BEFORE THE CLOCKS struck noon, Washington’s church bells began to toll, a signal to the capital that it was over. The telegraph sent the news across the country, and bells began to ring in cities and towns from the Atlantic coast to the deep interior. One of those first telegrams was sent to Lexington, Kentucky: “My father is no more. He has passed without pain into eternity.”1 Soon that message was speeding to the house nearby called Ashland, where an old woman at last had the hard news she had been expecting for months. Her husband of more than fifty years was dead. Lucretia Clay was a widow. The bells in Lexington were already ringing.
Henry Clay was dead. Shop owners across the country paused to stare briefly into the distance before pulling shades and locking doors. Men reflexively pulled watches from their vest pockets and noted the time. The immediacy of the news was sobering. Clay had died at seventeen minutes after eleven that very morning of June 29, 1852. Only a few years before, reports of his death would have seeped out of Washington only as fast as the post office and knowledgeable travelers could carry them. People on rivers would have heard about it first, possibly in days, but days would have stretched into weeks before most people learned that the greatest political figure in the nation was dead. Time would have cushioned the blow, weakening its power until it became a piece of history, something that had happened a long way off, a long time ago.
The telegraph made the news of Clay’s death instant and therefore indelible. Only hours passed before cities from Maine to Missouri began draping themselves in crepe and men from Savannah to St. Louis began pulling on black armbands. Washington, already slowed by summer’s heat, came to a halt. President Millard Fillmore shut down the government, and Congress immediately adjourned. Members scattered to boardinghouses, hotels, and taverns, some to draft eulogies they would deliver the next day in the legislative chambers that Henry Clay had deftly managed for almost a half century. Even after sunset, the bells continued to ring. Cannon at the Navy Yard were firing.2
On June 30, the House of Representatives and the Senate heard recollections of Henry Clay. His passing was not unexpected—he had lain ill in his rooms at the National Hotel for months, and his visitors had been on what amounted to a deathwatch for weeks—but the expectation did not make its actual occurrence any less piercing. The sense that Clay’s death was ending a momentous chapter in the country’s history was also sobering. A little more than two years before, Clay’s celebrated contemporary John C. Calhoun had died, and another, Daniel Webster, was gradually succumbing to maladies that were soon to carry him off as well. These three had become the fabled Great Triumvirate of American government. More than mere symbols of the Republic, they became personifications of it. The South Carolinian Calhoun was the South with its growing frustrations and emerging belligerency over the slavery issue. New England’s Webster had become the conflicting ambiguities of the North with its moral repugnance over slavery and its allegiance to a country constitutionally bound to slavery’s preservation. And the Kentuckian Clay was that national ambiguity defined. He was a westerner from the South. Yet he was not southern, because he deplored slavery. His owning slaves, however, meant that he was not northern. When an admirer said that “you find nothing that is not essentially AMERICAN in his life,” it was meant as a compliment in a divisively sectional time, but in retrospect it was also a warning to the country. Like Henry Clay, it could not long continue to own slaves while denouncing slavery.3
When Congress met on June 30, however, it was more in the mood to celebrate Clay’s life than to find portents in his death. Some members quoted poetry; some of it was good. Several remarked on his humble birth and his admirable efforts to rise above it, a theme that had already become an American political staple by the mid-nineteenth century, an obligatory credential for establishing one’s relationship with “the people.” And though in some cases, such as Clay’s, it was an exaggeration for election campaigns, he had indeed risen, and no less spectacularly because he started from relative comfort rather than poverty. His success resulted from ceaseless labor and fastidious attention to detail. Kentuckian Joseph Underwood reminded the Senate that Clay had been neat in everything from his handkerchiefs to his handwriting. Underwood was not just talking about wardrobes and penmanship.4
All realized, some grudgingly, that Clay had become a great statesman. They also had to admit—again, some grudgingly—that he had been usually a jovial adversary with his opponents and always an endearing companion to his friends. New York Whig William Seward, destined to become Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, did not particularly like or admire Clay, but he nevertheless dubbed him “the Prince of the Senate” and recalled that his “conversation, his gesture, his very look, was persuasive, seductive, irresistible.” A House Democrat paid tribute to the peerless orator for “the silvery tones of his bewitching voice,” and a Kentucky Whig said “he reminded us of those days when there were giants in the land,” concluding with Shakespeare’s Antony describing Caesar with “say to all the world, This was a man!”5
The reference to Caesar was ironic. The closest thing to an American Caesar in Clay’s time had been his most implacable foe, Andrew Jackson. “For near a quarter of a century,” Virginia’s Charles Faulkner observed, “this great Republic has been convulsed to its centre by the great divisions which have sprung from their respective opinions, policy, and personal destinies.”6 But that didn’t say the half of it. Andrew Jackson’s shadow had cast a pall over Clay’s political life for more than a quarter century in some way or other, starting with Clay’s criticism of Jackson’s foray into Florida in 1818, their rivalry in the 1824 presidential contest, and clashes during Jackson’s presidency that included the titanic struggle over the national bank, a political brawl so devastating that it was called a war. Clay had lost that war. In fact, he had lost almost every time he challenged Andrew Jackson, and worse, he was defined for many Americans by the accusation Jackson and his friends leveled at Clay in 1825. He had, they said, entered into a “corrupt bargain” with John Quincy Adams to give Adams the presidency in exchange for Clay’s appointment as secretary of state, a presumed springboard to the presidency. This example of what Americans now call the politics of personal destruction was called by Clay’s generation simple candor by his foes, base slander by his friends. The argument over who was right would outlive both Jackson, who died in 1845, and Clay, but as his colleagues took the measure of his life on that hot June day, the question momentarily became irrelevant. When John Breckinridge, a young Democrat from Clay’s Kentucky, proclaimed that Clay had been “in the public service for fifty years, and never attempted to deceive his countrymen,” it was a slightly oblique jab at Jackson and the charge he had perpetuated. Walker Brooke reminded the Senate and James Brooks the House of Clay’s famous response when advised to modify his principles for political advantage: “Sir, I had rather be right than be President.” Clay’s repeated failures as a presidential aspirant are evidence that he apparently meant it.
Yet Clay’s principles had never made him inflexible or doctrinaire, an ineffective posture for a party leader. Twenty years earlier, he had shaped the faction opposed to Andrew Jackson into a political party. Its members became known as Whigs because just as the Whigs of England had objected to the unchecked power of the throne, the American Whigs resisted “King Andrew’s” excessive assumption of authority. Abraham Venable noted that Clay was a highly successful party leader, his “plastic touch” almost always shaping Whig plans and purposes. Another speaker praised his ability to “relax the rigor of his policy” if it endangered the government and the nation.7 Those traits had earned his reputation as a political peacemaker. He was the “Great Compromiser” and the “Great Pacificator,” labels applied as tributes to a man who had always pursued political goals within the limits of the possible. Congress had the evidence for that in the most recent clash over slavery that had almost destroyed the Union. Clay, gravely ill and fading daily, had helped to save the country from that crisis in his last public act. These men now contemplating his death were ready to see that gesture as one of singular selflessness, a labor that had hastened a frail old man’s demise, making him a martyr to the cause of Union, “a holy sacrifice to his beloved country.”8
We know now what they could not imagine. Clay’s sacrifice was ultimately in vain, and the ungainly compromise he had helped cobble together was already unraveling as he died. The country had no more compromises in it, and only nine years later, the Union that Clay knew and loved would disappear. The congressional eulogies on June 30 contained subtle hints of the divisions that would finally split that Union and turn its political arguments into a civil war. Of the thirteen eulogies in the House of Representatives, all but three were delivered by Whigs, and they were mostly from the East. Not a single New Englander rose to praise Henry Clay, and aside from two representatives from Kentucky, only congressmen from Tennessee and Indiana, both Whigs, spoke for the West. No representative from the Deep South spoke for Clay. The only southerners who did so were from Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland. Many in the House apparently followed the rule that when unable to say anything good, one should say nothing at all.
The time was fast coming—perhaps it had already arrived—when even a Great Pacificator could not soothe such troubled political waters. One Democrat even tinged his remarks with mild spite. Virginia senator Robert M. T. Hunter was still smarting from the bruising fight over the Compromise of 1850 and could not keep from reciting a series of backhanded compliments that damned with faint praise: Clay was not well educated but had managed to achieve success anyway; clearly past his prime, he had soldiered on; never bright or prescient, he at least had never exaggerated matters for political effect. Hunter closed by inviting the Senate to gaze upon the ghost of the Democrat Calhoun, the man Hunter clearly regarded as a genuine intellect and great statesman.9 Some muttered about Clay’s popularity in death spanning the political breach and took small comfort in the reality that it was bad form to speak ill of the dead. Four days after the congressional eulogies, Democrat newspaper editor Francis Preston Blair privately groused that Democrats had made the best speeches but had apparently forgotten that Clay was a Whig.10
Nobody could forget, however, that Clay was a friendly, persistently cheerful man whose mark on the country was as indelible as his influence on its politics was profound. “The good and great can never die,” said Walker Brooke, and Maryland’s Richard J. Bowie observed that Clay’s “name is a household word, his thoughts are familiar sentences.” But Alabama senator Jeremiah Clemens, who happened to be a Democrat, spoke the simplest and most poignant sentiment, because it was the most personal. He had disagreed with Henry Clay about almost everything, but that was of no relevance now. “To me,” Clemens said simply, “he was something more than kind.”11
THE NEXT MORNING Clay came to the Capitol for the last time. Overnight, Washington had dressed its buildings in black. As dignitaries spent the morning gathering at the National Hotel, the church bells resumed their tolling, and the cannon at the Navy Yard began firing as they had the previous night, one report every sixty seconds, hence their label as minute guns. All flags were at half-staff. It was 11:00 A.M., and the day was steaming hot, making black attire even more oppressive.
It took an hour to organize everyone, but at noon the procession finally moved out for the Capitol, only a few blocks to the east. It headed up Pennsylvania Avenue behind two military companies and a regimental band setting a slow pace with dirges and muffled drums. The Senate Committee on Arrangements, wearing white scarves, and the Senate pallbearers with black scarves, led the funeral car, an elaborate creation covered in black cloth, its corners decorated by gilded torches wrapped in crepe, silver stars fastened to its sides, and a canopy of intertwined black and white silk arching over the coffin. Six white horses, each attended by a groom dressed in white, pulled the car up the avenue. A silent multitude lined the route. The slow pace took the procession almost an hour to cover the short distance to the Capitol’s portico that opened to the Rotunda.
President Fillmore, cabinet officers, and the diplomatic corps entered the Senate chamber at 12:20 P.M., and shortly afterward they were followed by the congressional chaplains, the pallbearers and the casket, Clay’s son Thomas, friends, senators, representatives, Supreme Court justices, judges, senior military officers, mayors from Washington and other major cities, civic groups, and militiamen. The absolute silence of such a large gathering, especially among the citizens packing the gallery above, was eerie. As the casket was brought in, the imposing figure of Senate chaplain Charles M. Butler, clad in high canonical robes, stepped forward and broke the hush: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.”12
The coffin was placed in the center of the chamber. It was a distracting novelty, made of metal shaped to resemble the human form and with weighty silver mountings and handles. A large, thick silver plate bore the inscription HENRY CLAY, and another just above it could be removed to reveal the corpse’s face under a glass pane, a practice to make sure that the encased body really was lifeless in order to avoid the nineteenth century’s greatest nightmare, being buried alive. The president and Speaker of the House sat nearest the coffin at the center. Senators, diplomats, family, and friends formed a semicircle just beyond. Congressmen and visiting dignitaries filled the outermost circles.13
The Reverend Dr. Butler was Clay’s friend. He performed the service as much from affection for the deceased as from his official duty as the Senate’s chaplain. He began by noting how different people would remember different Henry Clays. There was the Clay of youth and ambition, the Clay of great accomplishment and renown, the Clay of the sickroom, feeble but cheerful, and the Clay who rose to defend the beleaguered Union. But there was also the Henry Clay who had embodied all that was great and good about America. Butler invoked Jeremiah, chapter 48, verse 17, to describe this universal recollection of Henry Clay as “the strong staff” adorned with “the beautiful rod” of patriotism. He spoke of a nation in mourning, its cities silent but for pealing bells, an entire country swathed in crepe, its commerce stilled and its citizens reflecting on the sobering loss and the finality of burying Henry Clay. “Burying HENRY CLAY!” Butler roared. “Bury the records of your country’s history—bury the hearts of living millions—bury the mountains, the rivers, the lakes, and the spreading lands from sea to sea, with which his name is inseparably associated, and even then you would not bury HENRY CLAY—for he lives in other lands, and speaks in other tongues, and to other times than ours.”14
As Butler spoke, Francis Preston Blair in the gallery scanned the assembly. His eyes found Daniel Webster among the cabinet, the last of the Great Triumvirate, now in his final days serving as Millard Fillmore’s secretary of state. Blair saw in Webster’s face haunting, inconsolable sadness.15 Daniel Webster himself had less than four months to live.
The service ended. Attendants quietly removed the silver plate covering Clay’s face. President Fillmore paused only briefly to look on Clay for the last time. Tuberculosis had made him more skeleton than man and had drained the vitality out of his expressive face, but visitors in his last days had still seen something of the old spark, even at the very end. Now that was gone too, and what remained was only an effigy. Those who knew him well did not linger now to gaze upon it. At first, the plate was removed at stops on the lengthy journey home whenever Clay lay in state for public viewing, but the practice was soon discontinued. The remains had not been embalmed, and it was summer. In any case, those who knew him preferred to keep their memories unimpaired. When he arrived in Lexington, his family would leave the plate in place.16
The coffin was soon moved to the Rotunda and set atop a bier. Despite its enormous size, the Rotunda was quickly crammed with a confused, shoving crowd. Outside, the throng overflowed the portico and public grounds. Grief, curiosity, and the limited time almost turned the scene into mayhem as the jostling and rising murmur of the mob alarmed the U.S. marshal and his deputies. The confusion was understandable. Henry Clay was the first American to lie in state at the Capitol. No other official of the government, not even a president, had ever been accorded that honor. Procedures for managing the resulting crowd did not exist, and the marshal and his assistants took a while to restore order and establish the proper decorum. At last the crowd formed an orderly file that entered the Rotunda and parted into two queues on either side of the funeral bier, never pausing, steadily passing to catch a glimpse of the shadowed face in the odd coffin. Americans would not do this again for thirteen years. Then it would be for Abraham Lincoln.
AT 3:30 THAT afternoon it was time for Clay to start home. The Committee on Arrangements and the honorary pallbearers, led by four military companies and followed by a large crowd, accompanied the casket to the railroad station where a locomotive was standing by. At the station, thousands of men and women stood silently as the coffin was placed in a special car. The entire train was trimmed in crepe. The six senators selected to take Clay home prepared to board, a strange bunch split evenly between Whigs and Democrats. They included the venerable Lewis Cass, at seventy the eldest, and Tennessee’s James C. Jones, a youngster at forty-three. Sam Houston, the flamboyant Tennessee transplant to Texas, confidant of Andrew Jackson, was part of the group, as was New Jersey’s Robert F. Stockton, whose grandfather had signed the Declaration of Independence. The train’s whistle wheezed to a full roar, and its wheels began their slow turns, easing out of Washington like a black snake, bound first for Baltimore.
It was a mark of Clay’s importance that this last journey home began by heading away from it. The family agreed to allow the body to travel a much extended, roundabout route from Washington to Lexington, though Clay’s son Thomas dreaded the prospect of it all. “Oh! how sickening is the splendid pageantry I have to go through from this to Lexington,” Thomas wrote to his wife.17 In addition, the funeral procession was unprecedented. The funeral party would cover more than a thousand miles by train and steamboat, first to Baltimore and Wilmington and Philadelphia and then swinging north to New Jersey and New York, arcing over to Buffalo before heading south through Ohio to Kentucky. The journey consumed nine days—a direct passage could have taken Clay home in a fraction of that time—and attracted huge crowds in large cities and drew out the entire populations of towns. Aside from the journey’s obvious symbolism, it held subtle significance too. When Clay first traveled from Lexington to Washington, the trip took weeks of hard trekking on horseback and rickety stagecoaches. That was in 1806, when Thomas Jefferson was president. The enormous continental heartland called Louisiana had only just been added to a country that was still mainly a wilderness crossed by trails, many only paths hemmed by trees and undergrowth. When Clay headed home four and a half decades later, he passed through a land unrecognizably altered and marked by unparalleled expansion and improvement. Americans had turned trails into roads, some paved with wooden planks or broken stones to make them passable in all weathers, allowing coaches to cover twenty, sometimes thirty miles a day. Travelers who decades before had slept under the stars now could stay in moderately comfortable lodgings.
Americans now call such wonders “infrastructure,” but Clay’s generation called them internal improvements. He had been their constant champion through both private initiative and public subsidies. Internal improvements, he preached, could speed American commerce, bolster American security, refine life on rough farmsteads, transform remote villages into thriving townships. With such encouragement, engineers had scoured harbors and dredged rivers. Where there were no rivers, they dug them in the form of canals that could float keelboats heavy with freight and passengers into the interior. Along the way, steam revolutionized water traffic to allow packets to strain against American rivers and moor in spacious harbors, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers. Steam radically changed ground travel as well. When Clay first came to Washington, he would have heard only the wind in the trees, the songs of birds, the rush of untamed waters. On his last journey home, in 1852, the pounding cylinders of his locomotive joined a chorus of machined progress that had become an American expectation, a march that rarely paused for anything. It paused only briefly for Clay’s passing. Americans felt in their bones the inevitability of material improvement as they saw the future dance to the music of roaring steam whistles atop grand riverboats and heard the pinging of spikes driven for new iron rails and more locomotives. That summer evening in 1852, one of those locomotives pulled Henry Clay into the American twilight, a full moon waxing.
THE TRAIN ARRIVED at Baltimore’s outer depot on Poppleton and Pratt streets at 6:00 P.M. Attendants placed the coffin on an ornate hearse that slowly made its way up Pratt Street between a vast crowd toward the towering domed rotunda of the Exchange, a building owned by a joint stock company of Baltimore merchants. There the coffin was placed on a large draped catafalque. Its faceplate was removed, and the men of the local militia, in this case the Independent Greys, managed the slow-moving lines that passed in tribute well into the night.18
At 10:15 the next morning, a large procession escorted the coffin to the Philadelphia Depot. By 11:00 the train was on its way to Wilmington, where it stopped before proceeding at 7:00 P.M. to Philadelphia. A large crowd was gathered at that city’s Baltimore Depot when the train arrived at 9:00, and a torchlight procession conveyed the remains to Independence Hall. That night into the next morning, Philadelphians filed passed the funeral bier, military guards at its corners. No one seemed to have noticed the coincidence of the date, especially the year. Clay came to this room exactly seventy-six years, almost to the day, after the Declaration of Independence had been signed there in the year 1776.
On Saturday, July 3, the body was escorted to Kensington and placed on the steamboat Trenton bound for New York City. New York closed down and turned out on Broadway to see the makeshift parade that bore Clay to City Hall. He lay in state there for the rest of the day and all of the next, July 4, a Sunday.19
Despite a veneer of organization, almost everything about this funeral journey was impromptu and planned on the fly. It was a testament to the resourcefulness of the senators accompanying the remains. In New York City, for example, there was no set time for departure, and the city planned to have Clay lie in state “until the Congressional delegation determine to proceed onward.”20 After the Fourth, after tens of thousands of New Yorkers had paid their respects, the congressional delegation decided it was time to move on. Another grand procession conveyed the remains and the funeral delegation to the Santa Claus, a Troy passenger steamer, which promptly headed up the Hudson River to Albany. The Santa Claus made only a few brief stops, but all the towns along the way paid respects anyway. As the steamer neared Poughkeepsie at 5:00 P.M., it slowed to allow citizens in small boats to hand up flowers for the coffin. Albany was alerted and ready for their arrival. By the time the Santa Claus docked, a general din of steamboat whistles, church bells, and firing guns had broken out. Preparing to disembark, the funeral party was startled to see the gigantic crowd that stretched into the dark distance of Albany’s streets. After all, it was 11:00 at night.21
At 8:30 the next morning, the body and its growing entourage were escorted to the Erie Railroad Station, where another special funeral train began a slow journey to Buffalo, briefly pausing for large crowds at towns along the way. Like Albany, Buffalo remained up for the train despite its late arrival, greeting it with a torchlight procession that conveyed the coffin to the Buckeye State, an enormous steamboat of the first class, almost three hundred feet long and boasting powerful engines that made her one of the fastest of the Great Lakes packets. She was soon under way, lighted from bow to stern, heading down the Erie shore toward Cleveland.
SOME FIVE HUNDRED miles to the west, as the Buckeye State sped toward Cleveland, citizens and officials in Springfield, Illinois, were doing what countless towns across America were doing—gathering to mourn the death of Henry Clay. In Springfield, plans for such ceremonies had been made the evening of Clay’s death at a public meeting presided over by the young lawyer Abraham Lincoln. The next day a special committee set the following Tuesday as the day for the commemoration and the Illinois statehouse as the place. Stephen T. Logan, Lincoln’s former law partner and a leader in Illinois politics, was to deliver the eulogy. Before July 6, however, Lincoln was tapped to take Logan’s place. It has never been clear why this was done, but Lincoln must have been ambivalent about it. He was tired, having just returned from a long trip riding the Illinois judicial circuit, and he was busy preparing the defense of a Mexican War veteran, an amputee, who stood accused of stealing from the U.S. mails.22 It was also extremely short notice, and Lincoln’s previous experience at writing a eulogy—he had delivered one when President Zachary Taylor died two years earlier—had been a frustrating disappointment.
He was likely troubled by the task for other reasons as well, for he admired Clay more than he did any other man on the American political scene, describing him later as “my beau ideal of a statesman.”23 He had never met Clay, but he had devoured his speeches and had even heard him speak on one memorable occasion at Lexington in 1847. Lincoln had been visiting his in-laws, the important Robert Todd family, who knew Clay quite well. Clay was a frequent dinner guest in the Todd home, and Lincoln’s wife, Mary, as a girl had once taken her new pony to Ashland to show it off to Clay.24
Tackling this important and unexpected task, Lincoln hurriedly consulted Clay’s own writings and published speeches for inspiration, even searching for a model eulogy to imitate, but he could find nothing helpful. When the observances opened on July 6 at the Springfield Episcopal Church before moving to the hall of the state House of Representatives for his speech, Lincoln felt ill prepared and showed it. He spoke for just under an hour and was as disappointed as his listeners with a lackluster, pedestrian effort. He was especially frustrated because Clay meant so much to him, and Lincoln obviously meant it when he noted how Clay’s failed quests for the presidency had not diminished him in the slightest, how those who had won the office “all rose after, and set long before him.”25 Most of all, though, Lincoln strained to describe Clay as a champion not only of the Union but of human freedom, from his support for Latin American and Greek independence to his advocacy of gradual emancipation of American slaves and their colonization in Africa. Lincoln found both courses wise and sensible. He did not say so on July 6, 1852, but he was convinced, like Clay, that only gradual emancipation would end slavery without destroying the Union, and only colonization would remove freed slaves from the enduring bigotry of white Americans.
Although Lincoln’s speech was strangely disappointing and its effect unmemorable, there was a seed of great meaning and portent in it. Haste and the emotion of the moment seemed to have overwhelmed his talent for soaring rhetoric, his flair for muscular prose, a talent that appeared in some of Clay’s best speeches, a gift that had helped make Clay Lincoln’s political idol. That July day in the Springfield statehouse, the task proved too much for Lincoln, and he confessed as much about understanding Henry Clay’s appeal: “The spell—the long-enduring spell—with which the souls of men were bound to him, is a miracle,” he said. He then asked, “Who can compass it?”26
Lincoln was asking how such a miracle could be understood, and on that day he clearly did not know the answer. But the echo of Clay’s words would sound in Lincoln’s mind through the years and eventually find voice in Lincoln’s own words, when it really mattered. Lincoln would in the end manage to compass the miracle that puzzled him that day. It would be later, when it really mattered.
THE BUCKEYE STATE reached Cleveland, where a train waited to transport the funeral party south, at last heading toward Clay’s home, passing through Columbus and arriving at Cincinnati at 11:00 A.M. on July 8. The large gathering at the station there included citizens, military companies, local lodges of Masons and Oddfellows, and firemen. Immediately a long procession formed to convey the body and its growing number of companions to the wharves on the Ohio. It took two hours to reach the river and the steamer that would take Clay to Louisville. The boat, a special charter, had delayed its scheduled departure by an hour.
The earliest French explorers called the Ohio “the beautiful river,” and most travelers ever since have agreed. The waters were clear and almost always smooth, resembling polished glass except when southerly breezes rippled them for a few hours, usually at midday. Before there were steamboats, those winds had allowed travelers to make sail and beat upriver against the current. At night, the river caught starlight like a mirror and reflected the rising moon in a long shaft that chased the hulls of watercraft and mesmerized their occupants.27 Clay had traveled the Ohio many times. This last trip would carry him on it for the rest of Thursday and into dawn on Friday. Along the way, emerging national greatness was evident in bustling towns that had sprung up on the river’s banks and trim farms cultivating its fertile valley. They were lively places usually, but that Thursday they were subdued as the steamboat passed, steadily ringing its bell to signal its approach. Occasionally church bells and cannon answered from communities wrapped in black.
The steamer was the Ben Franklin, a U.S. mailboat that regularly made the Louisville run. Two years earlier, Ralph Waldo Emerson had taken the Ben Franklin out of Cincinnati on the way to visit Mammoth Cave, and indeed the trip was often festive with tourists bound for excursions. But on this run all was quiet except for the ringing bell, the thrashing waters under the boat’s paddle wheels, the reciprocating pistons of its engine sending a rhythmic thrum through its decks and cabins. The Senate delegation and others who had started this journey eight days earlier must have been exhausted, and everyone was certainly crowded and uncomfortable as the entourage had grown, increased along the way by delegations joining the trip to Lexington.
Yet the Ben Franklin had been only a few hours under way when something remarkable happened. The ringing bell suddenly stopped, and curious passengers crowded to the boat’s starboard rail. Indiana was off to the right, and just ahead on a community wharf stood more than two dozen ghosts, white shadows in the lowering sun. The regular beat of the bell having stopped, the silence was unsettling as the steamer glided closer. Gradually the passengers could see that the figures were not ghosts but girls. There were thirty-one of them, each to represent a state of the Union, and all but one dressed in white. The one in black was Kentucky. Behind them, off the wharf, the population of their town was gathered and hushed.
No one said a word, and the Ben Franklin continued downriver. Its bell began ringing steadily again, and the passengers moved away from the rail. The crew, familiar with the towns along the route, could have told them the name of the place with the girls. It was Rising Sun, Indiana.28
——
THE BEN FRANKLIN completed the 133-mile run to Louisville at six on Friday morning. Four hours later the funeral party departed on a train that stopped at Frankfort and finally at dusk arrived in Clay’s hometown of Lexington. A large crowd carrying torches silently escorted the coffin through the black-cloaked town. Lexington’s population was about nine thousand ordinarily, but in the first week of that July it became the most populous place in the state. It was impossible to make an accurate count, but at least thirty thousand—and some say as many as a hundred thousand—were gathered to pay respects to Clay.
A procession conducted the coffin to the Ashland estate, where it arrived at eight o’clock that evening and was placed in the large dining room. The Senate committee along with the family filled the house. Clay’s son Thomas had made the grueling journey with his father’s remains, and he was now joined by his brothers James and John and his mother, Lucretia. She was seventy-one and feeble, an intensely private woman who had never publicly shown much emotion or displayed much affection, masking what her family and friends knew to be a turbulent and loving heart. The years had made her resemble a frail bird, her eyes hard as diamonds. She had many devoted friends in Lexington, but now she had lost her best one, the only person in the world who had ever thoroughly understood her. She, the boys, and their families stood next to the coffin that night. Just five years earlier, Lucretia had been sitting down to dinner with her family in this same room when she had received devastating news about one of her sons. Now, surrounded by fine china and crystal gleaming in the candlelight, she gazed at her husband’s coffin. The family did not remove the faceplate; they did not need to. Clay was not really in that metal container, but he was there in that room. And for the rest of the night so was Lucretia.29
The Clay Guard that had come down from Cincinnati stood vigil through that night as thousands continued to stream into Lexington for the funeral the next day, Saturday, July 10. At 10:00 A.M. the Reverend Edward F. Berkeley, rector of Clay’s church in Lexington and the man who had baptized him only five years earlier, read a sermon and eulogy in a small outdoor service at Ashland. The coffin was then taken to Lexington in a grandly designed car drawn by eight horses, each as white as snow and wearing silver-fringed crepe. Lucretia watched the procession leave in the rising heat of the July morning before going back into the house and closing the door. She did not feel well, she had said simply. She would not go to the cemetery.
In Lexington a spectacular pageant grew to immense proportions, the procession extending farther and farther as muffled drums beat the cadence toward the Lexington Cemetery. The now familiar sounds of bells and cannon echoed out from the city across the countryside. Lucretia would have heard them. The crowd overflowed the cemetery’s grounds, many out of earshot of Berkeley’s reading of the Episcopal service and unable to see the ritual by the local Masons. During the ceremony, they placed on his coffin a Masonic apron, a gift to Clay from the Marquis de Lafayette, removing it just before the coffin was placed in its vault.
And so it ended, nine days and more than a thousand miles from where it had begun with the death of Clay and the beginning of his extraordinary journey home. The man whom The New York Times had judged “too great to be president” had been given a farewell to make a monarch envious. The London Times spoke of Clay’s “antique greatness” and said that Clay’s death deprived many Americans of something noble and fine, something connected to the beginning of the country, spanning from the Revolution through the tumult and strain of first creating and then building an American dream.30
Henry Clay’s part in that adventure had been always central and often crucial. But there was more to it than that. Lincoln had described the enduring affection for Clay as a miracle, as mysterious as it was tangible. Lincoln and many of his fellow Americans could not fully grasp it, he said, but they certainly felt it, and Lincoln would draw on it to help him save the country when the time came. Some of those girls in Rising Sun would later send off fathers, husbands, and sweethearts to fight and die for their country, and for the same reason that they had wrapped themselves in peculiar clothes and waited on a hot wharf that July afternoon for a steamboat.
In 1852 all of the country mourned Clay’s passing, marking a rare instance of agreement among people who had gotten into the habit of disagreeing about almost everything. He was a titanic symbol of Union to the very end, promoting compromise to prevent his country’s demise and the slaughter he was certain would follow. He saved his country until its muscles and sinews could weather a terrible civil war, until “fair seed time” and his example could produce a man like Lincoln, who when Clay died was yet straining to understand what it all meant, to understand the miracle that stemmed from Clay’s life, a life that had begun seven and a half decades earlier amid Virginia’s swampy rills. Clay’s life began in the midst of a war that was, as Lincoln’s would be, for national survival.
Losing Henry Clay was a uniquely personal event for the nation because his life had been the mirror of his country and its aspirations. In that, it was an extraordinary life. “I will forgive your weakness,” wrote a student at Yale, who could have been speaking for the entire country, “if you bow your head and weep for the departure of his noble spirit.”31