HENRY CLAY

(1777-1852)

ENRY CLAY was born in Hanover County, Virginia, April 12th, 1777. He was called the "Mill Boy of the Slashes" by his political admirers, but he never really felt himself a member of the class at the South which produced Crockett in Tennessee and Lincoln in Kentucky. His family was poor and his early education was defective, but his reading in law and in general literature gave him the remarkable grasp of fact which co-operated with some undefined power of controlling language melodiously, to give him his great reputation as an orator. It has been said that his power as an orator lay so largely in the musical tones of his voice that his speeches are "not worth reading," but this is a radical mistake. A few of them are dull, and in none of them is there the systematic art which marshals every idea towards a final climax. Mr. Clay's climax is as apt to come in the middle of his speech as it is anywhere else; and after it is reached, it does strain the attention to go on following him through arguments on a lower plane than that to which he himself had elevated the mind. But when this is admitted, it still remains true that his best orations and hundreds of pages of others which are not his best easily command attention and excite warm admiration. He was greater as a statesman and political manager than he was as an orator, if oratory is to be judged by those severe classical standards of which he knew nothing. But he was eloquent by nature, a man of multitudinous ideas, of what Taine calls "thronging imaginations," with a poetical sense of the beautiful and with a musician's ear for the harmonies of language. The same training as a linguist which gave Erskine his sense of the order in language might have made Clay the greatest orator of modern times. If, as Macaulay and Choate agree, that honor belongs to Edmund Burke, it is nevertheless certain that Clay will always be studied and admired as one of the greatest of those great orators whose eloquence, if it did not give them a permanent supremacy in history, made them pre-eminent in their own generations, with an influence reaching far into the generations after them.

From the Compromise of 1850 until the close of the first two decades after the Civil War, it was not possible for justice to be done the fundamental idea Clay and Webster represented in their efforts

to maintain the Union without bloodshed. Perhaps it is not possible yet, but it is no longer possible to hear Webster called a traitor to liberty in New England, or Clay denounced as a coward at the South. Both believed that there was no necessity whatever for Americans to fight each other, and that every issue it was possible to imagine could be settled better by evolution and the slow processes of intellectual and moral development than it could possibly be by force. Both held to the doctrine of nonintervention and laissez faire, by which they meant that they were bound to trust the innate good in human nature to work out reforms and to insure continuous progress without violent attempts to accelerate it. This theory grew in popularity in England and America during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, but the Crimean War impaired its influence in England - while our own Civil War so weakened it that for nearly a generation it has been too much out of the public mind to be taken into general consideration as an explanation of the course followed by Clay and Webster in what have been denounced as their compromises of principle. fact, compromise was with them a principle rather than a method. Those who hold that if the world is made freer it will become better; that they do most for progress who do most to keep the peace; that a policy of co-operation between neighboring States and countries without the "intervention" of one to correct the domestic abuses of the other, is the only mode of insuring evolutionary and steady development, necessarily believe in the continuous concessions which their theory forces, even when the question is not merely of the weakness but of the actual crimes of others beyond their jurisdiction.

The opponents of this idea in America asserted the jurisdiction of every man born into the world to interfere wherever wrong was perpetrated against weakness. "Are we not our brother's keeper?" they said, summing up their creed in the question.

The issue between two theories so antagonistic is not likely soon to be decided, but it must be understood before Clay's place in American history can be determined. From the time of the first Missouri Compromise, of which he has been called the chief designer, to the compromise tariff of 1833, and again up to the Compromise of 1850 and his death, Clay strove always to impress on the country his own governing idea that Americans of all sections were bound to tolerate each other in their mutual sins of ignorance, of lack of development, and of slowness to improve. Webster held with him, but in New England Webster was finally denounced as a renegade, and only a short time before the death of Clay, Mr. Jefferson Davis, listening to his pleas for the postponement of the crisis, concluded that it was cowardly for one generation to unload its responsibilities on the next, instead of meeting them at once.

It is seldom desirable to attempt a judgment of what events might have been had they been what they were not, but nothing which has occurred or is likely to occur can permanently obscure the fact that the great Americans who believed in the slow processes of growth were not mere cowards vacillating in the presence of every crisis, but were consistent followers of an ideal. Perhaps Clay was too consistent when his habit of compromising public questions led him to commit himself against himself in his presidential canvasses as he did when he lost the vote of New York and the Presidency by a partial recession from his position of resistance to war with Mexico. But it is hardly to be expected that a man who had in him so little of bitterness, so much of the genial, the tolerant, the charitable, as Clay had, could force any issue radically.

The ideas for which he stood as a constructive statesman were the use of all the powers of the Federal Government for internal improvements without being too strict in searching out constitutional objections; and after developing the internal trade of the country thus, to hold it against Europe, to give it commercial control of the hemisphere and, by excluding European products, to stimulate "competition in the home market." This he called "the American system," and his policy of supporting the South American countries against Europe seemed to him to be a part of it. He was, however, fundamentally opposed to coercive government where coercion could be avoided, and his denunciations of Andrew Jackson were the result of inherent intellectual tendencies, not of the mere prejudices created by rivalry. Clay believed in Republican institutions, but he believed government should be intrusted largely to those who shave regularly, bathe habitually, and do not ordinarily "expectorate» on the floor in public places. This made him the fit leader as it made him the idol of the "gentleman's party," and naturally enough it brought him into the strongest antagonism with Jackson who was accused by his enemies of smoking a corncob pipe, of sitting with his feet on the mantel, and of being a headstrong and violent advocate of the theory that "every one who did not interfere with his (Jackson's) own plans ought to be allowed the fullest liberty to interfere with those of other people." There was little of laissez faire in the policies of the man who hanged Arbuthnot and Ambruster first and considered the lawpoints involved afterwards. He came into collision with Clay as logically as he did with Calhoun and Webster. However else these three remarkable men differed, they agreed in detesting the theory of government which Jackson represented as a leader of what it is said Miss Nelly Custis once called the "dirty Democracy." It is fortunate for the reader that it is possible to see the element of humor in such antagonisms as this. Otherwise, such lives

as those of Clay and Webster, closing with the country on the verge of war and ending in what seemed complete failure, might seem sadder than they really were. For it is not yet demonstrated that they really did fail or that those who force radical issues to immediate settlement are more successful in improving the world than those who hold what Clay proclaimed and Webster practiced.

Clay entered national politics as United States Senator from Kentucky in 1806. After serving until 1807, he retired, and returned for another year of service in 1810. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1811, and served, with an intermission of two years, until 1825. During twelve years of this period he was Speaker of the House. His candidacy for the Presidency in 1824 was followed by his acceptance of the Secretaryship of the State under John Quincy Adams and his long quarrel with Jackson, whose supporters accused him of a corrupt bargain with Adams, by which they alleged that their favorite was cheated out of the Presidency. From that period until his death Mr. Clay was charged with being, and probably was, continuously a candidate for the Presidency. In 1832, and again in 1844, he was the nominee of the Whig party, defeated, as some have said, by his own disposition to compromise, rather than by the inherent weakness of his party. He died in the city of Washington, June 29th, 1852, after being more enthusiastically admired in all sections of the Union than any other American had been since the time of Washington. W. V. B.

DICTATORS IN AMERICAN POLITICS

(Denouncing Andrew Jackson, Delivered in the United States Senate on the Poindexter Resolution, April 30th, 1834)

N

EVER, Mr. President, have I known or read of an adminis

tration which expires with so much agony, and so little composure and resignation, as that which now unfortunately has the control of public affairs in this country. It exhibits a state of mind, feverish, fretful, and fidgety, bounding recklessly from one desperate expedient to another, without any sober or settled purpose. Ever since the dog days of last summer, it has been making a succession of the most extravagant plunges, of which the extraordinary cabinet paper, a sort of appeal from a dissenting cabinet to the people, was the first; and the protest, a direct appeal from the Senate to the people, is the last and the worst.