called on her to pay his respects, and the newspapers delighted in the fact that the celebrities had been in the same room, a mutual admiration society of two.24
Within weeks of his return, though, these happy scenes gave way to increasing concerns about his declining health. The “perpetual cold” had become more than an irritation. It was alarming. He coughed all the time, suffering especially violent fits at night. “Expectoration is tough and difficult,” he complained, “and what distresses me is that Nature seems less & less competent to carry them off, or to resist them.”25 Then an incident in the Senate suggested that impaired respiratory function was beginning to affect his mind. On February 11, a bill to help states care for the indigent insane was under discussion. The proposal was to grant a portion of the public lands to fund asylums. Clay praised the benevolent purpose but was concerned, he said, about placing so much of the public domain in the hands of one person. The remark caused everyone to pause, first in bewilderment and then in uncomfortable embarrassment. Either Clay had not read the bill or he had misunderstood its details. James Pearce patiently explained that the states, not a cabinet secretary, would be responsible for the grants, and Clay fumbled over a confession that he had not studied the matter carefully and would like to do so. It was more than awkward. For one thing, everyone knew about Theodore. And for another, it was obvious that Clay had slipped a mental cog over the simplest of proposals.26
Clay was also more impatient with adversaries about petty as well as significant matters. Regarding the latter, it became increasingly apparent to him that sustaining the Fugitive Slave Law was crucial to harmony in the Union, and he was irritated by those who treated southern anger about the issue casually. When New England caviled over the law, and it was suggested in the Senate that its modification or even its repeal should be debated, he exploded. Congress had debated and deliberated and decided this question just months before, he cried, and it was absurd to reopen it now under the threat of violent resistance to the law’s enforcement.27 He was just as vehement in his denunciation of southern hotheads. “Secession is treason,” he said plainly. It should not, could not, be tolerated. He was adamant that if South Carolina seceded for any reason, the state should be quickly brought to heel. Only through such decisive action could the country survive.28
Colleagues who had noticed Clay’s worsening health finally approached him. George W. Jones of Iowa later claimed to have suggested a trip to Cuba to relieve Clay’s respiratory symptoms, but Clay had tried to go to Cuba five years earlier, possibly when he detected the first signs of tuberculosis, to follow close upon the example of his consumptive grandson Martin Duralde. That trip had not worked out, and it is evidence of Clay’s growing alarm over his condition that he resolved to visit Cuba now, if for no other reason than to go home by way of the Caribbean and avoid mountains and rivers in a raw March. It would delay his return to Lucretia at Ashland, but that could not be helped.29
As February gave way to March, though, Fillmore called an extra session of the Senate to confirm his appointments and attend to other executive matters. Clay expected that the boat bound for Cuba would leave New York before adjournment. “It is perhaps of not much importance,” he concluded, “as in any event, I cannot live a great deal longer.”30 He and his servant, James Marshall, took the trouble to acquire a passport, though, in those days simply a letter describing its bearer and including an official signature. Clay was thus marked as seventy-three years old, six feet tall, with a “high” forehead, blue eyes, a large nose, a wide mouth, his hair “grey,” his complexion “fair.” Secretary of State Daniel Webster signed the document.31
Clay hurried to New York and was happy to discover that the Cuba packet had not yet steamed after all. Following a farewell dinner and a ball at the recently rebuilt Niblo’s Garden near Prince Street on Broadway, he left on the Georgia to arrive in Havana on March 17. The next day he wrote to Lucretia, “I have not yet seen much of this island, but enough to see that it is different from any thing I had ever before seen,” and for the next three weeks, he enjoyed himself as much as his health would allow and saw as much as his waning stamina permitted.32
But the Cuban sojourn did him little physical good and, if anything, made him the worse for wear. When he arrived in New Orleans from Havana on April 5, he went into virtual seclusion at William Mercer’s house on Canal Street. He declined to attend a public meeting in his honor, and friends had to disperse a crowd that gathered outside Mercer’s expecting Clay to speak. On April 11, he left for Louisville, “very anxious once more to be at home,” and arrived at Ashland on April 20, exhausted. “I think I shall not be tempted to leave it again,” he said. At least the journey had been inexpensive. Clay had reached such a level of fame that people no longer let him pay for things.33 In fact, when he looked into purchasing a cemetery plot that spring, John Lutz, the mathematics professor at Transylvania University who laid out Lexington Cemetery, arranged to assign him lots 37, 38, 54, and 55 in Section I. Lutz would take no money. They were a gift.34
In the weeks that followed, the simplest exertions, even writing letters, fatigued him.35 On May 9, he began a letter to James but could manage only a few lines before putting down his pen and resorting to dictation. He always complained now about the debilitating cough. His physician, Benjamin W. Dudley, was either incompetent or an artful liar, for he told Clay that the cough was the result of a digestive disorder and that his lungs were not affected. “Be that as it may,” Clay said, “I must get rid of the cough or it will dispose of me.”36
Lucretia and John encouraged him to go on little outings, thinking that the time on horseback would be good exercise, and though the trips tired him, he did as they wished. Old memories beckoned, and he fought back weariness to visit nearby places he held in fond recollection. In May he returned to Peyton Short’s old home, “Greenfield,” where years earlier he and Short had regularly talked into the wee hours over libations after spending the day in the Versailles court. Short had been dead for a quarter century, and Clay found nothing of Greenfield remaining from the old days. He was unsentimental about such things and rejected the idea of properties becoming shrines to dead former owners.37
In the second week of July, Clay made arrangements to dispose of his property as he drafted his last will and testament. In addition to arranging for the gradual emancipation of his slaves, he provided for the distribution of his possessions and the care of his family. He left almost everything to Lucretia and instructed that her wants as well as needs were to be fulfilled, either at Ashland or elsewhere, at her wish. He was generous with his sons as well as the grandchildren. He gave to his son “the Mansfield house” that he had built for Thomas and Mary and forgave his considerable debts while leaving him $5,000. He gave John two hundred prime acres of Ashland, an interest in the horses, and several slaves. He provided for Theodore’s maintenance with $600 per year, and stipulated that if Theodore ever recovered his senses, he was to receive $10,000 from the sale of Ashland after Lucretia’s death. He set up a trust for Thomas and James, and bequeathed $7,500 to the Erwin children and an equal amount to Henry Jr.’s children. He distributed small but important mementoes: a pin containing a lock of Henry Jr.’s hair went to Henry III, William Mercer was to receive a snuffbox that had belonged to Peter the Great, a ring containing the famous splinter from George Washington’s coffin went to a friend, and Lucy would be given a gold and diamond ring.38
Accomplishing the task marked an important admission, but he had always been careful to keep his affairs tidy. With the will drafted and his burial place settled, everything at last seemed in order. Yet that fall, Clay thought of something else. He had his mother’s body moved from Woodford County, where she had been buried since her death in 1829. Her new grave was one of the gift lots, 38 in Section I, in Lexington Cemetery, and Clay had a marker erected that paid “tribute to her many domestic virtues,” a gesture “prompted by the filial affection and veneration of one of her grateful sons—H. Clay.”39
Friends surveyed the political landscape of the upcoming presidential election and talked of another Clay candidacy, but he was frank and resolute. He was old, he said, and he now freely admitted that his health was quite bad. Not only was the matter simply out of the question, the prospect held no appeal for him. He was certain it would be the Democrats’ year, and he preferred Lewis Cass over Buchanan, who was neither honest nor sincere, in Clay’s opinion. Webster was in the running for the Whigs, of course, but Winfield Scott seemed the favorite, another military man, and Clay preferred Cass over Scott as well.40 He would never run again, Clay said, making clear at last that he really meant it. “I have not time, nor is it of any consequence,” he wearily told one unflagging supporter, “to enter into a consideration of what has brought me to this conclusion.”41
Clay informed his old friend William Mercer that he was trying “all the old womens [sic] remedies,” but he was realistic. “My feelings indicate that the machine is nearly worn out,” he said, “and that not one screw but several are out of place.” Consumption still carried a stigma, and Clay was careful to say that his lungs were sound, but anyone who heard his cough and breathless wheezing had to doubt that. His enjoyments had fallen away one by one, his appetites were mainly memories, and his ties to life were all but broken. Neither he nor his friends could doubt that he had only a few more months. They indulged his little fictions.42
The horseback rides came to a stop, another of his pleasures passing away. James was sorry “to hear that Pa has got no better,” for he had hoped that riding would improve things.43 As fall came and October passed, the routines of the farm and household continued apace. The weather stayed warm enough to delay hog killing and required Ashland to buy extra bacon. Mary Watkins, Clay’s niece by his half brother John, arrived for an extended visit, but despite the bustle of the impending harvest and the cheerful company in the house, he grew restless. He had forced himself to be sensible, but something in the air, something in the smell of autumn compelled him to defy the dwindling days and lengthening shadows. “My political life is ended,” he conceded, “but I wish once more, and for the last time, to visit Washington.” He weighed his time in that warm autumn and wondered, How long? “I hesitate,” he said, “for I do not like to go there to be brought back!”44
Finally he decided to risk it, a decision that prompted criticism then and since for the seeming desertion of his aged wife during what he must have known were his final days. Soon after Clay’s departure, Susan worried about her mother-in-law and wistfully contemplated her as lonely and neglected by her children. “They will never fully appreciate her goodness,” she confided to her sister-in-law Mary. At least, not until her kind heart stopped and finally revealed, in absence, the great void it had filled for all of them. Susan paused over the possibility of vexing Thomas, but she spoke her mind anyway: all of the boys had always been “spoiled children.”45
Although later observers would attribute his return to Washington to unstinting egotism, unabated ambition, and a desire to die on the national stage in order to become the center of the spectacle sure to ensue, nobody in the family seems to have objected to Clay’s decision to leave Ashland that last November of his life. “We all ought to try and make him as happy as we can” was James’s sentiment, one shared by everyone close to Henry Clay.46 In addition, he was still a member of the Senate and wished “to exert any possible usefulness left to him.”47 He also had a commission to argue cases before the Supreme Court in the January 1852 session, a task that could fatten the estate’s coffers with handsome fees.
Clay left Ashland on November 15 accompanied by a slave (possibly a servant) named Thornton, whom Clay sent home after boarding the Allegheny Belle at Maysville. As the sternwheeler churned toward Pittsburgh, Clay met a young New Yorker named Edwin Bryant who cheerfully took upon himself the task of looking after his famous but feeble traveling companion. Clay welcomed the help. Nothing ever dimmed his persistent faith in the goodness of people. He never ceased to believe that given the chance, people were inclined to behave decently.48 Bryant was genuinely friendly, and a good thing that he was too, for Clay began coughing up a good deal of blood while vainly dosing himself with alum water. Clay reported his progress to Lucretia and aimed to put her at ease with the description of young Bryant as “very kind and attentive.”49 It was snowing on them as they rattled toward Maryland through the mountains, and a hard chill had settled in on the capital when they arrived there on November 23. Clay croaked his farewells to Bryant, who left for New York on his way to California, and settled into his old rooms at the National Hotel.50
On December 1, Clay limped into the Senate chamber, a shocking, frail ghost, and tried to participate in a dispute between Stephen Mallory and David Yulee about whose credentials were legitimate for Florida’s Senate seat. Clay took Mallory’s part in a short speech often interrupted by his racking cough, and he was near collapse when he finished. He made his way back to his rooms and wrote to Lucretia that he had attended the Senate, the beginning of his valiant but transparent effort to portray his circumstances in the best light possible.51 It had not gone well at all, though. Clay fully intended to return to the Senate, but he never did. He blamed the blustery weather for keeping him in his rooms, and then he simply ceased mentioning the Senate altogether.52
Webster came to see him and was solicitous, taking special pains to praise James for his work in Portugal. President Fillmore sent an invitation for a private dinner at the White House, but Clay apologized that he was too weak to make the short trip up Pennsylvania Avenue. Fillmore refused to stand on ceremony. He came to see Clay right away and made a point of visiting him when he could, obviously a gesture of veneration but also because quiet, unassuming Millard Fillmore knew what it was like to be alone and cheerless.53
Clay’s weight loss was now rapid and alarming. He had no appetite, and he confided that he very much regretted leaving Ashland. “My utmost wish,” he said, “is to live to return.”54 To that end, he called in the best medical talent available. Dr. William W. Hall, a young specialist in throat and lung diseases, was soon joined by Dr. Samuel Jackson of Philadelphia, who observed Clay for two days. After poking, prodding, and consulting, they made their diagnosis, which Clay reported to Lucretia as acute bronchitis. Yet such a conclusion was highly unlikely, and Clay was evidently telling a soothing lie to his wife while keeping the grave confirmation of his actual illness to himself. Even years later, the Clay family would embrace this false information as fact, which attests to the continuing shame of tuberculosis as a presumed consequence of dissolute living. On the letter to Lucretia, someone (possibly Susan) later wrote, “it was bronchitis, not consumption.”55
Clay knew much more than what he revealed to family at Ashland. On December 17, 1851, he resigned from the Senate effective the first Monday of September 1852.56 Also, he told the artist John Neagle that his unsuccessful efforts to sell his full-length portrait of Clay to the Kentucky legislature would likely have a better prospect “when an event shall occur in regard to myself which cannot be very distant.”57
Family in Kentucky knew he was gravely ill and were understandably worried. Thomas and Mary said they would come to Washington to look after him, but Clay continued to insist that it was unnecessary. He gave the same response to nearby friends, as when the novelist and Whig politician John P. Kennedy offered him a room in his home in Baltimore.58
CHRISTMAS AND NEW Year’s came, and Clay planned to venture from his rooms for the first time in weeks. If he could argue at least two cases before the Supreme Court, he would receive his fees, but in the first week of January he was too ill to appear and had to secure the services of other lawyers, splitting the fees with them.59
Despite his fatigue, he agreed to meet the Hungarian separatist Louis Kossuth, who had come to the United States in an American frigate as an exile and commenced a tour to plead his country’s case for independence from Austria. Regular Americans and government officials showered him with acclaim, treating him to banquets and turning out in droves to hear him speak. Kossuth was impressed by Clay’s reputation as a champion of Latin American and Greek independence so many years before, and he seems to have been under the impression that Clay’s influence could further his country’s cause with Americans. He had been angling for an interview for weeks. The meeting finally took place in the early afternoon of January 9 in Clay’s rooms. Clay was quite feeble, but he had dressed for the occasion and rose haltingly to greet his visitor, who arrived with an escort that included Lewis Cass and Thomas Ewing. Clay spoke admiringly of Kossuth and expressed sympathy with the troubles of his country, especially its victimization by Austrian oppression and Russian intervention, but he also insisted that neutrality was and always should be the bulwark of U.S. foreign policy.60
Clay was distressed by press accounts that described his health as rapidly failing and asserted “that one lung is almost entirely destroyed by rapidly progressing abscesses, and the other already gives indication of the incipient states of the disease.”61 He had explicitly stated to Lucretia and Mary that the family was not to believe newspaper reports about his condition, and in the wake of these latest stories, he took the time to write a fairly lengthy description of his circumstances with the best gloss he could manage. “If there be any change,” he lied, “perhaps it is for the better.”62
Meanwhile, a special tribute arranged by Whigs in New York helped alleviate winter’s gloom. They were having a large gold medal cast in Clay’s honor. Made from the purest California ore and mounted in a silver case, the medal featured his profile on its face and a list of his major accomplishments on its obverse. He was deeply touched and had provided the milestones: his first Speakership, the War of 1812, the Ghent peace, Missouri, the distribution of the public domain, preserving peace with France in 1835, and the Compromise of 1850.63
Clay wryly noted that he had nearly “emptied an apothecary’s shop,” but even a nightly opiate did not bring sleep. He spent his days in his rooms reading and occasionally answering letters, almost always now through dictation. When the cold abated a bit in February, he ventured out, but only a couple of times. Climbing the stairs to his upper-floor suite after a ride in a closed carriage so wore him out that he abandoned that pastime as well and thereafter never again left his rooms. In bed by eight, he did not rise until ten. His doctor came every day and streams of visitors appeared, but most were turned away. He could sit up only about seven hours a day.64
Clay hoped to gain enough strength to return to Ashland in late May or early June. When the time came, he planned to send for Thomas to accompany him. In late April, he told his son it would be best for him to leave for Washington in a few weeks.65 In the days that followed, however, Clay’s strength swiftly ebbed, and he became alarmed enough to amend his instructions to Thomas by telegram, a sure sign of urgency, calling for him to come as soon as he could.66
“I write to nobody in my hand writing, but to you,” he told Lucretia. It must have taken him a long time to write this letter, for it was a laborious effort that produced his characteristically firm penmanship. The letter in its physical appearance gave no evidence that anything was wrong, but it was the last one he wrote to his wife of fifty-three years, a whispered promise that she alone at the end merited the immense effort of his pen touching paper, and in that respect it was a love letter.67 At Ashland, as Thomas left for the capital, Lucretia retreated more into herself. She had to dismiss her gardener for drunkenness and did not replace him, as an economy, and Clay worried that she was overworking herself and scrimping on her needs.68 James and Susan worried about her as well. “We wish you would make some one write to us occasionally about yourself,” James entreated her from Missouri. “Months pass without our hearing of you & we think of you very often.”69
When Thomas arrived in Washington on May 5, his father’s appearance shocked him. The day before, Clay had experienced a crisis so serious that Senate chaplain Charles M. Butler had administered the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Clay was extremely weak but alert enough to press his hands together in prayer and spread them in supplication. James Marshall was convinced that his employer was dying, but Butler’s service seemed to revive him. Nonetheless, Thomas noted that his father was no longer merely gaunt but had become a wraith. He could speak for only a few minutes before the effort left him spent. The cough that had interrupted his sentences now disrupted words by the syllable. He no longer had the strength to walk and had to be carried from his bed to the couch in the parlor. Yet Thomas’s arrival was a tonic, and for a few days Clay rallied. The opiates began to work, giving him a few comfortable nights, and Thomas even became cautiously optimistic. His father was “very feeble,” he admitted, “but is not so much reduced in flesh as I had supposed before I came on here.” Thomas added hopefully, “His lungs are not at all affected.”70
Visitors continued to come to the National Hotel, but only a select few friends entered Room 32 in those dwindling days. There had been a few touching reconciliations. Francis Preston Blair had made his peace with Clay, and along with Martin Van Buren he helped to smooth the progress of an understanding between Thomas Hart Benton and Clay. Van Buren sent Blair a portion of Benton’s memoir, Thirty Years’ View, which discounted entirely the idea of the Corrupt Bargain ever having occurred. The admission, coming after all these years, was significant, and Blair told Clay about it “with the warm feelings of earlier days.” The long shadow finally lifted. “Mr. Clay was deeply moved,” Van Buren recalled.71
He was similarly touched by a gesture from Blair’s wife, who had been slower to forgive Clay for breaking with her husband so many years before, even snubbing him on the floor of the Senate just months earlier. As the seriousness of his illness became apparent, Eliza Blair organized and led a circle of ladies to keep him company and attend to his wants during the final days. The soft voices and attentive care meant a lot to him, and Mrs. Blair’s offer of a room at her house on Pennsylvania Avenue where she could administer nonstop “Kentucky nursing” made him cry.72
And then there was John J. Crittenden. For several years, friends had tried to restore the good feelings of old, but the bitterness persisted. Clay suspected that Crittenden had continued to block his patronage recommendations, and Kentucky factions attached to the two remained wary of each other. The previous year, Washington hostess Julia Tayloe had invited Crittenden to dine with Clay at her house by playfully quoting Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona: “Oh Heaven! were man but constant, he were perfect; that one error Fills him with faults.” But the invitation came when Clay was already on his way to New York to catch the packet to Cuba. Crittenden also might have noted what was surely unintended irony in Mrs. Tayloe’s dispatching her message on March 15, the Ides.73
Thomas said that in the first week of that last June, his father asked to see Crittenden. Their subsequent visit on June 6 presumably allowed them to settle their differences, as just days later, Clay referred to Crittenden and himself as “cordial friends.” Thomas, however, noticed that Clay was “much depressed.” Yet his father also told him that everyone had been mistaken, that Crittenden had not behaved dishonorably in 1848. Thomas said Clay implored him not to hold anything against his old, newfound friend. There was certainly a visit—Thomas was there to witness it—and evidence surfaced years later that suggested Clay had heard defenses of Crittenden and had mellowed about their differences as early as 1850.74 Yet James always doubted that his father ever forgave John J. Crittenden. After Clay’s death, James arrived at Ashland to await the arrival of the funeral party and found on Clay’s desk a copy of the angry letter he had persuaded his father not to publish in 1848. Clay had apparently been reviewing it just before leaving for Washington in November, suggesting to James that the wounds from Crittenden’s betrayal had not healed and were in fact still fresh. Possibly both James and Thomas were correct: Clay might have been assessing this enormously important event of his life as he prepared for his journey. Yet once in Washington and aware of his rapidly approaching end, perhaps he decided it was pointless to leave the breach unmended. The former feeling would have been perfectly natural for any deeply wronged man, and the latter action would have been perfectly in character for Henry Clay.
When he found the letter at Ashland, James saw little point in its message. He burned it.75
BY THE TIME of Crittenden’s visit, Thomas’s optimism was ebbing. In only a few days, it vanished. Those allowed into the rooms found Henry Clay to be slowly disappearing, his deep voice reduced to a raspy whisper, the volume and violence of the cough terrifying. The entire city of Washington listened for news, expecting at any time to hear the worst. One of his congressional colleagues wrote to a friend that they all knew that Clay would die soon and lamented, “oh what a man will fall, when he falls,” and observed that now that he was almost dead, “all men of all parties speak of him as ‘the noblest Roman of them all.’”76 Strangers continued to send him gifts or to bring them in person to leave at the hotel desk. These were often luscious treats for which he had no appetite. Yet it was truly the thought behind these presents that counted for Clay. He always said to Thomas when a new package arrived, “Was there ever a man who had such friends?” And he made certain that Thomas sent thank-you notes to everyone for even the slightest remembrance. “In the letter be kind,” he instructed, “be very kind.”77
The thermometer rose into the nineties, and the humidity rising from Washington’s surrounding swamps made it seem even hotter. By mid-June, Clay was in a very bad way, profusely perspiring from the heat as well as his fever. His doctor rubbed him down from head to toe with brandy and alum. He pulled Thomas aside and told him that his father could not last much longer. “He now never gets out of bed,” Thomas recorded in his diary.78
One of his last acts, and evidently the last document signed by Henry Clay, was to tie up a final loose end. James Marshall had given him a deed for a lot in Detroit as security for endorsing a note. Clay now noted that Marshall had paid everything he owed. He had overpaid, in fact, by two dollars. Clay wanted to make sure that the deed, which he had placed in a little trunk in Lucretia’s room at Ashland, would be handed over to his servant, who as his companion had become his friend.79
The doctor tried to alleviate his patient’s growing distress with larger doses of the opiate, and in late June, Clay began to hallucinate. He saw his mother. He saw Lucretia. “My dear wife,” he murmured.80 Finally he stopped eating altogether, and Thomas sadly noted that “taking even a single swallow of water is painful to him.”81
On the morning of June 29, Clay asked James Marshall to shave him, but it was not long before something had clearly changed. James summoned Thomas. Clay looked up through watery eyes. “Sit near me, my dear son,” he said. Thomas placed a chair next to the bed. “I do not wish you to leave me for any time today,” his father whispered.
At ten o’clock, he asked Thomas for some cool water, but as he drank, his mind wandered. The silver tube he used for a straw remained dangling in his lips when the cup was taken away, and he had trouble swallowing. “I believe, my son, I am going,” he mumbled. Thomas watched his father labor for breath. Clay whispered a request for Thomas to “button his shirt collar.” He always liked things neat.
Thomas buttoned the collar, but as he withdrew his hand, Clay shakily grasped it and silently held it. Thomas sent for Senator James C. Jones, who had a room just above, and he soon joined Thomas and James at the bedside. Clay’s eyes were closed, and his grip on Thomas’s hand gradually relaxed. It was seventeen minutes past eleven.82
Before the clocks struck noon, Washington’s church bells began to toll, a signal to the capital that it was over. The telegraph sent the news across the country, and soon the bells began to ring in cities and towns from the Atlantic coast to the deep interior. Thomas sent one of those first telegrams to Lexington: “My father is no more. He has passed without pain into eternity.”83 At Ashland, Lucretia received the hard news she had been expecting for months.
The bells in Lexington were already ringing.