Famous Americans of Recent Times | Page 9

of half the Kentuckian's speeches, and the
inspiration of his public life. The President is discussing the question,
What shall we do with the surplus?
"Shall we suppress the impost, and give that advantage to foreign over
domestic manufactures? On a few articles of more general and
necessary use, the suppression, in due season, will doubtless be right;
but the great mass of the articles upon which impost is paid are foreign
luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford
themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its

continuance, and application to the great purposes of the public
education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public
improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional
enumeration of Federal powers. By these operations, new channels of
communication will be opened between the States, the lines of
separation will disappear, their interests will be identified, and their
union cemented by new and indissoluble bonds."
Upon these hints, the young Senator delayed not to speak and act; nor
did he wait for an amendment to the Constitution. His first speech in
the Senate was in favor of building a bridge over the Potomac; one of
his first acts, to propose an appropriation of lands for a canal round the
Falls of the Ohio at Louisville; and soon he brought forward a
resolution directing the Secretary of the Treasury to report a system of
roads and canals for the consideration of Congress. The seed of the
President's Message had fallen into good ground.
Returning home at the end of the session, and reentering the Kentucky
Legislature, we still find him a strict follower of Mr. Jefferson. In
support of the President's non-intercourse policy (which was Franklin's
policy of 1775 applied to the circumstances of 1808), Mr. Clay
proposed that the members of the Legislature should bind themselves to
wear nothing that was not of American manufacture. A Federalist,
ignorant of the illustrious origin of this idea, ignorant that the
homespun system had caused the repeal of the Stamp Act, and would
have postponed the Revolution but for the accident of Lexington,
denounced Mr. Clay's proposition as the act of a shameless demagogue.
Clay challenged this ill-informed gentleman, and a duel resulted, in
which two shots were exchanged, and both antagonists were slightly
wounded. Elected again to the Senate for an unexpired term, he
reappeared in that body in 1809, and sat during two sessions.
Homespun was again the theme of his speeches. His ideas on the
subject of protecting and encouraging American manufactures were not
derived from books, nor expressed in the language of political economy.
At his own Kentucky home, Mrs. Clay, assisted by her servants, was
spinning and weaving, knitting and sewing, most of the garments
required in her little kingdom of six hundred acres, while her husband
was away over the mountains serving his country. "Let the nation do
what we Kentucky farmers are doing," said Mr. Clay to the Senate.

"Let us manufacture enough to be independent of foreign nations in
things essential,--no more." He discoursed on this subject in a very
pleasant, humorous manner, without referring to the abstract principle
involved, or employing any of the technical language of economists.
His service in the Senate during these two sessions enhanced his
reputation greatly, and the galleries were filled when he was expected
to speak, little known as he was to the nation at large. We have a
glimpse of him in one of Washington Irving's letters of February, 1811:
"Clay, from Kentucky, spoke against the Bank. He is one of the finest
fellows I have seen here, and one of the finest orators in the Senate,
though I believe the youngest man in it. The galleries, however, were
so much crowded with ladies and gentlemen, and such expectations had
been expressed concerning his speech, that he was completely
frightened, and acquitted himself very little to his own satisfaction. He
is a man I have great personal regard for."
This was the anti-bank speech which General Jackson used to say had
convinced him of the impolicy of a national bank, and which, with
ingenious malice, he covertly quoted in making up his Bank Veto
Message of 1832.
Mr. Clay's public life proper began in November, 1811, when he
appeared in Washington as a member of the House of Representatives,
and was immediately elected Speaker by the war party, by the decisive
majority of thirty-one. He was then thirty-four years of age. His
election to the Speakership on his first appearance in the House gave
him, at once, national standing. His master in political doctrine and his
partisan chief, Thomas Jefferson, was gone from the scene; and Clay
could now be a planet instead of a satellite. Restive as he had been