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Henry Clay
by
When his term as Congressman expired, he again went to the Senate, and served two years. Then he went back to the House, and through his influence, and his alone, did we challenge Great Britain, just as he had challenged Marshall.
England accepted the challenge, and we call it the War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve.
Very often, indeed, do we hear the rural statesmen at Fourth of July celebrations exclaim, “We have whipped England twice, and we can do it again!”
We whipped England once, and it is possible we could do it again, but she got the best of us in the War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve. Henry Clay plunged the country into war to redress certain grievances, and as a peace commissioner he backed out of that war without having a single one of those grievances indemnified or redressed.
After the treaty of peace had been declared and “the war was over,” that fighting Irishman, Andrew Jackson, Irishlike, gave the British a black eye at New Orleans, just for luck, and this is the only thing in that whole misunderstanding of which we should not as a nation be ashamed.
If England had not had Napoleon on her hands at that particular time, Wellington would probably have made a visit to America, and might have brought along for us a Waterloo. And these things are fully explained in the textbooks on history used in the schools of Great Britain, on whose possessions the sun never sets.
But as Henry Clay had gotten us into war, his diplomacy helped to get us out, and as it was a peace without dishonor, Clay’s reputation did not materially suffer. In fact, the terms of peace were so ambiguous that Congress gave out to the world that it was a victory, and the exact facts were quite lost in the smoke of Jackson’s muskets that hovered over the cotton bales.
Later, when Clay ran against Jackson for the Presidency he found that a peace-hero has no such place in the hearts of men as a war-hero. Jackson had not a tithe of Clay’s ability, and yet Clay’s defeat was overwhelming. “Peace hath her victories”–yes, but the average voter does not know it. The only men who have received overwhelming majorities for President have been war-heroes. Obscure men have crept in several times, but popular diplomats–never. The fate of such popular men as Clay, Seward and Blaine is one. And when one considers how strong is this tendency to glorify the hero of action, and ignore the hero of thought, he wonders how it really happened that Paul Revere was not made the second President of the United States instead of John Adams.
Clay was a most eloquent pleader. The grace of his manner, the beauty of his speech, and the intense earnestness of his nature often convinced men against their wills.
There was sometimes, however, a suspicion in the air that his best quotations were inspirations, and that the statistics to which he appealed were evolved from his inner consciousness. But the man had power and personality plus. He was a natural leader, and unlike other statesmen we might name, he always carried his town and district by overwhelming majorities. And it is well to remember that the first breath of popular disfavor directed against Henry Clay was because he proposed the abolition of slavery.
Those who knew him best loved him most, and this was true from the time he began to practise law in Lexington, when scarcely twenty-one years old, to his seventy-fifth year, when his worn-out body was brought home to rest.
On that occasion all business in Lexington, and in most of Kentucky, ceased. Even the farmers quit work, and very many private residences were draped in mourning. Memorial services were held in hundreds of churches, the day was given over to mourning, and everywhere men said, “We shall never look upon his like again.”
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