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Ashland is just a mile south of the courthouse. When Henry Clay used to ride horseback between the town and his farm there were scarce a dozen houses to pass on the way, but now the street is all built up, and is smartly paved, and the trolley-line booms a noisy car to the sacred gates every ten minutes.

Lexington was laid out in the year Seventeen Hundred Seventy-four, and the intention was to name it in honor of Colonel Patterson, the founder, or of Daniel Boone. But while the surveyors were doing their work, word came of the battle of some British and certain embattled farmers, and the spirit of freedom promptly declared that the town should be called Lexington.

Three years after the laying-out of Lexington, Henry Clay was born. He was the son of a poor and obscure Baptist preacher who lived at “The Slashes,” in Virginia. The boy never had any vivid recollection of his father, who passed away when Henry was a mere child.

The mother had a hard time of it with her family of seven children, and if kind neighbors had not aided, there would have been actual want. And surely one can not blame the widow for “marrying for a home” when opportunity offered. Only one out of that first family ever achieved eminence, and the second brood is actually lost to us in oblivion.

Henry Clay was a graduate of the University of Hard Knocks; he also took several post-graduate courses at the same institution. Very early in life we see that he possessed the fine, eager, receptive spirit that absorbs knowledge through the finger-tips; and the ability to think and to absorb is all that even college can ever do for a man. I doubt whether college would have helped Clay, and it might have dimmed the diamond luster of his mind, and diluted that fine audacity which carried him on his way. In this capacity to comprehend in the mass, Clay’s character was essentially feminine. We have Thoreau for authority that the intuition and the sympathy found always in the saviors of the world are purely feminine attributes–the legacy bequeathed from a mother who thirsted for better things.

From a clerk in a country store to a bookkeeper, then a copyist for a lawyer, a writer of letters for the neighborhood, a reader of law, and next a lawyer, were easy and natural steps for this ambitious boy.

Virginia with its older settlements offered small opportunities, and so we find young Clay going West, and landing at Lexington when twenty years old. He requested a license to practise law, but the Bar Association, which consisted of about a dozen members, decided that no more lawyers were needed at Lexington. Clay demanded that he should be examined as to fitness, and the blackberry-bush Blackstones sat upon him, as a coroner would say, with intent to give him so stiff an examination that he would be glad to get work as a farmhand.

A dozen questions had been asked, and an attempt had been made to confuse and browbeat the youth, when the Nestor of the Lexington Bar expectorated at a fly ten feet away, and remarked, “Oh, the devil! there is no need of tryin’ to keep a boy like this down–he’s as fit as we, or fitter!”

And so he was admitted.

From the very first he was a success; he toned up the mental qualities of the Fayette County Bar, and made the older, easy-going members feel to see whether their laurel wreaths were in place.

When he was thirty years of age he was chosen by the Legislature of Kentucky as United States Senator. When his term expired he chose to go to Congress, probably because it afforded better opportunity for oratory and leadership. As soon as he appeared upon the floor he was chosen Speaker by acclamation. So thoroughly American was he, that one of his very first suggestions was to the effect that every member should clothe himself wholly in fabrics made in the United States. Humphrey Marshall ridiculed the proposition and called Clay a demagogue, for which he got himself straightway challenged. Clay shot a bullet through his English-made broadcloth coat, and then they shook hands.