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Henry Clay, Part Two

Champion of the Union

Henry Clay had the attractive appearance and charisma of a national hero, but the depth of feeling for him derived from the realization that he restored calm and peace of mind in three dangerous crises that threatened the Union. This set him apart as the leader who met the deepest need of the people—he was their Moses who led them from the abyss of Civil War into continued peace and prosperity. When he died, Americans identified with him as the symbol of the American eagle, the Genius of Liberty, and the champion of Union-saving compromises. The identification was so complete that people could hardly accept his death. Over and over, throughout the nation, eulogies and tributes began with the same words—“Henry Clay is dead!”—as if the fact was too foreboding to accept.¹

Kentucky played a role in the development of Clay's approach to slavery and states' rights, and his leadership was the greatest influence shaping the attitude of Kentuckians toward slavery, the Union, and the Civil War and its aftermath. Clay gave Kentucky its long heritage of firm support of the Union and compromise between the North and the South, and most Kentuckians agreed with him that legislation on slavery was strictly a state prerogative. However, Kentuckians followed Clay only halfway on slavery; they used his necessary-evil doctrine as practical justification to support their opposition to his plan of gradual emancipation with colonization.

Kentuckians helped Clay find the middle ground of compromise between the sections, and most Kentuckians enthusiastically supported his long championship of the Union in that era of rising sectionalism. In one of the most courageous acts of his life, at the age of twenty-one, he wrote a letter to the Kentucky Statesman proposing that Kentucky should free its slaves. He used the appropriate pen name of Scaevola, the legendary hero of ancient Rome who was captured by the enemy and sentenced to be burned. Scaevola held his hand over his execution fire until it burned off, and this self-sacrificing bravery led the invading king to make peace—the Romans were saved. “All America acknowledges the existence of slavery to be an evil,” Clay declared, “which while it deprives the slave of the best gift of heaven, in the end injures the master too, by laying waste his lands, enabling him to live indolently, and thus contracting all the vices generated by a state of idleness. If it be this enormous evil, the sooner we attempt its destruction the better.” Kentucky was creating a new constitution, and now was the time, he wrote, to destroy the evil institution.²

The letter created such a tempest among Bluegrass slave owners that Clay must have felt that he had placed his hand in the fire like Scaevola. The slave owners dominating Lexington society told him that Kentucky could not adopt immediate emancipation because it would lead to race war and anarchy. Realizing that he must moderate his plan, young Clay wrote a second Scaevola letter that recommended gradual emancipation with training for the freed slaves. At that point, he was moving toward the middle ground on the issue—slavery was evil but necessary to maintain public safety, including the safety of African Americans—unless freed slaves could be educated or transported outside the United States, where they would be safe and live in freedom with human dignity. Basic to the position that Clay adopted was the doctrine that each state had a right under the Constitution to legislate on slave property within the state; the federal government had no authority to abolish slavery.³

Thus, his position, formulated in Kentucky early in his life in an effort to free Kentucky's slaves, placed Clay firmly in the middle, and there he consistently remained the rest of his life. Almost fifty years later, when delegates were being elected to the 1849 state constitutional convention, he wrote a published letter to Kentuckians in which he stated that slavery was evil and should be abolished under a plan of colonization. Slave owners in the Lower South agreed with the necessary-evil position until Nat Turner's 1831 revolt, and then they changed to the positive-good theory that slavery was good for slaves as well as masters. Henry Clay led Kentucky in never making the change; Kentucky held firmly to the necessary-evil position, as historian Harold D. Tallant wrote.⁴

Abolitionists thought that the Kentucky necessary-evil defense meant that the state might lead the South in abolishing slavery, but Kentuckians placed emphasis on the necessity of maintaining order and turned Clay's necessary-evil position against his proposals for gradual emancipation. Tallant pointed out that, in attacking slavery as evil, the necessary-evil doctrine freed Kentuckians from guilt and sanctioned the status quo. The constitution of 1799 did not provide for emancipation as Clay proposed, and the constitution of 1850 strengthened slavery rather than authorizing gradual emancipation.⁵

Clay owned no slaves in 1799 but had three in 1800; later, he purchased and owned slaves for house-and farmwork at Ashland. Robert Remini concluded that Clay believed that he could not compete in Kentucky agriculture without slaves. In agreement with his fellow Virginia native Thomas Jefferson, he regarded African Americans as human beings with the gift of reason who deserved freedom. However, he also agreed with Jefferson's racist assumption that differences between blacks and whites meant that the two could never live together in the same society. Clay said that, when abolitionists advocated immediate emancipation, they only made slavery worse for the slaves, giving them false hope, and causing them to resist, which led to punishment and restrictions. Responding to abolitionist petitions to Congress, he said in a Senate speech on February 7, 1839, that he was no friend of slavery but that, if Congress enacted emancipation, it would violate states' rights, subvert the Union, and end in the loss of liberty for both blacks and whites. Ultra-abolitionists, he said, were on a “mad and fatal course” that threatened “to deluge our country in blood.” In a letter of September 2, 1843, he wrote that abolitionist agitation would “destroy all harmony, and finally lead to disunion,” and that disunion would result in “perpetual war—the extinction of the African race—ultimate military despotism.”⁶

The answer was the colonization by freed blacks of Africa, which Clay said was “humane, religious and patriotic.”⁷ He joined the American Colonization Society and served as president. From our point of view, Clay's ideas are inhumane and racist, but, from his point of view, he went all the way for freedom and equal opportunity for African Americans. He wanted the blacks of his generation to live in a society free of discrimination, and he could not envision that goal in the United States. He did not foresee the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and, even if he had, it would have seemed a terribly long time to wait. Before the Civil War, Lincoln and many other Americans agreed with Clay that colonization was the only way African American slaves could enjoy immediate freedom, safety, and equal opportunity.

When Clay was an undeclared candidate for the presidential election of 1848, he presented an important speech at a mass Whig Party meeting in Lexington on November 13, 1847, addressing the issues of the Mexican War and slavery. Among those in the audience was Abraham Lincoln, recently elected as a Whig representative from Illinois, who was in Lexington to visit his wife Mary's family. The Wilmot Proviso prohibiting slavery in any territory that might be acquired from Mexico was in the news, and, knowing that Clay opposed the war, people listened intently for his opinion on this difficult question. He did not mention the proviso but condemned the war as one of “offensive aggression,” unlike the War of 1812, which was in defense of national honor and rights. Addressing claims that Southerners supported the war to acquire slave territory, he said: “I have ever regarded slavery as a great evil, a wrong, for the present, I fear, an irremediable wrong to its unfortunate victims. I should rejoice if not a single slave breathed the air or was within the limits of our country.” However, he continued, the slaves were here, and each state had the right to decide whether slavery would continue. He pointed out that nearly fifty years ago he had proposed gradual emancipation of educated slaves when they reached the age of twenty-eight, but he said that he believed that immediate emancipation proposed by abolitionists would result in a race war and “the extinction or expulsion of the blacks.” He proposed a series of resolutions that included praise for the American soldiers and their commanders in Mexico, and one of the resolutions came close to addressing the Wilmot Proviso. He proposed that the citizens in the meeting resolve that the United States had no desire to acquire territory for the purpose of propagating slavery.⁸

The speech was transmitted on the recently opened telegraph and was published in newspapers. Former slave Frederick Douglass read it in Rochester, New York, and published an editorial reply in his abolitionist newspaper the North Star on December 3, 1847. He declared that the Whig editors who were claiming that Clay was in favor of the Wilmot Proviso were wrong. Actually, the resolution was nothing but “a pettifogging quibble” that failed to oppose slavery in the territories—Clay was “the same old coon.” In the same issue, he published a lengthy letter to Clay, identifying himself as “one of those ‘unfortunate victims’” and “one of the unhappy millions enduring the evils of Slavery, in this otherwise highly favored and glorious land.” He thanked Clay for pledging that acquiring slave territory was not the intent of the war and replied to his position on slavery point by point. He argued that there was no evidence in history that immediate emancipation would lead to race war and challenged Clay as a Christian: “Emancipate your own slaves. Leave them not to be held or sold by others. Leave them free as the Father of his country left his, and let your name go down to posterity, as his came down to us, a slaveholder, to be sure, but a repentant one. Make the noble resolve, that so far as you are personally concerned, ‘AMERICA SHALL BE FREE.’” About three and a half years later, on July 10, 1851, Clay filed his last will and testament; rather than following Douglass's recommendation, he remained consistent with his public position on slavery. He freed all children of his female slaves born after January 1, 1850: males when they reached twenty-eight and females at twenty-five. These slaves were to be educated and, during the last three years of their bondage, were to be paid wages for their journey to Africa. The children of the female slaves who were scheduled for freedom were to be free at birth and apprenticed in a trade before leaving for Africa.⁹

Most Kentuckians approved that Clay upheld property rights and defended the Union from both abolitionists and proslavery proponents. William Conrad, who owned a few slaves in Grant County, agreed that slavery was evil and believed that freed blacks would be unable to make a living if emancipated without education and training. He endorsed the American Colonization Society and its goal of purchasing slaves and transporting them to Liberia. After Clay died, he wrote: “Mr. Clay saved the union and our dear old government from earlier dissolution with the compromises he achieved through miracles of oratory given to him by Almighty God.”¹⁰

His necessary-evil position on slavery placed Clay in the middle on the issue of the extension of slavery into the western territories and enabled him to create compromises without violating his principles. After most slave owners adopted the positive-good argument, he disagreed but firmly supported the right of the states to enact laws on slavery. Throughout, he opposed abolitionists, and he considered ultra positions on both sides dangerous to the Union. He was speaker of the House when the first great crisis came over Missouri's petition to enter the Union as a slave state. This would extend slavery north in the Louisiana Purchase territory and break the balance in the Senate between the eleven slave states and the eleven free states. The debate in Congress was angry and passionate, and the American people realized that the Union was in danger. “A sullen gloom hung over the nation,” Lincoln recalled. When Maine applied for admission as a free state, Clay realized that compromise was possible. He pushed through legislation admitting Missouri and Maine and providing that, except for Missouri, slavery would be prohibited in the Louisiana Territory north of 36° 30' latitude. Americans sighed with relief, and the crisis seemed to be over, but then a second question arose and threatened to destroy the compromise. Missouri's proposed constitution required the state legislature to pass a law forbidding free blacks from entering the state. Both the North and the South again threatened disunion, and Americans were more worried than ever. Clay crafted the second Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri with its constitution intact on condition that the state legislature would not prohibit any individual from living there who was or might have become a citizen of another state. Clay's brave and accomplished work dispelled the sectional excitement and saved the Union in 1820, earning him the honorific sobriquet Great Pacificator. Lincoln declared that, after 1820, the people regarded Clay as “the man for a crisis.”¹¹

When the next great sectional crisis came in 1832 with South Carolina's nullification of the tariff acts of 1828 and 1832, Clay realized that both the Union and the American System were threatened. President Andrew Jackson proclaimed that disunion was treason, recommended lowering tariffs, and threatened to send troops to South Carolina to collect tariff revenue. “Disunion by armed force is treason,” he warned. Clay prevented civil war again by introducing and supporting the compromise tariff of 1833 that gradually lowered tariff duties and ended the crisis. On the day the compromise tariff passed, Clay told a reporter that it was the proudest day of his life. He was pleased to have the support of Kentucky. Governor John Breathitt delivered a speech to the state legislature warning South Carolina that Kentucky did not approve of the disruption of the Union that Kentuckians had helped create. “She cannot,” he said, “consent that her treasure and her blood shall have been expended in vain—she cannot consent that her sister state shall give to our children waters of bitterness to drink.” The legislature responded with resolutions condemning South Carolina for threatening disunion and civil war.¹²

Clay's friends believed that, when he led as the great compromiser in 1820 and 1833, he made enemies and lost support in both the North and the South. They believed that his saving the Union cost him votes as a presidential nominee. On the other hand, his opponents accused him of being motivated by ambition for the White House—once again, his status as a hero was a two-edged sword. It was the same when he championed freedom and independence in Greece and Latin America; his opponents successfully tainted his motives with selfish political ambition. As a spokesman for world freedom, he made several eloquent and emotional speeches in Congress that were widely published and brought him international recognition. In 1824, there was widespread enthusiasm in the United States in support of the Greek revolution against the Turks, and Clay moved out in front of public opinion with a speech in the House in favor of a resolution authorizing the president to recognize Greece's independence when it seemed appropriate. Clay's friends supported him enthusiastically, but one of his House opponents spoke for many when he accused Clay of ambitiously riding the whirlwind of “Greek fever.”¹³

For several years, Clay rode the wave of popular sentiment for recognition of the Latin American republics in their revolutions against Spain. They revolted during the Napoleonic Wars, and Clay spoke for Kentucky when he advocated early recognition. The Kentucky General Assembly passed a resolution in favor in 1818, about four years before the Monroe administration acted. On March 24, 1818, Clay demanded that the United States support “18,000,000 fellow-Americans struggling to burst their chains and be free.” He continued speaking and pressing for recognition, and this campaign made him the number one symbol of the advance of freedom in the world. General Simon Bolivar, the great liberator, had some of Clay's speeches translated and read to armies in Latin America, and the men responded with “universal shouts of applause.” In 1921, when a delegation from Venezuela, Bolivar's birthplace, unveiled a statue of Bolivar in New York City, they traveled to Lexington and on May 6, 1921, laid a bronze wreath at Clay's tomb. However, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams believed that Clay's motive was simply political ambition.¹⁴

Then, Clay's work to bring about the Compromise of 1850 removed the stain of ambition. Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire said in his eulogy of Clay in the Senate that his support of independence in Latin America and Greece was his greatest legacy.¹⁵ When Clay left retirement and returned to Washington on December 1, 1849, to serve again in the Senate, he was seventy-two years old, and in the eyes of the American public he had earned a peaceful retirement at Ashland. Even his most bitter opponents admitted that his ambition for the White House was gone, that he was now motivated by patriotism. The Union was in grave danger again, and his presence and influence as a crisis manager were greatly needed. President Zachary Taylor demanded that Congress admit California as a free state, and southern congressmen declared that, if that happened, their states would secede. It took three weeks to elect a House speaker, and fistfights broke out in the House. Taylor said that, if the South seceded, he would personally lead the army into the region and capture and hang any traitors he found. On January 29, 1850, Clay wrote and presented a series of resolutions that eventually became the Compromise of 1850.¹⁶

Today, it is difficult to appreciate the difficulty of Clay's monumental achievement or how deeply the American people loved him for it. He had to call on all the energy he could muster, and, even with his powerful presence, international reputation, and lengthy experience in congressional leadership as speaker of the House, to succeed he required assistance. Public opinion at the time gave him all the credit for the compromise, but, as Holman Hamilton and others have pointed out, the assistance of the man who was a close friend of Clay in his dying months, the young Democrat Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, was vital in achieving the enactment of the eight separate laws. As far as the people were concerned, Clay's key contribution was his famous two-day speech on February 5 and 6, 1850, entreating Congress to save the Union. This was not his last speech in the Senate, but Charles Roland called it his valedictory. His words echoed in the American memory for the next ten years and into the Civil War. On the first day, he had a cold; needing help to walk up the Capitol steps, he asked a friend, “Will you lend me your arm?” The speech lasted four hours and forty-five minutes, and he had to pause several times to catch his breath. He pleaded with both sides to make concessions; near the end of the second day, he held up a fragment of wood reputed to be part of George Washington's coffin and asked his colleagues to save the republic that Washington sacrificed to create. He warned that dissolution of the Union would result in a bloody civil war and that out of the destruction a tyrant would arise and extinguish liberty. “I conjure gentlemen…solemnly to pause…at the edge of the precipice, before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken into the yawning abyss below.”¹⁷

It was very strenuous work—standing in the breach with harsh emotions directed against him from both sides—and it lasted for months. On July 22, 1850, now seventy-three years old, he delivered a speech in favor of the omnibus bill that contained all the provisions of the compromise. The audience loudly applauded his emotional appeal to nationalism and patriotism, and at one point Senator Robert Barnwell of South Carolina interrupted and accused Clay of showing disrespect to Robert Barnwell Rhett, who had been making speeches for secession. Clay replied that, if Rhett proceeded to act on his secessionist rhetoric, he would be a traitor and that he hoped he would meet the fate of a traitor. The audience in the galleries applauded and shouted their approval.¹⁸

Clay concluded with a statement that the Union was more important than states' rights. “If Kentucky to-morrow unfurls the banner of resistance unjustly,” he said, “I will never fight under that banner. I owe a paramount allegiance to the whole Union—a subordinate one to my own State.” If Kentucky called him, he said, “to support her in any cause which is unjust to the Union, never, never will I engage with her in such a cause.” Kentuckians agreed with Clay's statement and fully supported his efforts for compromise. When the crisis began, his friend John J. Crittenden was governor, and Crittenden avowed that the state would be “the last spot” where Union would become unfashionable and that dissolution of the Union would be “the greatest evil that can befall us.” One of the threats hanging over Congress was the Nashville Convention held that summer. Defenders of slavery encouraged delegates from the slave states to meet and unite against what many Southerners considered aggressive forces rising in the North. The Kentucky state legislature voted three to one against sending delegates and, to emphasize their Unionism, had engraved on the block of marble sent to Washington for the Washington Monument the words “Under the auspices of Heaven and the precepts of Washington, Kentucky will be the last to give up the Union.”¹⁹

The omnibus bill failed, and Douglas worked quietly and behind the scenes to push through Clay's compromise in separate bills. He said in a private letter on August 3, 1850: “Let it always be said of old Hal that he fought a glorious & a patriotic battle. No man was ever governed by higher & purer motives.” Even before the crisis ended, Clay was heralded. For example, on his seventy-third birthday, on April 12, 1850, the Marine Band serenaded him at his hotel. After the compromise passed, according to Robert Remini: “Newspapers everywhere now treated him like a second father of his country, above party, above faction, above sectional rivalry. Old political foes readily forgave him for his past ‘sins' and errors.” In his eulogy of Clay in the Senate, John C. Breckinridge said that, after 1850, the former party measures and passions were forgotten and that the American people weaved for him “the laurel wreath, with common hands,” and sent him, “crowned, to history.” The eagle had taken flight, and he would soar high above his enemies the rest of his life.²⁰

From September 28 to October 2, Clay traveled to Lexington on the railroad, and all along the way people shook his hand and thanked him. He arrived in Lexington at dusk on Wednesday, October 2, and his friends welcomed him with bonfires, fireworks, cannon fire, and ringing of church bells. A large crowd stood outside the Phoenix Hotel, and, when he stepped down from his carriage, they gave three cheers. He went into the hotel and gave a brief speech from the balcony. With a clear, strong voice, he congratulated them for their support of the Union and concluded with a statement that was not only romantic but also pure, informal “Kentuckian.” Pointing toward Ashland, he said: “There lives an old lady about a mile and a half from here, with whom I have lived for more than fifty years, whom I would rather see than any of you.”²¹

Clay believed that the only way to avoid civil war was to support the permanence of the Compromise of 1850, and he worked for that for the remainder of his public life. On October 17, 1850, he attended a free barbecue at the fairgrounds in Lexington that had the goal of uniting local Whigs and Democrats for the Union. The invitation praised him for his role in the compromise and celebrated the fact that public admiration now placed him “above and beyond” political party differences. Thousands of people attended, and Democrat John C. Breckinridge gave the principal address. Clay responded that he hoped leaders would preserve the compromise and that the people would silence the extremists and preserve the peace. Members of the General Assembly embraced this new spirit of unity and voted unanimously, Democrats and Whigs, to invite Clay to address them. When he spoke to them in Frankfort in November, he praised Democrats for supporting the compromise. “I want no office, no station in the gift of man,” he said, except “a warm place in your hearts.”²²

He returned to Washington in December 1850 and reported that he had a severe cold, but, unknown to him and his Lexington physician, Benjamin W. Dudley, he had tuberculosis, then called consumption. On January 21, 1851, he attended the annual meeting of the American Colonization Society in Washington and as president stated in a speech that he still believed that white prejudice against blacks meant that “they can never be incorporated” and should be sent to Africa. During the congressional session, he worried about northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act and southern talk of secession. He asked both sides in Congress to fully support the compromise. Leaving Washington on March 10, 1851, he visited Cuba for his cough and returned through New Orleans. He arrived in Lexington on April 20, 1851, and, even though he was seventy-four and coughing up blood, Dr. Dudley said that he did not have consumption. On May 26, he attempted to purchase a grave plot in the newly opened Lexington Cemetery, but John Lutz, the engineer and professor of mathematics at Transylvania University who designed the cemetery, gave him four lots. In July, he wrote his last will and testament, giving Ashland to Lucretia except for two hundred acres that he willed to son John.²³

That fall he made national news when the leaders of Union rallies in several states invited him to attend. In his letters of regret, he applauded the meetings and promoted the compromise. One of the many newspapers that published and lauded these letters was the Lexington Observer and Reporter, which called Clay's reply to the New York invitation “Mr. Clay's great Union letter.” The Democratic Frankfort Yeoman commented on the same letter: “Age may have weakened his body and bowed his frame; but it has not to any perceivable extent impaired his mind. He gives the Northern factionalists some hard thrusts, in a quiet and dignified way.”²⁴

No one could blame him for not attending the Union rallies, and certainly nobody could have blamed him if he had resigned from the Senate and stayed in Lexington when Congress convened on December 1, 1851. But his decision to cross the mountains and support the compromise in one more session had as dramatic an impact on the creation of the Clay legend as something in the plot of a romantic novel. His return to Washington provided him a hero's death—he died in the national limelight—on duty, a member of the U.S. Senate keeping a watchful eye on the Union, and far away from his beloved Lucretia, children, and grandchildren. He arrived on November 23, 1851, and checked into room 32 of the National Hotel. He attended the Senate on opening day and gave a brief speech, but the trip had weakened him, and he was unable to continue. Within a few months, the people of the country knew he was dying, and they followed his death-watch in the newspapers.²⁵

For the first few months of his confinement, during good weather he would take rides around the city in a closed carriage, and newspaper readers were aware that many friends visited him in his room. On February 9, 1852, a delegation of his friends from New York City called to present him a gold medal recognizing the accomplishments of his career. It was made of California gold, and on the front was his image and on the back a list of his accomplishments, including the American System and the three compromises. The medal had a silver case decorated with engravings of the U.S. Capitol, the Clay monument on the National Road, and Ashland.²⁶

For several years, the Clay Festival Association in New York City had been celebrating his birthday with a dinner, and they sent him an invitation to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday on April 12, 1852, at the Apollo Hotel. His letter of reply, published in the newspapers, said that he was deeply honored and grateful but that he thought the only birthday that should be celebrated every year was George Washington's. The celebration held unusual poignancy this year because Clay was dying, and over six hundred people attended. One of the toasts was to the Compromise of 1850: “It came as a trusted messenger of glad tidings, in an hour of trouble to every homestead and every heart in the Republic—cheering up with words of faithfulness and hopes of deliverance and peace. It dispelled in a moment the deepening gloom which hung upon the Union.” Clay's friend James C. Jones, a U.S. senator and former governor of Tennessee, praised Clay for rising as a boy “from the utmost obscurity of life” as the “Mill Boy of the Slashes” to win the praise of the multitudes. Where is the man, he asked, who says, “I know no East, no West, no North, no South,—but my country?” He said that Clay did not act out of ambition in the compromises but that he was “ever willing to sacrifice himself for his country and his country's honor.” “Where else,” Jones asked, “is the man, living or dead, that thrice in three-quarters of a century, had been called upon and responded to the call?” A volunteer toast proclaimed: “Kentucky—First admitted to—she has, with unsurpassed ability and bravery in the Cabinet and in the field, maintained the interest, the honor, and the glory of the Union.” Kentucky congressman Presley Ewing replied that, because of Clay, Kentucky would be the last state to leave the Union. Clay was Kentucky's proudest claim, he said, and, “if Kentucky has pursued an honorable, straight-forward policy, it is due to him.” He said he was quite surprised at the love of Clay in the hearts of the citizens of New York City.²⁷

In March, Clay's cough became more persistent, and, in May, the newspapers reported that he could no longer walk. He wrote Lucretia on the second day of April: “I wish most sincerely that I was at home with you; but unless I gain more strength, I doubt whether I could perform the journey.” On Monday morning, May 3, reporters in Washington telegraphed: “On Friday night he was much troubled with his cough, which has since increased. His end is evidently not far distant.” At 3:00 P.M. on Monday, the Washington telegraph carried the news: “Henry Clay is sinking fast, and he will not probably survive three days. His family has been sent for.” It was true, Clay had telegrammed home: “Tell Thomas to come as soon as he can.” Newspapers reported that Thomas arrived and remained with his father around the clock. Clay was cheered that the compromise seemed to be holding, and one of the last things he said before he died was that he hoped it would continue. Reporters said his last words, directed to Thomas, were, “My son, I am going; sit near me,” and they made a point of giving the exact time of death at 11:17 A.M. on Tuesday, June 29, 1852. Thomas had kept Lucretia informed, and he telegrammed her; in Lexington, the bells tolled and businesses closed.²⁸

Few Kentuckians fully realized how well Clay was loved in other states, and few appreciated the extent of national funeral pageantry in his honor. Several commentators compared it to the obsequies for George Washington, and many observed that the nation mourned like never before. Cities such as St. Louis and Rochester not included in the route of the funeral entourage escorting Clay's body to Lexington held their own funeral processions; memorial services were held in various cities for months after his burial. In Washington, as soon as word passed that he was dead, Congress adjourned, government offices and private stores closed, bells tolled, and cannon fired in three locations. The next day, Congress met in the Senate chamber for a memorial service, and President Millard Fillmore and his cabinet, Supreme Court justices, and foreign ministers were present. Senators and representatives, Whigs and Democrats, including Southerners, delivered eulogies—more than ever given before in Congress. They placed Clay's life on a pedestal as a model for the young people of the land of someone who rose to success out of obscurity, lamented that a great national hero was gone, pointed out that Clay sacrificed his health for the Union in the Compromise of 1850, and proclaimed that his only motive was pure patriotism. Clay's friend Democratic representative John C. Breckinridge said that, “while the youth of America should imitate his noble qualities,” they should realize that the same opportunities were open to them. “Mr. Clay rose,” he continued, “by the force of his own genius, unaided by power, patronage, or wealth.” Democratic senator Lewis Cass of Michigan said that Clay was “the architect of his own fortune” and “as pure a patriot as ever participated in the councils of a nation.”²⁹

The next day, Thursday, July 1, the capital observed Clay's state funeral. The young army captain Ulysses S. Grant was in town hoping to conduct business in the War Department, but everything was closed, and he wrote his wife, Julia, that everybody was at the funeral. “Mr. Clay's death produced a feeling of regret that could hardly be felt for any other man,” he stated. People gathered on the streets for the funeral procession, and the Washington Daily Telegraph said that the crowd was “immense—unprecedented! There is a peculiar stillness in the city.” At 11:00 A.M., the funeral procession began at the National Hotel and made its way to the Capitol. When the casket was brought into the Senate chamber and placed on a sarcophagus, President Fillmore and the cabinet were already there. Senate chaplain, Clement M. Butler, said in his sermon: “He was baptized in the communion of the Protestant Episcopal Church; and during his sojourn in this city, he was in full communion with Trinity Parish.” After the service, Clay's casket was moved to the Capitol Rotunda, where it remained until 3:30 P.M. Clay was the first person to lay in state in the rotunda. Then the procession went from the Capitol to the railroad station, and the coffin was placed on a funeral train draped in black. “The scene on the Avenue, in the Senate, and in the Rotunda, which will be described by a thousand pens, was the finest exhibition of the homage of a great people to a great man this country has ever witnessed,” declared the Washington Globe.³⁰

The congressional committee of arrangements designed the route to pass through New York to give the people of the eastern city that loved him most an opportunity to view his casket and pay their respects. The separate congressional committee elected to accompany the body included Senators James C. Jones of Tennessee, Lewis Cass of Michigan, and Samuel Houston of Texas. The funeral train arrived in Philadelphia after dark on Friday night, and the casket was placed under guard for the night in Independence Hall, where earlier, on the afternoon of the day he died, the Liberty Bell had tolled for him. Early the next morning, on Saturday, July 3, the doors were opened, and people filed past—Clay had the honor of laying in state in Independence Hall.³¹

At midafternoon that day, the procession arrived in New York, and, after three days of preparation, the city was eager to welcome its hero. Business was closed in the entire area, and people in Brooklyn, other boroughs, and Jersey City gathered for the day along the parade route in Manhattan. The Clay Festival Association met the steamboat bearing Clay's body at the Battery and moved his casket onto an elaborate funeral car pulled by eight white horses with black bridles and harness and black ostrich plumes. The casket was in view on the floor of the car, and on the black canopy above there were an urn and a large black-draped gilded eagle, with wings folded and head down in mourning. High above that, there was another eagle, in flight but covered with a black veil that draped toward the front and rear of the canopy below. On both sides of the car, the Washington Grays, one of the most impressive militias on the continent, marched in single file as the honor guard, and they made quite an impression with their full dress uniforms, tall beaver hats, and shouldered arms with bayonets gleaming in the sun.³²

The parade moved up Broadway and Park Row to City Hall, and the only sounds to be heard were the tolling of the church bells, the constant sound of cannon fire as artillerymen fired minute guns—cannon fired once per minute as a signal of mourning—on a revenue cutter on the Hudson River and from the Battery, Governor's Island, Jersey City, and Brooklyn Heights. Along the route, every porch, balcony, and window was overflowing with silent spectators. On a normal sunny afternoon, sunshine gleamed on the white marble fronts of businesses, but, on this day, along the procession route of four miles, every building was draped in black, as were many buildings on side streets. Long black drapes hung from the rooftops and reached to the sidewalk below. The massive granite front on the Astor House Hotel was entirely covered, windows and all. Many businesses, at considerable expense, had erected temporary funeral tableaus on the fronts of their buildings. Stewart's Marble Palace department store had a platform draped in black; on it was a large tomb with a medallion portrait of Clay. On each side of the tomb, black willows waved in the breeze; kneeling at the tomb, the Genius of Liberty was weeping, and beside her an eagle was taking flight. Several of the displays had eagles and Clay's portrait, and many buildings had banners with tributes such as: “He is dead; yet he liveth in our hearts”; “The Sage of Ashland: In memory an evergreen”; “The bright Star of the West has set”; “Henry Clay; as pure a patriot as ever stood in the Councils of the nation”; and, on the Bowery Hotel, “A great man's spirit has departed; but his name shall live forever.” Many community organizations marched in the parade, and it ran for four miles. The New York Tribune heralded the four-mile procession as the largest and most impressive the city had ever seen.³³

When Clay's body was placed in the Governor's Room in City Hall, people crowded around, and there was a great crush to enter immediately and view his casket. They were prevented, and the next day Clay's remains lay in state, an estimated 100,000 people walking past. At one point, a young man about fifteen or sixteen years old timidly approached, and in his hands he held a large, beautiful wreath of laurel, violets, and rosebuds with a white and black satin ribbon. A member of the committee accompanying the body asked if he wanted to place the wreath on Clay's casket. He said he did, and the man asked if he had seen Clay alive. “No,” he replied, “but I loved him as well as my own father and mother.”³⁴

On Monday morning, July 5, the body was placed on the steamboat Santa Claus, and, as it steamed up the Hudson to Albany, cannon boomed in every town and village. When the funeral boats arrived at Poughkeepsie, they were greeted by a flotilla of small boats crowded with a large number of people who presented bouquets of flowers to be placed on Clay's coffin. By steamboat and rail, the journey proceeded slowly, pausing to allow people to pay their respects in all the principal towns, such as Albany, Buffalo, and Cleveland. The funeral train arrived in Cincinnati at 11:00 A.M. on Thursday, July 8, and a large procession of militia, Masons, Odd Fellows, firemen, and citizens formed to conduct Clay's body to the public landing. Public offices and private businesses were closed and draped in black, and the bells tolled and minute guns fired throughout the day. The parade lasted until 1:00 P.M., when the remains were placed on the chartered mail boat Ben Franklin for Louisville.³⁵

The nine-day, twelve-hundred-mile journey was the greatest funeral pageant in American history at that point—George Washington had insisted that his body be buried at Mount Vernon, where he died. There would be nothing like it until Lincoln's body was escorted to Springfield thirteen years later. All along the way, buildings were decorated in black, shops closed, church bells rang, and cannon boomed as people gathered beside the railroad track and in throngs on the riverbank to watch in silence as Clay's body passed. Delegations in about twenty towns, including five state capitals, welcomed the funeral party with speeches and usually with a procession through the streets. The event was national news, and reporters lovingly described Clay's casket and reported the number of cars on the trains and other details. None of this was hurried, and the trip took longer than expected; in Lexington, Clay's funeral had to be postponed one day, from Friday, July 9, to Saturday, July 10, to allow time for the trip. Lexington citizens kept informed by reading the newspapers and through reports from the Lexington committee of escort they sent to Cleveland to welcome Clay's body to the West. D. C. Wickliffe, editor of the Lexington Observer and Reporter, was a member of the committee, and he said that he was overwhelmed by the hospitality the people of Ohio extended to everyone involved. “No one about here,” he wrote after he returned home, “can scarcely have an adequate conception of the appreciation in which Mr. Clay is held elsewhere.”³⁶

George Prentice was proud that Clay's remains touched Kentucky soil first in Louisville. It was about daylight on Friday, July 9, when the boat arrived at the wharf. Businesses were closed, and the buildings were shrouded in black crepe. At 10:00 A.M., the largest procession the city had ever seen marched through the principal streets and concluded at the Lexington and Louisville Railroad station. The casket was placed on an elaborately decorated funeral car and at 12:30 P.M. departed for Frankfort. Two trains followed with hundreds of Louisville citizens going to Lexington for the funeral.³⁷

The train arrived in Lexington after dark, and the congressional committee escorting the body turned the casket over to the local committee in charge. A large crowd gathered around the depot and lined the streets for the torch-lit procession to Ashland. First came a contingent of men on horseback, followed by the hearse, escorted by the Clay Guard from Cincinnati as honor guard. At Ashland, the casket was placed in Clay's study, and seventy-two-year-old Lucretia and the children, grandchildren, and other family members gathered around. The elaborately decorated coffin was metallic and shrouded in black crepe, with an evergreen wreath surrounding the nameplate and silver handles and three decorative silver plates, one over the oval-shaped glass faceplate. Once the procession left Washington, the congressional committee accompanying the body decided not to reopen the faceplate, and it was not opened in Lexington. The Clay Guard of Cincinnati served as honor guard through the night.³⁸

Clay's final funeral was held on a platform the next morning at the main entrance to Ashland. A crowd of several thousand gathered, and at 9:00 A.M. the congressional committee, the local committee of arrangements, and others arrived to visit Lucretia and the family. At 10:00 A.M., Clay's coffin was moved onto the platform and surrounded by wreaths and flower arrangements from New York, Philadelphia, and other cities. The minister who delivered the eulogy was the friend who had baptized Clay five years before, Reverend Edward F. Berkley, pastor of Christ Episcopal Church. Lucretia did not plan to go to the cemetery; this was her final farewell. Many of the people standing around the platform had known Clay all their lives, and men and women wept, with tears streaming down their faces. At the conclusion of the service, the procession began with the hearse pulled by eight white horses under the control of eight African American grooms. The hearse moved from Ashland westward along Main Street and was met at the Phoenix Hotel by a large number of dignitaries, including schoolteachers and Transylvania University faculty members, who joined the march. Everyone was silent, and there were no accidents or disturbances; the only sounds were the measured tread of the horses and the marchers and the muffled roll of drums, the tolling of church bells, and the firing of minute guns.³⁹

For several days, people had been gathering in Lexington from the surrounding area, and, by Friday night, most of the houses and the Phoenix Hotel were filled, forcing people to spend the night in the courthouse, market house, and stables and barns. Saturday morning was clear and bright. The air was still, but there was the stir of activity—on all the roads, from every direction, a continuous stream of pedestrians, equestrians, and carriages was moving into the city. By shortly after noon, when the procession toward the cemetery began, every place a person could sit or stand along Main Street was occupied. People stood next to each other on the sidewalks and intersecting streets, with children on their father's shoulders and people standing in the windows and on the housetops. Everywhere one looked there was a crowd; it was the largest number of people that had ever gathered in Lexington—a New York Times correspondent said it was “an immense turn-out.”⁴⁰

Nearly the entire city was draped in mourning. The doors of houses were closed and decorated with black crepe and evergreen wreaths. Black funeral arches connected the streets at intersections, and everywhere there were wreaths, on every column, every shutter, and every building facade; garlands were fastened to every column and shutter. The three-story brick courthouse was draped entirely in black, and across the street, on the corner of Mill and Main streets, high above the street, artists had created the most dramatic tribute to Clay as a national hero during the entire period of mourning. It was a large national flag; emerging from its center was an eagle with widespread wings, taking flight. The procession moved slowly to the cemetery, Pastor Berkley presided over a brief graveside service, and leaders of the Masonic Order placed on the coffin the Masonic apron given to Clay by Lafayette, who had worn it at the laying of the Bunker Hill monument cornerstone on June 15, 1825. Plans were under way to create a permanent monument. Clay's remains were, therefore, placed in a temporary vault, and the people quietly returned to their homes. “And never did we have more cause to be proud of our City, County and State,” concluded a Lexington journalist.⁴¹

The honor and attention given to Clay's body was phenomenal; it was remarkable how people even beyond the route of the funeral journey were moved to venerate him in death. In Concord, New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce, the Democratic presidential candidate, spoke at a public service for Clay. Covington held a public meeting at City Hall on the evening of July 3, 1852, and elected fifty-seven men to accompany Clay's body to Lexington. The gathering of citizens agreed to suspend business and ring the bells all day on July 26 and elected a committee to draft resolutions honoring Clay. One of the resolutions stated that Clay had faced bitter opposition but was now held in reverence by the entire nation. Danville agreed to close business, toll the bells, and have a memorial service on July 16. Nashville made plans to suspend business and hold funeral solemnities on Monday, July 12. Norfolk closed business and celebrated on July 21. In New Orleans, when news came of Clay's death, the courts adjourned, bells tolled, and flags were lowered to half-mast. St. Louis suspended business on July 13 and held an imposing procession. On July 23, Rochester had a record turnout for its funeral procession. On July 20, Flushing, New York, held a procession, fired minute guns, tolled the church bells, decorated buildings, lowered colors to half-mast, and held a service at the Dutch Reformed Church.⁴²

One of the themes of the mourning and eulogies was that no one was available to replace Clay the next time the Union was endangered by the issue of slavery. George Prentice wrote in his poem “Henry Clay”:

Who now, in danger's fearful hour,
When all around is wild and dark,
Shall guard with voice and arm of power,
Our freedom's consecrated ark?⁴³

William Conrad lamented: “There is no one person who can fill his place.” When Lincoln delivered his eulogy of Clay in Springfield, he read from a newspaper article that inquired as to whom the people could look for counsel. One reason for the tremendous outpouring of grief was the tragic realization that the nation still had the slavery wolf by the ears and that Clay would not be around to come to the rescue.⁴⁴

Another theme was that Clay would live on in spirit, and he did, perhaps most significantly, in Lincoln's memory. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln mentioned “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave,” reminding people of sacrifices made in the past for the Union. He probably had in mind the graves of soldiers, but he may have also meant Clay's tomb, for we know that Clay was still strong in his memory and still speaking to him from the grave. In 1858, Lincoln said that Clay was his “beau ideal of a statesman,” and, in his eulogy, he said that he identified thoroughly with Clay's love of the Union. In October 1861, when Clay's son Thomas H. Clay wrote to Lincoln asking him to appoint two of his friends as postmasters, Lincoln endorsed the letter, “For the sake of Kentucky and the memory of Henry Clay, I would like these appointments to be made as soon as possible.” Clay's youngest son, John M. Clay, sent Lincoln one of Clay's snuffboxes as a gift; it arrived on August 8, 1862. Lincoln had decided the month before to free the slaves; he would issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation almost six weeks later. The next day after receiving the gift, August 9, 1862, Lincoln wrote that he was pleased to have the memento of John's “great and patriotic father,” and he declared: “I recognize his voice, speaking as it ever spoke, for the Union, the Constitution, and the freedom of mankind.”⁴⁵

In the national public memory, Clay and Kentucky were remembered as champions of the Union, and this was, perhaps, one reason Lincoln considered it vital to keep Kentucky in the Union. Early in the war, he wrote: “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.”⁴⁶ On another occasion, he wrote: “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including surrender of this capital.”⁴⁷ Lowell Harrison was correct when he wrote in Lincoln of Kentucky that Lincoln was considering Kentucky's economic and strategic significance with its northern border on the Ohio River and with the state's rank in the 1860 census: fifth in value of livestock, eighth in number of farms, ninth in population, and fifteenth in value of products manufactured. Harrison believed that Lincoln viewed Kentucky as the bellwether of the border states, and this was correct. However, given Clay's influence on Lincoln, and given the reputation of Kentucky for Unionism, it seems likely that Lincoln was thinking also about how disheartening it would be to the North in general—not just the border states—to lose the state that had given the Union its savior in three previous crises. At about the same time as Lincoln's bellwether statement, George Prentice declared: “KENTUCKIANS! YOU CONSTITUTE TODAY THE FORLORN HOPE OF THE UNION.”⁴⁸

Clay's leadership continued as well in Kentucky's persistent defense of the Union and in the continuing use of the necessary-evil defense to resist emancipation. Kentuckians carried forward Clay's view that, under the Constitution, the national government had no authority to abolish slavery; only the states had that power. Standing in the middle as Clay had, Kentucky leaders believed that it was up to them to take up his mantle in devising compromises. Once the Whig Party collapsed and the Know-Nothing enthusiasm dissipated, the Democratic Party dominated politics in the state; most Kentuckians, regardless of party, believed strongly that the Union had to be preserved. In the 1860 election, John C. Breckinridge, as the nominee of the southern Democrats, made it clear that he abhorred disunionism. Unionist John Bell carried the state, and, in casting thirteen thousand more votes for him than for Breckinridge, Kentucky voters showed strong support for the Union.⁴⁹

When it was announced that Lincoln was elected, Kentucky organized pro-Union meetings and began working for compromise to prevent secession. On December 9, 1860, eleven days before South Carolina seceded, Governor Beriah Magoffin sent a plan of compromise to the slave states recommending the thirty-seventh parallel as the dividing line between slavery and freedom. Later, he recommended a convention of all slave states to draw up a list of demands, but he made it clear that he wanted the slave states to obey the Constitution and remain in the Union. In Washington, two days before secession began, Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden introduced in the Senate his famous compromise that included extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific coast. Vice President John C. Breckinridge and most Kentuckians supported Crittenden's compromise, and Kentucky united behind Crittenden as the new Henry Clay. The Kentucky state legislature refused to call a convention to consider secession. Five days after the war began at Fort Sumter, Crittenden proposed in a speech in Lexington that Kentucky remain consistent and stay out of the war, instead serving as a peaceful mediator between the sections. About five thousand people attended a Union meeting in Louisville on April 19 and passed resolutions for remaining in the Union to stay true to “memories of the past.”⁵⁰

Lowell Harrison's Lincoln of Kentucky details how carefully Lincoln acted to keep Kentucky in the Union, but he was disappointed when the state refused to comply with his request to lead the loyal border states in adopting compensated, voluntary emancipation. Clay's influence was very much alive in this issue as well. Kentucky still held on to the necessary-evil doctrine of Clay's recommendations and still used that doctrine to reject emancipation, as it had all along. Furthermore, Kentuckians retained Clay's belief in states' rights, and, when Lincoln used the power of the federal government to proclaim emancipation, most Kentuckians, including Unionist Kentuckians like George Prentice, opposed him. They also opposed the use of black troops in the Union army, and, chafing under Union army occupation and the arbitrary arrest of southern sympathizers, they became very anti-Lincoln and prosouthern during the war. Prentice pointed out that Kentucky was following Clay's example. On July 21, 1863, when his support of the Union but opposition to emancipation and use of black troops were well-known, Prentice mentioned in an editorial that Clay would have approved. He said that Clay would never have gone against the Union.⁵¹

It is a matter of speculation whether Clay would have joined most Kentuckians in the Civil War in turning against the Lincoln administration and voting for George McClellan in 1864. Would Clay have approved of the fact that most Kentuckians became prosouthern and, in sentiment, had seceded from the Union by the end of the war? Would his vision of national greatness in the American System have overcome his fear of immediate emancipation? Lincoln totally agreed with Clay on slavery when he delivered his eulogy of Clay, and only after it became clear that the Civil War would be long and bloody did he change his mind. Clay had the commitment and courage to oppose most of his fellow Kentuckians by twice proposing gradual emancipation, and it seems possible that, if he had lived, he might have changed his mind like Lincoln. If so, he would not have hesitated to recommend Lincoln's policies.