Famous Americans of Recent Times | Page 7

possessed in the older States. Mr. Clay had two strings to his bow.
Besides being a man of red tape and pigeon-holes, exact, methodical,
and strictly attentive to business, he had a power over a Kentucky jury
such as no other man has ever wielded. To this day nothing pleases
aged Kentuckians better than to tell stories which they heard their
fathers tell, of Clay's happy repartees to opposing counsel, his
ingenious cross-questioning of witnesses, his sweeping torrents of
invective, his captivating courtesy, his melting pathos. Single gestures,
attitudes, tones, have come down to us through two or three memories,
and still please the curious guest at Kentucky firesides. But when we
turn to the cold records of this part of his life, we find little to justify
his traditional celebrity. It appears that the principal use to which his
talents were applied during the first years of his practice at the bar was
in defending murderers. He seems to have shared the feeling which
then prevailed in the Western country, that to defend a prisoner at the
bar is a nobler thing than to assist in defending the public against his
further depredations; and he threw all his force into the defence of
some men who would have been "none the worse for a hanging." One
day, in the streets of Lexington, a drunken fellow whom he had rescued
from the murderer's doom cried out, "Here comes Mr. Clay, who saved
my life." "Ah! my poor fellow," replied the advocate, "I fear I have
saved too many like you, who ought to be hanged." The anecdotes
printed of his exploits in cheating the gallows of its due are of a quality
which shows that the power of this man over a jury lay much in his
manner. His delivery, which "bears absolute sway in oratory," was
bewitching and irresistible, and gave to quite commonplace wit and
very questionable sentiment an amazing power to please and subdue.
We are far from thinking that he was not a very able lawyer. Judge
Story, we remember, before whom he argued a cause later in life, was
of opinion that he would have won a high position at the bar of the
Supreme Court, if he had not been early drawn away to public life. In
Kentucky he was a brilliant, successful practitioner, such as Kentucky
wanted and could appreciate. In a very few years he was the possessor
of a fine estate near Lexington, and to the single slave who came to him
as his share of his father's property were added several others. His wife
being a skilful and vigorous manager, he was in independent

circumstances, and ready to serve the public, if the public wished him,
when he had been but ten years in his Western home. Thus he had a
basis for a public career, without which few men can long serve the
public with honor and success. And this was a principal reason of the
former supremacy of Southern men in Washington; nearly all of them
being men who owned land, which slaves tilled for them, whether they
were present or absent.
The young lawyer took to politics very naturally. Posterity, which will
judge the public men of that period chiefly by their course with regard
to slavery, will note with pleasure that Clay's first public act was an
attempt to deliver the infant State of Kentucky from that curse. The
State Constitution was to be remodelled in 1799. Fresh from the society
of Chancellor Wythe, an abolitionist who had set free his own
slaves,--fresh from Richmond, where every man of note, from Jefferson
and Patrick Henry downwards, was an abolitionist,--Henry Clay began
in 1798, being then twenty-one years of age, to write a series of articles
for a newspaper, advocating the gradual abolition of slavery in
Kentucky. He afterwards spoke on that side at public meetings. Young
as he was, he took the lead of the public-spirited young men who strove
to purge the State from this iniquity; but in the Convention the
proposition was voted down by a majority so decisive as to banish the
subject from politics for fifty years. Still more honorable was it in Mr.
Clay, that, in 1829, when Calhoun was maturing nullification, he could
publicly say that among the acts of his life which he reflected upon
with most satisfaction was his youthful effort to secure emancipation in
Kentucky.
The chapter of our history most abounding in all the elements of
interest will be that one which will relate the rise and first national
triumph of the Democratic party. Young Clay came to the Kentucky
stump just when the country was at the crisis of the struggle between
the Old and the New. But in Kentucky it was not a struggle; for