A History of the American People

This second tradition, upheld for so long by the Virginia patricians, the Washingtons and
Madisons, now fell firmly into the capable hands of a man from the new West, Kentucky's Henry
Clay. Henry Clay is a key figure in the period 1815-50, who three times averted complete
breakdown between North and South by his political skills. He was also a man of extraordinary
energy and ability, perhaps the ablest man, next to Calhoun, who never quite managed to become
president of the United States-though, God knows, he tried hard enough. Clay was from Virginia,
as American as they came. The Clays got to Jamestown in 1613 (from Wales) and Clay was fifth
generation. His mother was third generation. Clay was born in 1777, to a Baptist preacher and
tobacco farmer with a 464-acre homestead and twenty-one slaves in the low-lying marshlands or
Slashes. His father hated the British, especially Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who ravaged the area,
and they hated him: it was Clay's story that redcoats desecrated his father's grave, looking for
treasure. When he was four his father died, and Clay inherited two slaves from him (and one
from his grandfather). So he owned slaves until his death in 1852 but called slavery a great evil,' imposed byour ancestors,' and that it was against the Constitution, which, in his opinion,
extended equality to blacks as an abstract principle.' If, he said, America could start all over again, slavery would never be admitted. Clay's desperate attempts to hold the balance within the Union on slavery made him a particular favorite of Abraham Lincoln, who, during his famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas, quoted Clay forty-one times.' It was Clay's fate to be born to and live with extraordinary personal tragedy. Of his eight sisters and brothers, only two survived childhood and his widowed mother was an embittered woman in consequence. So was his wife, Lucretia Hart. Of their eleven children, two, Henrietta and Laura, died in infancy, Eliza at twelve, Lucretia at fourteen, Susan at twenty, Anne at twenty-eight; the eldest son, Theodore, spent most of his life in a lunatic asylum, and the second, Thomas, became an alcoholic; the third, Henry Jr, a brilliant graduate of West Point, in whom Clay put all his hopes, was killed in the Mexican War. Clay regarded his background as poverty- stricken and for political purposes exaggerated it. He said he was aself-made man,' a term he
invented, an orphan who never recognised a father's smile ... I inherited [nothing but] infancy, ignorance and indigence.' He regretted to the end of his days that he never learned Latin and Greek-'I always relied too much on the resources of my genius' (Clay was not a conspicuously modest man). On the other hand, Clay had beautiful handwriting and, after working as an errand boy and drugstore clerk, he went to work in the Virginia Chancellery under the great George Wythe, who had trained Jefferson, Monroe, and Marshall. Wythe turned Clay into a capable lawyer and a polished gentleman. So Clay got into Richmond society, where he broke hearts and made enemies as well as connections.' But Virginia swarmed with underemployed lawyers, so Clay went to Kentucky to make his fortune. The dark and bloody ground' was an Indian name for Kentucky, but it fitted the origins of this
border state. Settlers there were described as blue beards, who are rugged, dirty, brawling, browbeating monsters, six feet high, whose vocation is robbing, drinking, fighting and terrifying every peaceable man in the community.' Clay was six feet too and could fight with the best of them. He was slender, graceful, but ugly:Henry's face was a compromise put together by a
committee' and was distinguished by an enormously wide mouth, like a slash. He used this
mouth often, to eat and drink prodigiously, to shape his superbly soft, melodic, caressing voice,
and to do an extraordinary amount of kissing. As he put it, Kissing is like the presidency, it is not to be sought and not to be declined.' His opponents said his prodigiously wide mouth allowed him an unfair advantage:the ample dimensions of his kissing apparatus enabled him completely
to rest one side of it while the other was on active duty.’ If women had had the vote Clay would