CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“What Prodigies Arise”

AVISITOR TO Ashland in the fall of 1845 went out of his way to describe the plantation’s slave quarters and their inhabitants in bright terms. The “negro cottages are exceedingly comfortable,” he said, “all white-washed, clean and well furnished, and plenty of flowers in the windows and about the dwellings.” Ashland’s slaves, he observed, “possess more comforts of life, have better dwellings, are better clothed, and work less than a large majority of the day laborers of the North.”¹

Yet contradicting this glowing picture were other descriptions depicting Ashland as a place of brutal punishments where the purportedly compassionate master winked at a cruel overseer. Just months after newspaper accounts of Henry Clay’s farm as a slave’s Eden, the abolitionist press carried lurid stories about an escaped slave from Ashland named Lewis Richardson who claimed he had been viciously whipped at Clay’s direction for a minor offense. According to Richardson, who told his story after reaching Canada, a total of 150 lashes had laid his back open after he had been suspended from a beam in one of Ashland’s barns for almost an hour on a frigid December day. Richardson had run away after the whipping to tell this tale, one that was eagerly taken up by abolitionists to highlight not only Clay’s depravity but to strip away the mask of benevolence he had affected with high talk of hating slavery while owning slaves.²

Yet the tale of Louis Richardson was not true, at least to the extent of Clay’s involvement. In fact, Clay, who was on his way to New Orleans, did not know that a whipping had occurred. Richardson had received sixteen lashes, not 150, and according to Andrew Barnett, Clay’s overseer, it was because of his frequent drunkenness, a circumstance attested to by reputable witnesses when Barnett defended himself against the charge of cruelty and vindicated his employer’s reputation for kindness. Certainly it would have been out of character for Henry Clay to behave so cruelly, and under the weight of proof, even abolitionists let the matter fade away, especially when it was revealed that Clay made no effort to pursue or reclaim Richardson when he fled.³

As a young man just starting out in Kentucky, Henry Clay had urged the state constitutional convention of 1799 to adopt gradual emancipation, but in the years that followed he became a Kentucky planter who purchased slaves to work a growing farm. In doing this he essentially surrendered to circumstance and ambition. The circumstance was the world as he found it, first in Virginia and then in Kentucky. Slavery had always been part of that world, and though men he admired, such as George Wythe, had shown that it did not have to be that way, the life Clay chose pointed him in different, less admirable directions. After 1799, he gradually succumbed to the vice of slavery, a conclusion wrought by his ambition for status and local political prominence. Clay’s behavior in all this was hypocritical, to be sure, and for that alone he merited at least a measure of the denunciation heaped on him by abolitionists.

He was in many ways a typical planter, and the claims of some friendly writers that Clay never sold a slave are false.⁴ And yet in many ways he was not typical at all. While he did occasionally sell slaves, he also freed them, as in the case of Lottie Dupuy as well as her daughter Mary Ann and son Charles. Sometimes his purchases were made to unite families, and he was willing to help speed slaves to freedom when requested to by others. He was remarkably indifferent about recovering runaways. When a young slave named Levi disappeared while accompanying him during his travels in 1849, Clay casually remarked “that in a reversal of our conditions I would have done the same thing” and simply provided money to help Levi return to Ashland should he wish to, which he did. After Kentucky authorities arrested Vermont abolitionist Delia Webster in 1844 for inciting slaves to run away, Clay offered to defend her. Responding to defenders of slavery who hinted at reviving the African slave trade, he was unequivocal in condemning it as deserving the “detestation of mankind.” He remained active in the American Colonization Society and served as its president from 1836 until his death.⁵

Clay believed that emancipated slaves could only prosper someplace other than America. In part that belief was born of the prejudices of his time, which he repeated in public and private statements: blacks were inferior, he felt, because of their race. But Clay also qualified the observation with caveats that slavery itself and the unrelenting prejudice of whites most thoroughly contributed to the degradation of blacks, a belief shared by Abraham Lincoln.⁶ Clay insisted that whites would fare no better if made into slaves, and he rejected the argument that black inferiority justified black enslavement. That attitude, he said, was a spurious rationalization that could be insidiously used to justify the subjugation of anyone, given the right circumstances.⁷

Clay consistently denounced slavery as wrong, lamented its existence, and wished that it had never been established.⁸ He would not consent to its extension, and where it did exist, he was eager to see it extinguished if that could be accomplished without undue injury to owners and excessive burdens placed on freed slaves. His embrace of gradual emancipation remained a constant throughout his life, despite his vagueness about methods and timetables. Gradualism would allow owners to absorb the economic shock of losing so great a capital investment. It would benefit slaves slated for freedom by giving them time to learn trades and gather the money necessary to go home, a place defined for Clay as that whence they had originated as a race, namely, Africa. The American Colonization Society for decades had been the vehicle to accomplish that objective, and Clay was among many important men who belonged to it, held high offices in it, contributed money to it, and lobbied for state and federal subsidization. By the 1840s, the idea had grown rather threadbare, although the organization still attracted new members. Nobody thought, however, that it would ever possess the financial means or political reach necessary for significant success, and in many respects it was always meant to be an example as well as an experiment.

Abolitionists grew to despise it. They castigated it for disguising overt racism behind a veil of humanitarianism. As slaveholders adopted a positive defense of slavery, they too attacked colonization and prevailed on state legislatures to outlaw practices friendly to it, such as bequests of slaves to the society with instructions for their transport to Africa. The American Colonization Society could have better countered these charges and stopped these attacks with evidence that its example was persuasive and the experiment was working, but proof on both counts was quite thin. Instances of emancipation remained rare, and many freed slaves showed no desire to go to Africa.⁹

In any case, Clay insisted that only slave owners could deal with the problem as it currently existed. He continued to oppose abolitionists because he thought that their radicalism damaged the cause of emancipation. Abolitionists not only hardened slaveholders’ resolve to resist all solutions, even reasonable ones, they also goaded slaveholders into insisting that slavery was not a predicament at all and that it actually benefited slaves. Clay always branded this proslavery defense as odious and corrosive. People who defended slavery as a positive good undermined the very idea of freedom and endangered everyone’s liberty, regardless of caste or color.¹⁰ As the years went by and attitudes on both sides became more inflexible, Clay grew increasingly exasperated. Abolitionists moved in ways that entrenched slavery. Proslavery activists inched toward destroying the Union.

Meanwhile, he cried out that time was reason’s greatest ally. Given enough time, a growing population would supply enough labor to make slavery obsolete, and it would then disappear.¹¹ He often made this prediction to abolitionists, but they did not believe him. Moreover, they opposed uncertain remedies and elastic schedules.

Abolitionists who genuinely admired him, believing that they could appeal to the better man in Henry Clay, urged him to free his slaves and set an example for his neighbors.¹² But slavery continued at Ashland. He was a benevolent master—too kind and lax, according to slave-owning neighbors—who by all objective accounts fed and clothed and lodged his slaves well. His slaves were allowed remarkable levels of liberty, allowed to come and go from Ashland as they wished to visit family on other plantations or in Lexington, often to stay overnight. Yet the fact remained that no matter how healthy and autonomous they were, they were still slaves, the property of Henry Clay. They had to eat and wear what was given to them, had to live where they were told to, always had to return to Ashland sooner rather than later from visits elsewhere.

At Ashland, Clay told his critics, one would find slaves in comfort from cradle to grave, which was as physically true as he could manage, and the paternalism soothed a kindhearted man who could boast that his elderly and infirm slaves were cosseted in their last years, not cast off to fend for themselves as were the “wage slaves” of the North. Yet such paternalism was part of the problem of slavery. The underlying consequences of paternalism were not as appalling or as emotionally evocative as the stories of brutal beatings and fractured families and violated women clutching mulatto children. Rather, the consequences of benevolent paternalism were insidious precisely because of their banality.

What happened at Ashland that December day in 1845 exposed the limits of benevolent paternalism. Clay was away, but the whipping happened. It mattered little that the punishment was “only” sixteen blows rather than 150. It had happened. The system allowed it to happen no matter what Henry Clay said or did, and that reality emphasized the immorality of slavery more than scandalous fabrications that played upon melodrama for sensational effect. That Henry Clay continued to own slaves while condemning slavery was nothing short of tragic, a fundamental flaw in an otherwise good and decent man.

THERE WERE FEW heroes in this predicament. As it did on the national scale, slavery jumbled Bluegrass political affiliations and tested class loyalties. Standing to the left of Henry Clay but to the right of radical abolitionists was Clay’s second cousin, Cassius Marcellus Clay (“Cash” to those who knew him), son of the wealthy planter and slaveholder Green Clay. Cash was reckless with often toxic prose. A venomous pen was his first weapon of choice, a bowie knife his second, and because he was so effective with the one, he found it wise to have the other handy.

During his initial sojourn in the North while attending Yale and in his later travels in the North, Cash was impressed by the relative scarcity of poverty in the free states. Returning to Kentucky, he was ashamed to look on the lower-class southern whites who lived in filthy shacks and took pride in refusing to do work they perceived as suited only for slaves. Cash began emancipating those slaves he could, his authority over some being restricted by the laws of inheritance, and exhorted his fellow Kentuckians to follow his example. Such pronouncements made him many enemies, most notably the powerful Wickliffes, the state’s wealthiest slaveholders. The feud with the Wickliffes produced at least one duel as well as a brawl during which Cash gouged out a man’s eye and used his knife to slice off an ear. His famous cousin defended Cash in the ensuing trial.¹³

Cash’s increasing activism with regard to slavery in Kentucky gradually estranged the two cousins, Henry Clay clinging to the idea that gradual emancipation presented the most realistic solution while Cash urged a firm date for Kentucky emancipation that would coerce slaveholders into cutting their eventual losses by selling their slaves to out-of-state buyers. Cash did not much worry about the fate of the slaves themselves, in whom he had little interest. Rather, he viewed emancipation as the best way to promote economic progress and white advancement. When a mob (James Clay included) disassembled the printing press of Cash’s abolitionist newspaper, he blamed his older cousin, completing their estrangement.¹⁴

The Wickliffes and many other slave owners had long been obsessed with repealing the state’s 1833 law banning the importation of slaves, a statute that had been widely violated but did have the salutary effect of keeping Kentucky’s slave population relatively low. Intense lobbying and threats of political reprisals finally convinced the legislature to repeal the law in 1849. It was a major setback for antislavery advocates, one matched by their failure to control the constitutional convention of that same year. The central issue of the convention clearly would be the future of slavery in Kentucky.

In February, Henry Clay wrote a letter to provide a definitive statement of his views on this issue. Although addressed to his brother-in-law Richard Pindell, the letter was meant for publication and caused a stir.¹⁵ In addition to repeating the claim that colonization was the most sensible way to effect emancipation, Clay lamented the failure of the state to address the problem fifty years earlier in its 1799 constitutional convention. Now a new opportunity was at hand, and he urged his fellow Kentuckians to adopt gradual emancipation as well as to fund colonization. Failing to act decisively this time could have terrible consequences, he said, for both Kentucky and the Union.¹⁶

“At no moment of Henry Clay’s long and glorious career,” proclaimed the Louisville Courier, “have we ever felt prouder of him.”¹⁷ Yet Clay correctly predicted that the Pindell letter would “bring on me some odium” in the South. Proslavery southerners saw Kentucky’s convention as a bellwether for the fate of slavery in the Upper South, and Clay’s statement confirmed their worst suspicions about his reliability on the subject. “Mr. Clay’s name is no longer all powerful even in Kentucky,” was a typical observation. “This letter completes his prostration with the masses.”¹⁸Abolitionists were no happier. William Lloyd Garrison berated Clay’s Pindell letter as “remorseless in purpose, cruel in spirit, delusive in expectation, sophistical in reasoning, tyrannous in principle.” Yet Clay did not regret his statements. “I could not, towards the close of my life,” he explained, “relinquish the inestimable privilege of freely expressing my sentiments on a great public matter, however they might be received by the public.”¹⁹

In such an atmosphere, the campaign for the constitutional convention started in simmering rage and became ugly early. In one of its calmer and more decorous moments, Henry Clay presided over a meeting in Frankfort to promote emancipationist candidates, but other settings were freighted with the potential for violence as men went to meetings armed and angry.²⁰ Judge James Campbell shot Benedict Austin dead after a debate in Paducah. In June, tensions mounted in Madison County as Cash Clay aggressively spoke at public meetings for the emancipationist candidate and squared off against Squire Turner’s family, who supported their patriarch’s proslavery candidacy with snarls and threats. “It was now evident,” said a newspaper account, “that there was some unpleasant feeling between them.”²¹ That observation was an incredible understatement. At a public meeting in Foxtown, the Turners set upon Cassius Clay with cudgels and knives. He was stabbed from behind. Thomas Turner pressed a revolver to Cash’s head and pulled the trigger. The cap fired but not the chamber. Turner frantically pulled the trigger three more times without discharging a single shot. Cash ended the fracas by gutting Cyrus Turner with a bowie knife, a mortal wound. Everyone thought Cash Clay would die as well, but he again proved too stubborn to kill. As long as there was slavery, Cash’s guardian angel would have his hands full.²²

Kentucky showed the rest of the country that there would be slavery in the Bluegrass State, presumably forever. Although emancipationists ran in twenty-nine counties, not a single one was elected, an ominous portent for the course of the constitutional convention. Proslavery Kentuckians marshaled forces to control every aspect of the meeting, adopting a constitution that not only endorsed slavery but bolstered it with protections that surpassed those of every other slave state’s constitution.²³ The emancipationist cause in Kentucky was dead, and Clay was disheartened. In a few months, he was able to consider the matter philosophically. He was sure that slavery was destined for extinction, despite Kentucky’s rejection of gradual emancipation. It would happen either “legally or naturally,” he predicted with extraordinary foresight. “The chief difference in the two modes is that, according to the first, we should take hold of the Institution intelligently and dispose of it cautiously and safely.” The alternative was to have slavery “some day or other take hold of us, and constrain us, in some manner or other, to get rid of it.”²⁴ In his Pindell letter, Clay had voiced a grim warning: “in the event of a civil war breaking out … Kentucky would become the theater and bear the brunt” of it.²⁵ The question raised by those realities was how to gauge the number of years the country had left to control its own destiny, how long before the blight of slavery exerted its own dismal control.

As for himself, he made arrangements in his will to emancipate Ashland’s slaves. All males born after January 1, 1850, were to be freed at age twenty-eight; all females born after that date, freed at twenty-five. Taking into account the possibility that financial necessity would require the sale of some slaves before their emancipation, he legally bound new owners to honor the schedule stipulated in his will. In any case, families subject to any sale were to be kept together. Only by their own consent could they be separated.²⁶

As he laid these plans in 1851, he forlornly weighed the deteriorating status of free blacks. In that same year, Indiana adopted a constitution that prohibited free blacks from entering the state and contemplated the eviction of those in residence. Certain that other “free” states would eventually do the same, Henry Clay was heartsick. He therefore directed that his slaves be prepared for their freedom by receiving wages for their labor during the final three years of servitude. The money was to help them learn a trade and defray the cost of their transit to Africa. Furthermore, any children born to female slaves slated for freedom were to be free at birth, apprenticed to learn a trade, and taught reading, writing, and arithmetic.

In the end, he thought it was both the least and the best he could do. He had always hated slavery, had always lived with it as with a slumbering monster, vile in his eyes and disgraced by the considered judgment of enlightened men, but he had never hated the people who happened to be slaves, had never said of them, as had Cassius Clay, that “God has made them for the sun and the banana.”²⁷ Now, in places like Indiana, men and women who had so long been victims of slavery were to be made casualties of freedom. “What is to become of these poor creatures?” he cried. “In the name of humanity, I ask what is to become of them—where are they to go?”²⁸

IN LATE OCTOBER, just before the election of 1848, Clay invited Zachary Taylor to Ashland. Taylor declined but said he wanted to meet during Clay’s visit to New Orleans that winter. Moreover, the president-elect claimed to lament some people’s efforts to generate bad feelings between them—the tireless Burnley, sworn enemy of Clay, was still much in Taylor’s confidence—and rejoiced that the attempts to poison their friendship had failed. That remained to be seen. Clay had hopes for better times ahead with a Whig in the White House, and he wanted to meet Taylor “to form an opinion whether that hope will be realized or not.” He left Ashland on December 20 for New Orleans and briefly ran into Taylor on the last leg of the journey, an accidental encounter too brief for anything but idle pleasantries. The planned lengthier meeting in New Orleans never took place. A cholera outbreak in the city was blamed, but other reasons kept them apart. Clay claimed to bear Taylor no ill will over the events of 1848, but Taylor’s victory convinced Clay that he would have won had he been nominated. That made his rejection by the Whigs even more disillusioning. Yet any lingering disappointment, said Clay, “should not affect our desire that the new administration may honorably aquit [sic] itself, and for the advantage of our Country.”²⁹

On January 20, Clay had a bad fall in New Orleans “while carelessly descending a flight of stairs” and had to cancel a side trip to Mobile as a result. The accident left him lame and his hands badly bruised. Such mishaps marked a growing clumsiness as his gait grew uncertain and his balance shaky, a normal consequence of age, but his halting step and chronic cough were worrisome. “The fall was a service to me,” Clay joked to his old friend Kit Hughes, claiming that it had awakened “some of my sleeping interior organs … to the performance of their duties.” But he also wryly observed, “In youth our topics of correspondence are our pleasures, in age our pains.”³⁰ The whimsy disguised gloomier reflections that clouded his days. He and Lucretia had started alone, he recalled, and now, after eleven children, seven of them in their graves, only the youngest, John, lived with them. Clay became increasingly pensive, and every new loss pushed him in the conflicting directions of calm acceptance and mild alarm. In one moment he was resigned to his own death, but in the next he worried that he might not live to see distant loved ones again. He worried when friends fell silent, thinking the worst. Clay suspected something was amiss when Kit Hughes stopped answering letters in the summer of 1849. Hughes had stayed forever young to Clay, after all these years still the punster who had traveled mountainous seas on the John Adamsthirty-five years earlier with him and Jonathan Russell, now dead for seventeen years. “If it be so ordered that we shall never see each other here below,” Clay told Hughes, “I hope that we shall meet in the realms of bliss above.”³¹ Hughes died on September 18, 1849, making Henry Clay the sole survivor of the Ghent delegation. It was “a solemn warning that I too must soon follow them.”³²

Clay had always dreaded receiving bad news about those he loved, but in these final years the blows were more telling and his spirits less resilient. An amplified religiosity colored much of his temperament. When he learned of his brother Porter’s death in early 1850, Clay’s “greatest consolation” was that Porter “had long been a sincere, pious, and zealous Christian.”³³ But sometimes even deep faith could not blunt his grief. In the summer of 1850, he heard that Anna Mercer, his dear friend William Mercer’s daughter, was ill. He immediately wrote Mercer asking for a report, avowing trust in “an Allwise and Merciful God.” He recalled how much Anna had suffered once when she wore tight shoes to a ball, and he mildly admonished her to “dance less, go to fewer parties, and avoid all excesses in your amusements.” But Anna’s health was delicate, for she too had tuberculosis. As the Mercers traveled abroad in 1851, she became ill again. That fall a letter told him that Anna had died three weeks earlier in Liverpool. He was as devastated as Mercer. It was as though his own girls were instantly gone all over again, a flood of grief over each one made newly raw by the thought of poor little Anna gone as well, never again to dance laughing and tender-footed at a Newport fancy ball.³⁴

GOVERNOR OWSLEY HAD wanted to send Clay to the Senate when Crittenden resigned in the summer of 1848, but Clay had declined. Clay’s friends soon revived the idea, but for a lengthy period at the end of the year he resisted. He had been quite ill that fall, and he was not convinced that his service would be of any use in the country’s current situation. Friends holding up the example of John Quincy Adams left Clay unimpressed. Old Man Eloquent’s stint in Congress, Clay thought, “had the tendency to diminish instead of augmenting his reputation.”³⁵ Besides, he heard from Greeley, who was filling an unexpired congressional term at the end of the Thirtieth Congress, that the problems with the Mexican Cession would be settled soon by admitting the entire region as one or two states. There wouldn’t be much point in Clay’s going to Washington if that were the case. Late in the year, he thought it unlikely the Kentucky legislature would consider him, and he did not want his friends to press his candidacy. As usual, he feared it would be unseemly to appear to seek the office.³⁶

Clay changed his mind, though. By January he no longer felt he could decline, because Greeley’s cheerful forecast about the territorial question now appeared doubtful. Bills to admit California and New Mexico as one state never even came to a vote. Some, however, suspected Clay was acting from the worst motives. Did he harbor resentments that would prompt him to sabotage the administration? Bailie Peyton thought so and said Clay would “play hell.” He recommended that Clay be frozen out, but Peyton was hardly an objective observer. Not only was he a staunch Taylor Whig, he had once been embarrassed by owing Clay money he could not repay.³⁷ People other than resentful debtors, however, perceived in Clay a man bitter over his treatment in 1848 and inclined to do something about it. James Buchanan predicted Clay “will raise the d[evi]l there” as a “dying gladiator.”³⁸

Such expectations prompted Taylor’s supporters to oppose Clay’s return to Washington, but through Bob Letcher, Clay let it be known that he bore no ill will to anyone, and the pledge of benevolence persuaded Governor Crittenden to support him. On February 1, Whig majorities in both houses of the Kentucky legislature gave him an easy victory over Democrat Richard M. Johnson.³⁹ Combs chuckled that Clay’s return to the Senate would resemble “the sudden entrance of an old tom cat into a room of cheese-stealing mice & rats.”⁴⁰ Democrats even happily anticipated the prospect of Clay’s making trouble, though a clash with Taylor was less likely, friends said, because Clay’s ambition was “now rounded and smoothed by the corrections of time and religion.” Buchanan was counting on age to restrain the formerly impulsive Harry of the West. “Clay may regain his influence,” he mused, “but a man of seventy-three probably cannot do much.”⁴¹

Clay jokingly admitted as much himself. He felt like “the day laborer … who having worked all day by sun shine, is sent again at night into the fields to work by moon light.” He noted that he did “not apprehend any danger from lunacy,” however.⁴² Just how much work he intended to do, mischievous or otherwise, remained uncertain in any case. He did not attend the brief Senate session in March that confirmed Taylor’s appointments. When he went to the capital at the end 1849, he said he would “take no leading part, either in support of, or in opposition to the Administration.” Instead, he merely wanted “to be a calm and quiet looker on, occasionally offering a word of advice or pouring a little oil on the tempestuous billows.”⁴³

Neither foe nor friend thought that likely. Buchanan gazed on with grudging admiration tinged with cynicism: “In life’s last stage,” he misquoted Samuel Johnson, “what prodigies arise.”⁴⁴

WARM WEATHER BROUGHT cholera to Lexington that summer, and Clay was reported to have died from it, a rumor that persisted until July 10.⁴⁵ He chose not to press his luck. The extended illness the previous fall, the accident in New Orleans early in the year, and the chronic cough that was now his constant companion persuaded him to head north. On July 24, he left Ashland with James and his family for a month-and-a-half journey through Ohio to Upstate New York and Newport, Rhode Island. James, Susan, and the children enjoyed this brief holiday before leaving for Europe, James having received an appointment as chargé d’affaires to Portugal. Clay was gratified by the exuberant, occasionally adulatory treatment he received along the way. Crowds flocked to train platforms to catch a glimpse of him through the window of his car as locomotives took on water and wood. Sometimes he spoke, but he was more often so weak that he remained seated and merely waved.⁴⁶

In New York, he visited Martin Van Buren at his home, “Lindenwald.” The two had a grand time, sitting down one afternoon to feast on “cruellers, olecocks, suckettush, owgreet cheese,” and a large tureen of sauerkraut. Clay did not much care for the sauerkraut. With his handkerchief to his nose, he said, “Van, I’ve lived long, and encountered as strong opposition as any other man, but, to be frank with you, I have never encountered anything quite so strong as this.” At least, that was what the newspapers reported.⁴⁷

Only a few weeks later, he was back at Ashland. The trip had started precariously and was mottled by ill health, but the crowds had been heartening, and Clay felt better. His cough would not go away, though. He began to suspect that it never would.⁴⁸

WHILE CLAY TRAVELED, Taylor was bungling his first job as president, which was dispensing the patronage to solidify support for his administration and its programs. Immediately after the election, Whigs had clung to the hope that Taylor would sweep away the corruptions of “loco-foco misrule” to place “Departments … into new hands, and good, and things will go on more smoothly.” Whigs could hardly wait for March and inauguration day. “Hurra for the Old Hero!” they cheered.⁴⁹

But Taylor’s decisions, beginning with his cabinet, were disappointing. Nine months passed between his inauguration in March and the opening of the Thirty-first Congress in December, and during that time Taylor went on something of a rampage, making appointments that made little sense. Gradually deemed incompetent, he was compared to a “half cooked mutton chop” that had been hurried too quickly to the table. Even before he left for Washington, Clay was convinced that Taylor would be a one-term president.⁵⁰

Taylor’s clumsy use of the patronage squandered the momentum of 1848, depriving the administration of the necessary clout to push through its program. Some appointments clearly should have been made. Crittenden was the logical choice for attorney general, and many expected it to be offered to him, but he was not asked and remained offstage in the governor’s chair at Frankfort rather than in Washington, where he could have helped Taylor with the country’s crises. Possibly Taylor was fearful that a Crittenden appointment would invite charges of a new “corrupt bargain,” but that does not account for the trouble that Crittenden had in securing places for his friends. Such treatment by the Taylor administration verged on truculence.⁵¹

Another appointment that directly concerned Clay illustrated Taylor’s public relations problem. Shortly after Taylor’s inauguration, Clay asked him to appoint James to a diplomatic post, a request Clay felt was justified to balance John Tyler’s spiteful refusal to honor William Henry Harrison’s pledge to Henry Jr. eight years earlier. Taylor obliged by making James chargé d’affaires to Portugal. As the matter stood, it was so far so good, and had it been allowed to stand at that, it would have been the sort of gracious gesture that could heal breaches and salve wounds. Yet all the goodwill was lost when Taylor’s supporters complained that the president was toadying to Clay, and Taylor defensively revealed that Clay had asked for the appointment. The administration thus countered the impression that Taylor had bargained for Clay’s support by encouraging the perception that Clay’s support could be purchased with a patronage appointment. John Clayton and Reverdy Johnson made gloating remarks that painted Henry Clay as just another office seeker grubbing for a place at the trough.⁵²

Of all Taylor’s mistakes with the patronage, this was among the most dreadful. The post itself—chargé to Portugal—was hardly a munificent boon, and Clay was mortified at being treated so gracelessly.⁵³ In Frankfort, John J. Crittenden was dismayed by the talk of Clay’s supplication. Those who were saying this were “thoughtless or intemperate,” he told John Clayton. Their remarks would “take off all the good & grace of the act, &, perhaps, make things worse.” Crittenden said that Clay wanted to be Taylor’s friend. “Little sparks,” he warned, “are constantly falling around us that unless timely put out, might kindle a great fire.”⁵⁴

THE COUNTRY WAS in serious trouble when Zachary Taylor became president. Sectional harmony staggered under the weight of several controversies, some of long-standing and others of recent vintage. Northern agitation was on the rise to end slave trading in the District of Columbia, a national embarrassment for years. In earlier days, even southerners had found the trudging, forlorn coffles discomfiting. John Randolph one afternoon watched a lady making garments to send to Greek freedom fighters—a fashionable cause in the early 1820s—and motioned toward a group of young slaves in rags while acidly remarking: “Madam, the Greeks are at your door.”⁵⁵ In 1849, Randolph’s “Greeks” were still being bought and sold in the nation’s capital, but southern uneasiness over it had all but vanished. Many southerners would not tolerate any position that challenged their insistence that all aspects of slavery were beneficial.

When the House of Representatives considered resolutions banning the D.C. slave trade, southerners came together as never before. In December 1848, a caucus of senators and representatives from the slave states watched John C. Calhoun’s thundering rage over the growing assault on slavery. A committee drafted a Southern Address. Mostly Calhoun’s creation, it was such a belligerent statement that southern Whigs and quite a few Democrats refused to sign it, but in the coming weeks, events eroded that restraint.⁵⁶

Southern slaveholders brooded over the abolitionists’ Underground Railroad, a supposedly vast network of safe houses that helped ferry fugitive slaves to freedom in Canada. The Underground Railroad was more menacing in the southern imagination than it was in fact, and even the incidence of runaway slaves was more exaggerated in lore than in reality. Southerners nevertheless demanded a more rigorous fugitive slave law, insisting that the federal government not only help reclaim fugitives but compel the northern states to do so as well. Virginia’s James Mason was drafting a bill to accomplish this, and it was certain to unite the North in opposition.

Out west, Texas had a complaint of its own. As it had before the Mexican War, the Lone Star State still claimed that the enormous expanse east of the Rio Grande and north to the 42nd parallel was part of Texas. President Polk had supported the Texan position as one of the pretexts to provoke Mexico to war, but the federal government was determined to prevent Texas from expropriating half of provincial New Mexico. Quick-tempered Texans threatened to march on Santa Fe if necessary and take the disputed territory by force. The U.S. army was in Santa Fe. Texas did not care.

It was only one of the grave controversies involving the fate of the Mexican Cession. Early in 1848, even as Taylor’s supporters were jockeying to secure his nomination, the discovery of gold in California and the rush of adventurers that followed created a completely unexpected state of affairs. The sudden influx of tens of thousands of people overwhelmed what passed for government in previously sleepy California. Little law and less order prevailed as prospectors came with shady pasts. Shady women quickly followed, and soon life in the goldfields was a dangerous mix of prostitution, thievery, claim jumping, murder, and vigilante justice. Upright and peaceable Californians, yearning for shelter from this human storm, tackled the task of erecting a government, a project surreptitiously supported by President Taylor. A convention drafted a constitution and audaciously proposed skipping the territorial stage by applying immediately to Congress for admission as a state. Clay wryly observed that northern Democrats like Senator Stephen A. Douglas should be pleased because Taylor had “produced a Democratic Child,” but both Whigs and Democrats in the South were alarmed as they read California’s proposed constitution. It excluded slavery.⁵⁷

Under the weight of these controversies, the Union verged on disaster. Whig and Democrat differences crumbled in the South, and sectional unity to protect slavery at all costs took shape. As Clay prepared to head for Washington in October 1849, a bipartisan meeting in Mississippi called for a southern convention to assemble in Nashville the following June, its aim clearly to establish southern concord for action. The only question was how drastic that action would be.

WHEN CLAY ARRIVED in Washington, the news from home was troubling as winter raged in Kentucky. Eight inches of snow lay on the ground, and smallpox gripped Lexington. While the town set up hospitals and imposed quarantines, Clay tore into letters from Ashland, where a slave was ill and the family at risk. “John is lazy,” Clay complained, “and his mother never writes.” He felt guilty about leaving Lucretia, especially in the worst winter he could recall. He implored Thomas and Mary to look after her and hoped that duty and affection would make John attentive to her. “I do not think,” he said, “I will leave her again another winter.”⁵⁸

He moved into Room 32, a bedchamber with an adjoining parlor at the National Hotel. Sir Henry L. Bulwer, British minister to the United States, and his wife, niece of the Duke of Wellington, were neighbors. Clay did not bring a slave to Washington but hired a free black named James Marshall. Clay grew fond of Marshall and was generous in large and little ways toward him, often giving him time off to visit his family in Virginia. Soon Clay had settled into a pleasant routine that included socializing with the Bulwers, though he usually stayed in at night and retired early.⁵⁹

The mood in Washington disturbed him, and he feared that the anger of southern politicians would produce an “inflamed and perverted” response by the southern people. In mid-December, the House of Representatives struggled to elect a Speaker and fell into a round of coarse name-calling that degenerated into catcalls urging antagonists to “shoot” and jeering “Where is your bowie knife?” Clay watched from the gallery with Joshua Giddings. They were a study in contrasts. Several years of seeing such behavior had made Giddings numb to it, and he thought the scene in the House amusing. Clay looked “sober and grave.” He soon urged his friends in Kentucky and New York to arrange public meetings supporting the Union and denouncing secession.⁶⁰

He kept to his pledge to stay above the fray, requesting as the Senate organized committees that he not be appointed to any. The Senate chamber itself was comforting and familiar despite his long absence, still covered in the dark red carpet, its desks arranged in four tiers with galleries above. Before the renovation of 1835, only a bar behind the outermost desks separated the floor from the galleries, but now visitors were relegated to elevated seating that could accommodate about five hundred people and frequently did, many of them ladies eager to see political celebrities in action.⁶¹ Senators prided themselves on keeping that action deliberative, dressing for the part with morning clothes their usual attire. Members had access to two large snuffboxes on Millard Fillmore’s dais as well as wine and spirits, a custom retained from earlier days. That much was in Clay’s recollection, but many of the people he was to serve with were new to him, known only by reputation if at all, and a casual survey of the semicircled desks revealed another sobering change that was startling: over half the Democrats were under fifty; all but five Whigs were older than that.⁶²

Clay’s reputation preceded him, and his return aroused curiosity among members and guests alike, eager to hear him speak but uneasy over the possibility that his mental as well as physical powers were fading. He looked old and feeble, and he paused often to bend under the rattling cough, but his wit was still sharp and spontaneous, his timing impeccable, and his audience responsive. When the Senate discussed an appropriation to repair a dam on the Ohio River, Clay related how he had once been near it while traveling on Old Hickory, “a steamboat bearing a name rather ominous, I confess.” And in early December, one James Robertson appeared in the Senate gallery to announce that he intended to kill Henry Clay. The sergeant-at-arms took the man seriously and told Vice President Fillmore, who had Robertson arrested. Held for two weeks, he was clearly insane, and Clay judged him harmless as well. Upon his release, Robertson petitioned Congress for compensation, and Clay supported it in such a lighthearted way as to draw laughter and persuade Congress to give the man $100.⁶³

He was soon as popular as ever, and even political opponents on Capitol Hill were deferential, which was fortunate because he would need every shred of goodwill he could muster for the work ahead. But his popularity was also a problem on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where Zachary Taylor suspiciously watched the man his advisers were accusing of trying to reclaim the Whig Party. The relations between Clay and the administration were amiable in Clay’s view, despite Taylor’s never consulting him about anything. But the amiability was brittle. Clay declined to have dinner with Clayton and Reverdy Johnson, blaming his “cold.” But he was still angry over Johnson’s churlish remarks about James’s appointment, and a visit to Clayton’s office turned interminable when Clayton would not let him go, telling him about his official chores and many troubles. Not even brittle amiability described Clay’s relationship with Taylor, and there were warning signs early. Clay was irked that Taylor had now invented another story about the contents of the November 1847 letter in which Taylor had promised to step aside for Clay. In a political sense, this was ancient history, but Clay bristled. He knew exactly where that letter was—tucked among a bundle of papers tied up in a pasteboard container in his upstairs office at Ashland—and he had Thomas send it to him.⁶⁴

Letting the matter go would have been wise, but getting along with the president became increasingly difficult as Taylor nursed an exaggerated sensitivity. Clay took halting walks on the streets around the National Hotel, but he early discovered that if he made eye contact with anyone, he invited extended idle chatter. He was weary enough without the distractions. Taylor passed Clay one morning on Pennsylvania Avenue, concluded he had been snubbed, and was chilly when Clay called at the White House to assure him that nothing of the sort had been intended. Personalities and egos can pose petty obstacles to meaningful action, and the president was increasingly difficult to get along with.⁶⁵

THE CALIFORNIA QUESTION rapidly became a crisis of the first order. Despite the South’s dominance of national councils that included a slave-owning Louisiana planter in the White House, a preponderance in the cabinet, and a majority on the Supreme Court, the South was outnumbered in the House of Representatives, a result of the North’s faster-growing population.⁶⁶ Only by sustaining equality in the Senate could it continue to block injurious schemes such as the Wilmot Proviso and protect its “peculiar institution.” Southerners were deeply worried that California’s admission would destroy the fragile balance of fifteen slave states and fifteen free states in the Senate. Likely avenues of slavery expansion were vanishing as well, making improbable the reestablishment of senatorial sectional balance. Campaigns were already under way in the rest of the Mexican Cession to sustain the Mexican law abolishing slavery, and southerners were angry that California’s destiny, if unchecked, would go far to establish the pattern of free soil in a region obtained largely with the blood of southern soldiers.

The political problem within this otherwise complicated issue was itself simple. Northern Whigs wanted slavery barred from the western territories. Applying the Wilmot Proviso was an unlikely solution because southerners, whether Whig or Democrat, would not consent to it. The government could claim that because Mexico had abolished slavery in the region, it should not be reintroduced, hence doing nothing. Or the government could take California as the model to admit the entire Mexican Cession to the Union as a single state or multiple ones, bypassing territorial organization in order to absolve Congress of any responsibility for the region’s slave or free status. Southern Whigs, if not southern Democrats, seemed willing to tolerate the prohibition of slavery as a function of extant Mexican law rather than as a new policy from Washington. The Taylor administration consequently pursued a policy of “non-action” to avoid riling southerners. It embraced immediate admission to preempt congressional debates sure to destroy the little sectional accord remaining.

Like the patronage plan, however, Taylor’s approach to the western territories was better in theory than in practice. The political complexion of the Thirty-first Congress was a significant obstacle to the twin policies of non-action and admission. For one thing, Democrats were the majority in both houses and had to placate their powerful southern wing. Conversely, Whigs had to fashion a policy acceptable to their northern wing. Taylor did not help matters when special messages to both houses of Congress in late January revealed that he believed Congress possessed the authority to exclude slavery from the Mexican Cession. That admission gave northerners an opening, which frightened and angered southerners. Southern Whigs were especially troubled by indications that the president would not veto the Wilmot Proviso.⁶⁷

After these revelations, Taylor’s non-action plan was essentially dead on arrival. Southern Whigs began thinking about how they could use California’s admission to bargain for concessions in the rest of the Mexican Cession. Ideally they could kill the Wilmot Proviso and give Texas its extension to the Rio Grande. In January 1850, Clay was rumored to have contrived a remedy that sought to accomplish these very goals. His enemies reacted by presuming that anything from his pen had the primary purpose of showing up Taylor in order to supplant him as the head of the party.⁶⁸ In short, it was to be the Old Chieftain versus Captain Tyler all over again, only this time with Old Zach—the same old story, just a different antagonist. Clay’s motives for returning to Washington, however, were grounded more in patriotism than pride, for the vehemence of this new sectional dispute truly alarmed him. Possibly he was eager to rescue the Whig Party from Zachary Taylor, but the Union was foremost in his mind and saving the country was his primary goal. He started by going to the home of an old rival on a frigid, rainy January night.

It was January 21, the day the House received Taylor’s troubling special message. That evening at seven o’clock, Clay’s tall, gaunt form came haltingly to Daniel Webster’s door on Louisiana Avenue, just blocks from Clay’s rooms at the National Hotel. Clay did not have an appointment, but Webster instantly agreed to see him. They spent an hour together, Webster listening intently as Clay described his plan to resolve the crisis over the territories. Webster nodded and observed that Clay’s ideas might well satisfy the North and reasonable southerners. Clay rose to leave, content at least that Webster would likely help him and certainly at this point not oppose him. Webster, in fact, was not so sure, but the visit touched and saddened him. His visitor had not been able to stop coughing, and only an hour’s conversation had exhausted him. As he watched the faltering, sunken figure leave, Webster was certain of one thing if nothing else: Henry Clay was dying.⁶⁹

Eight days later, on January 29, Clay stood on the Senate floor amid high expectations. “I hold in my hand,” he said, “a series of resolutions I desire to submit to the consideration of this body.” And thus it began. The relatively brief speech that followed outlined eight proposals that Clay hoped would be “an amicable arrangement of all questions in controversy between the free and slave states.” He resorted to the most dramatic devices he could summon, even brandishing a fragment of Washington’s coffin to goad those forgetful of the Union’s glory.⁷⁰

With this appearance Clay began his last grand legislative endeavor. From January 29 through August 1, he would be on his feet in debate no fewer than seventy times. Not every instance marked a major speech, but many of his remarks were extensive arguments and defenses of his proposals.⁷¹ It was a killing pace for a man in his condition. Yet if sheer will could accomplish anything, he was determined to save his country. Webster knew that too—that at least Henry Clay would die trying.

CLAY’S JANUARY 29 speech was a brief preliminary to the major address concerning his proposal that he delivered a week later. People came from as far away as Boston to hear him. By midmorning on February 5, the Capitol was brimming with spectators so numerous they were blocking access to the Senate chamber. Galleries, cloakrooms, and corridors were jammed with people. The Rotunda overflowed, as did the library, and even the galleries of the House of Representatives sagged under the weight of a crowd that began emptying out toward the Senate as the time for Clay’s speech neared.

Clay was sick, but he came up Pennsylvania Avenue from the National Hotel with a purpose. His cough forced him to stop more than once as he hung on the arms of companions. He steeled himself as the crowd parted to let him enter the Senate. Spectators broke into applause. For the rest of the morning, the Senate’s routine business merely heightened anticipation. Finally, at one o’clock, Clay stopped writing and carefully put away his papers. As always, he spoke without notes. He stood slowly, partly from frailty, partly from habit. Ohio representative Salmon Chase’s daughter, Kate, would later remark that Clay was so tall “he had to unwind himself to get up.”⁷² The galleries again broke into spontaneous applause. The throng outside realized he was about to begin and raised a prolonged cheer. Clay had to wait for the sergeant-at-arms to restore order. For the rest of the afternoon, his performance was so focused that he did not even go to his snuffbox. After more than two hours, he was spent but not done, and he concluded his address with another two-hour performance the next day.⁷³

Clay tilted toward the North with his first four resolutions, which dealt with the Mexican Cession. Instead of making unpopulated expanses into states, as Taylor wanted, Clay relied on the fact that Mexican law had already excluded slavery in the region. He sought to satisfy southern demands that Texas have the Rio Grande boundary, but he wanted to lop off a considerable portion of northern Texas by running a new boundary from El Paso to the Sabine River. Everything north of that line would become part of the Mexican Cession. By virtue of Mexican law, Clay’s new northern boundary for Texas would abolish slavery in a considerable portion of the state as it currently existed. Slave owners in Dallas and the surrounding regions would be forced to move south or lose their property. Moreover, the number of slaves that this plan would free was staggering—about twenty thousand—making Clay’s initial proposal the most sweeping bid for mass emancipation until President Abraham Lincoln issued his proclamation twelve years later. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation occurred during the Civil War and had the force of arms behind it. Clay’s proposal was a desperate attempt to prevent a civil war and had nothing other than the prescience of his contemporaries to recommend it. The idea did not stand a chance.

Clay tried to make the proffer more palatable to Texas with the federal treasury. From the start of the controversy, Clay had always believed that Texas would prove the most difficult problem to solve.⁷⁴ Too much pride was in play, and too much territory was at stake. Yet he thought he had hit on a workable solution. Texas was financially strapped and deeply in debt. Investors across the country who had purchased Texas bonds had a stake in preserving peace in the Southwest. Clay’s friend Leslie Combs was a Texas bondholder, as was journalist Francis Grund. Clay hoped the bondholders would exert pressure for his boundary settlement in order to protect their interests. Grund, for one, had ties to William W. Corcoran, of the powerful bank Corcoran & Riggs, which would be brought into play in significant ways, such as canceling a large note it held from Daniel Webster. Clay reported that his neighbor Grund had taken “a wonderful liking” to him.⁷⁵

Clay knew that wide support for this crucial part of the compromise was most likely to be garnered with a pledge to pay Texas bondholders with federal dollars. Southerners opposed to the compromise sourly agreed.⁷⁶ Clay’s final resolutions, however, attempted to conciliate the South. He softened his call to abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia by declaring that slavery itself should not be abolished in the District without Maryland and Virginia’s consent. He recommended the adoption of a new fugitive slave law and stated that Congress had no authority to obstruct the slave trade between slave states.⁷⁷

When he was done, he had spoken for almost five hours over the span of two days to deliver one of the finest, most masterful orations of his career. Despite its flawed endorsement of maintaining slavery—an obvious pander to the implacable South—there was much good in the speech. There was also a prophetic warning in its stirring conclusion. He described the horrors of the war that was certain to follow secession. Eleven years later, Abraham Lincoln would consult Clay’s speech when framing his first inaugural address.⁷⁸

The immediate response was mixed at best. Northerners had suspected that Clay’s return to Washington was a plan to hoodwink them with a “second edition of the Missouri Compromise, and thus cheat the North again” by saving Taylor the trouble of vetoing the Wilmot Proviso.⁷⁹ “We think it would have been better for himself and his country, if he had remained at Ashland,” complained one Ohio editorial.⁸⁰ Many southerners were no happier, and some were livid. Clay had firmly rejected the proposal of southern moderates to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. “No earthly power,” he said, “could induce me to vote for a specific measure for the introduction of slavery where it had not before existed, either south or north of that line.”⁸¹ The sentiment, along with his reliance on Mexican law, was simply a way to implement the Wilmot Proviso without invoking its name. Virginia radical Beverley Tucker was blunt: Clay was a “humbug” and “charlatan.” Southern Democrats resolved to pick apart Clay’s proposals even before formal debate on them began on February 11.⁸²

The attacks by northern and southern extremists were to be expected. Clay was hoping to mobilize the center of both sections among the general population and in Congress by rousing what Lincoln would later call “the mystic chords of memory,” the ardent attachment to the idea of the Union. Again, he foreshadowed Lincoln when he extemporaneously commented to the Senate: “I consider us all as one family, all as friends, all as brethren. I consider us all as united in one common destiny, and those efforts which I shall continue to employ will be to keep us together as one family, in concord and harmony; and above all, to avoid that direful day when one part of the Union can speak of the other as an enemy.”⁸³

In 1850, Clay prayed that the center was still large and strong enough to hold firm the bonds of Union, to embrace his words as worth living by. Lincoln too would speak eloquently of the sections being not “enemies, but friends,” but by his time—just ten short years later—the center had crumbled away, and the words, while similar, had assumed an entirely different meaning. They had become worth dying for.

THE TAYLOR ADMINISTRATION rejected Clay’s plan, but even with northern Whigs joining forces with Free-Soilers, the president did not have the votes to pass his own. Nevertheless, Taylor was confident, as he told Massachusetts congressman Horace Mann, that he could “save the Union without shedding a drop of blood.” Mann also opposed Clay’s proposals but thought overt northern resistance would only unite the South behind them. “If we from the North are still,” predicted Mann, “it will be defeated by Southern votes and declamation.”⁸⁴

The crisis stalled into a tense stalemate. Southern Whigs like Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs became adamant about the right to expand slavery into the Mexican Cession in exchange for California’s admission as a free state. As far as Zachary Taylor was concerned, that was out of the question. Clay, as it turned out, was more flexible precisely because he had to secure the center. In the days after his speech of February 5 and 6, he realized his stand on sustaining Mexican law in New Mexico and Utah was alienating southern Unionists, a crucial part of that center. Thomas Ritchie exemplified that opposition. Friends during their youth in Richmond, the two had shared a few moments of pleasant conversation before Van Buren’s inauguration in 1837, but mostly they had been estranged since Ritchie’s condemnation of the “Corrupt Bargain” in 1825. Now, with the Union in jeopardy, they concluded it was time to put the past behind them.

Their reconciliation was a delicate matter that had to be accomplished quietly to avoid irritating their respective supporters, so long at odds. A mutual friend named James Simonton arranged a meeting, and late on the Sunday afternoon of February 10, while Washington drowsed, Ritchie and Virginia congressman Thomas Bayly came to Clay’s rooms at the National Hotel. For the first time in years, the two old men sat across from each other and talked, at first reminiscing agreeably about their youthful days in Richmond. Clay said he always read the Enquirer and had followed Ritchie’s career with friendly interest. They then moved to the reason for their meeting, a frank discussion of Clay’s proposal. Ritchie had already suggested through Mississippi senator Henry S. Foote that Clay’s plan should be referred to a select committee for formal presentation to the Senate as a package, and he repeated that suggestion with the stipulation that Clay drop his insistence on preserving the Mexican law that abolished slavery. That way, the South could be assured that the North would not admit a free California and then renege on opening the rest of the cession to slavery.

Clay pondered his options. He decided to give way on Mexican law. He agreed to push for territorial organization on the basis of popular sovereignty as a way to avoid making what was likely an unnecessary decision. Clay believed the region was unsuited to slavery in any case, and embracing popular sovereignty had the salutary effect of removing Ritchie’s opposition to his plan. Clay remained firm, however, in resisting the formation of a committee to bundle his proposals. As he told the Senate four days later, he believed Foote’s plan was “utterly impossible” as a way to settle the difficulties. In this regard, he was correct, for making one proposal reliant on all the others was bound to create more opposition in sum than the separate resolutions would provoke individually.

The old Whig and the aging Democrat parted amicably that Sunday evening, and Ritchie became a staunch ally in rallying moderate southern Democrats to the cause. Their rekindled friendship was soon common knowledge in Washington as Clay and Ritchie bantered at social events. Then one evening as he was seated across from Clay at a dinner, Ritchie jokingly referred to the Corrupt Bargain, and the table went as silent as it would have had Ritchie mentioned rope to a man on the eve of his hanging. “Shut your mouth, Tom Ritchie,” Clay chuckled. “You know perfectly well that there never was a word of truth in that charge.” Everyone laughed in relief. If Clay could save the Union, said Tom Ritchie, he would plant laurels on his grave. The old Whig and the aging Democrat understood each other at last.⁸⁵

Northern Whigs and President Taylor were quite another matter, however, as were the angry Democrats of the South led by John C. Calhoun. Indeed, Calhoun, Webster, and Clay—the three leading lights of the Senate, dubbed the Great Triumvirate by contemporaries—could all have assumed sectional identities as the crises of 1850 evolved. Yet Clay, the slave-owning westerner, insisted on a national solution to the sectional problems menacing the Union.

Thus the formal debate on Clay’s resolutions that commenced on February 11 became a prelude to what the other two members of the Great Triumvirate would have to say, and they did not weigh in until the first week of March. Calhoun on the fourth delivered—or rather, had delivered for him, because he was now so feeble that he could barely stand, let alone speak at length—a speech condemning northern political aggression and vowing resistance to requests for additional southern concessions on slavery. Few doubted that this definitive statement of the inflexible southern position was Calhoun’s swan song, but they were less certain of its effectiveness. Had it preceded Clay’s February address, it might have been more disruptive, but coming a month afterward it seemed oddly out of place and vaguely irrelevant.

That became more apparent three days later. Daniel Webster countered the blatant sectionalism of Calhoun’s speech. In an address spanning three hours, Webster lauded the idea of the Union, denounced fire-eating secessionists, condemned rabble-rousing abolitionists, and made a shocking bid to appease southerners by promising to support a fugitive slave bill.⁸⁶ While some northern moderates, including many Boston merchants, appreciated Webster’s attempt to restore sectional harmony, his pledge was unforgivable for most in the North and was especially appalling to New Englanders. Abolitionists denounced him outright. Zachary Taylor, for his own reasons, railed about Webster’s rank disloyalty to the administration. Generally, though, Webster’s tribute to the Union awakened the same sort of patriotic impulses stirred by Clay’s brandishing of the splinter from Washington’s coffin. Even better, Webster’s demonstration of flexibility on a thoroughly southern issue halted secessionist momentum as it headed toward the Nashville convention.⁸⁷

But what Webster did not do was also significant. He did not explicitly endorse Clay’s compromise, and consequently did not rally northern Whigs behind it. From that perspective, the speech calmed passions without clarifying problems, and, upon reflection, disappointed those it did not offend. Taylor was not given much to reflection in the best of times, but he could take some comfort in the fact that Webster had not embraced Clay. The president now expected his advocate in the Senate, William Seward, to unite Whigs behind the administration’s plan.

In the course of the year since Taylor’s inauguration, Seward had emerged as the president’s most influential adviser, which some Whigs found unfortunate. Webster thought Seward both “subtle and unscrupulous,” and many suspected that the New Yorker was committed only to his own advancement. He was no friend of Clay’s, and the administration expected him to demolish the Great Compromiser’s scheme with a major address, Seward’s first formal speech to the Senate. Seward had an arresting look about him—his gray-streaked red hair and aquiline nose made him look like an aging rooster—and though his voice tended to be droning rather than dramatic, he could say the most provocative things with an easy self-confidence that made men listen.⁸⁸

On March 11, Seward spoke to rows of empty Senate desks, although the few men present were important. Webster was there, as were Thomas Hart Benton and Tom Corwin. Clay sat in a remote section of the empty chamber, but he soon rose to come nearer, troubled by Seward’s words. As the New Yorker criticized compromises in general and Clay’s in particular, it became clear that his speech would be the inflexible northern response to Calhoun’s southern position. Any concessions to the South, Seward said, would endorse the idea that southerners had as much constitutional claim on the western territories as did northerners. Seward disagreed by citing what he called “a higher law than the Constitution,” a phrase so provocative that it became emblematic of the speech and its most memorable (and, in the view of many, regrettable) contribution to the debate.⁸⁹ Aside from trying to spike sectional reconciliation, Seward’s speech did nothing to advance any solution, including Taylor’s. Seward’s failure to promote the president’s plan dismayed even the New Yorker’s friends. After March 11, Taylor was angrier with Seward than with Webster or, if possible, even Clay, because Seward had grievously wounded the administration by alienating southern Whigs. Clay noted how Seward’s “late Abolition Speech” had estranged him not just from the White House but everyone else as well. As for Taylor’s presidency, Clay marveled that he had “never before seen such an Administration” that never consulted with Congress nor took a single prominent Whig into its confidence.⁹⁰

As the end of March drew near, Clay judged events as cumulatively disastrous. John Bell introduced yet another compromise plan, and Stephen Douglas’s Committee on Territories reported bills admitting California to the Union and organizing New Mexico and Utah as territories. Congressmen on opposing sides of these issues fell to fighting like common brawlers when they encountered one another on the streets and in taverns.

JOHN C. CALHOUN was dying. He had appeared only twice in the Senate since his March 4 address, once to hear Webster and finally to repeat briefly his opposition to any compromise that required the slightest southern concession. He was then confined to his rooms, weak but still alert. Clay wanted to see him. Hardly any but harsh words had passed between them for a quarter century, but Calhoun said to come ahead. Clay appeared for the appointment smiling and solicitous, but Calhoun’s nature would not allow him to shed his animosity, not even for an hour. Calhoun’s fellow South Carolinian Andrew Pickens Butler stood at the edge of the room and watched the two men, Clay with a kind smile murmuring idle pleasantries and Calhoun with a distant stare, giants in the twilight.⁹¹

Calhoun died on March 31, a Sunday. The Great Triumvirate was no more. “From the old heroic race to which Webster and Clay and Calhoun belonged,” New Yorker George Templeton Strong would lament, “down to the rising race of Sewards and Douglases and [Hamilton] Fishes is a dismal descent.”⁹² Both North and South saw giants in the twilight, passing.

Calhoun’s death had the immediate effect of bringing the Senate to a standstill on the sectional controversy while it eulogized him on April 2 and then on April 22 sent the customary delegation of six senators to Charleston to attend his funeral. During those three weeks, Clay reassessed the fate of his proposals. Whigs in both sections were not likely to support either his or Taylor’s plan, and Clay had already abandoned sustaining Mexican law to support popular sovereignty, a shift that essentially placed him in the moderate Democrat camp, or at least part of it. As the stalemate lengthened, it became difficult to trace traditional alignments. Party labels blurred. Democrat Thomas Hart Benton supported Taylor and opposed fellow Democrat Henry Foote, who continued to urge the creation of a committee to consider all proposals as one. Clay had long rejected what he derided as the Omnibus Plan, but he gradually realized that a broad range of political opinion wanted a comprehensive settlement. Moderate southerners had always been the key to a successful compromise, and they would not agree to a piecemeal arrangement that potentially had them giving up California without receiving any concessions.⁹³

For these reasons, Clay finally consented to Foote’s proposal to form a select committee. Almost everyone has judged Clay’s decision to support the Omnibus as a mistake, but he could see no other way to attract moderate southerners. Tempers were frayed by mid-April as the capital mourned Calhoun and suffered through “cold, damp, and rainy” weather.⁹⁴ The House was often in tumult, and finally the Senate too witnessed a shocking confrontation in which Henry Foote pulled a pistol on Thomas Hart Benton. After the pandemonium subsided, Clay wanted the two men to swear before a D.C. magistrate that they would not continue the quarrel, but Benton refused, insisting that he had done nothing wrong. Clay believed the country was running out of time.⁹⁵

On April 18, the day after the Foote-Benton fracas, the Senate approved the creation of a Committee of Thirteen to consist of six free state and six slave state senators with Clay as the chairman. The committee was moderate and generally procompromise with members such as Cass, Jesse Bright, Webster, and John Bell. The only radicals were abolitionist Samuel Phelps of Vermont and James Mason of Virginia, the author of the Fugitive Slave Bill. Yet none of that mattered, for the committee never met as a group. Clay in fact was the committee, and Washington emptied out as he worked to draft a report, only occasionally consulting with the others about its particulars. At the end of April, he completed his labors at “Riverdale,” Charles Calvert’s home near Bladensburg.⁹⁶

On May 8, Clay presented the report to the Senate. It revealed a remarkable change in his position. He detailed three bills with a lengthy justification. The first was Mason’s Fugitive Slave Bill with a couple of amendments added, and the second was the elimination of the D.C. slave market. But it was the third bill, an enormous contrivance that would be called Clay’s Compromise as well as the Omnibus Bill, that bundled together all the bills from the Committee on Territories organizing the Mexican Cession. Those proposals admitted a free California, established New Mexico and Utah territories on the basis of popular sovereignty, and adjusted the Texas boundary by having the state relinquish the Rio Grande for a payment of ten million dollars. He implored the Senate to enact these three bills, a plea he repeated on May 13.⁹⁷

Clay’s work was masterful in a way, a tribute to the classic political technique of reconciling diverse political interests without favoring any one of them to the extent of alienating the others. Southern Whigs found much to like in the plan, and Clay’s proposal to deprive Texas of New Mexican land was meant to placate northern Whigs. In both of his speeches advocating acceptance of his report, he held out an olive branch to the Taylor administration by praising it for patriotically forming its own plan, one that had made sense in January, he said, but had now become outmoded by the welter of events.

The Taylor presidency was actually in no position to cavil over anything in Congress at just that moment. A scandal involving influence peddling within Taylor’s cabinet led to a congressional investigation that tarnished the administration. “It is said that the President told the Cabinet that he liked them very much,” Clay noted, “and they told him that they liked him very much, and so they agreed that they would not dissolve that union.”⁹⁸ Even though the cabinet was exonerated of intentional wrongdoing, Taylor nevertheless lost the initiative in the compromise debates, leaving control of events to Henry Clay.

Taylor’s intention to veto anything that included concessions for California’s admission seemingly doomed Clay’s efforts, though, and the Great Compromiser decided enough was enough. He appeared before the Senate on May 21 to deliver a response to the administration’s obstruction and Zachary Taylor’s obtuseness. Most accounts of Clay’s May 21 speech describe it as a blistering denunciation of Taylor that surprised Whigs at first and then left them mildly angry because it seemed as though Clay did not care if he destroyed the party.⁹⁹ Yet the transcript of Clay’s remarks does not warrant the venom that would be directed at him in the columns of the administration press. Clay was forceful but not vicious, and he was well into his remarks by the time he began parsing Taylor’s plan, a task he described as a “painful duty.” Clay said, “Let us here, and not in the columns of newspapers, have a fair, full, and manly interchange of argument and opinion.”¹⁰⁰ More memorable than anything Clay said about Taylor, though, was his characterization of the stalled crisis over California, Texas, territorial organization, D.C. slave markets, and fugitive slaves as “five bleeding wounds” that would cause the death of the country if left untended. Taylor’s shortsighted plan only partially treated one of these hemorrhaging problems, leaving the others to do their harm.¹⁰¹

Clay knew at last that trying to woo northern Whigs away from the president was a futile task, and he moved closer to a greater reliance on northern Democrats along with a smattering of procompromise Whigs to push through the Omnibus, if it were possible to enact it at all. Success appeared unlikely. Nothing had advanced a particle from the situation as it had existed in December, and the stalemate continued into June with Clay exhibiting diminishing patience and increasing anxiety. Friends and foes of his plan meanwhile quarreled day in and day out, tweaking his proposals with amendments, amending those amendments, adjusting changes with provisos, scrambling with stipulations to seize slight advantages. Meanwhile, Rome burned.¹⁰²

Most depressing for Clay was a determined southern effort to extend slavery into the New Mexico and Utah territories. Southerners also adjusted his recommended Texas borders to give the Lone Star State more land, and lobbyists for Texas bondholders plied Congress to enhance the payout. These actions hurt the proposal by eroding its already reluctant northern support. The only cheerful news in an otherwise dreary June was that the radical plan to mount a secession movement had suffered a setback when the menacing Nashville convention sputtered to a tame conclusion. Yet any relief that that development afforded was soon dimmed by alarming news from Texas and New Mexico, where mounting Texas anger over the border and the presence of federal troops in Santa Fe moved the region closer to armed conflict. Indeed, as Congress drowned in words and floundered in parliamentary maneuver, the country confronted the sobering potential for civil war to break out in the arid Southwest. If many southerners were to be believed, it would spread eastward as Dixie drew daggers to defend the section’s property and honor.

As alarming as the prospect was, it left Taylor unmoved and unfazed. Southern Whigs trooped into the White House to warn him of dire consequences, but such visits just left him more irritated and inflexible. When the Georgian George W. Crawford refused as secretary of war to sign orders sending additional troops to New Mexico, fearing it was striking a flint at a powder keg, Taylor reportedly said he would sign the orders himself. If Taylor sent additional soldiers to Santa Fe, Alexander Stephens declared after a stormy final interview, he would personally begin impeachment proceedings in the House.

Clay’s count of votes for the compromise left him discouraged. The plan would fail unless he could muster more votes, especially with defections on the rise, the most disappointing one being that of Georgian John Berrien. Clay anxiously urged Willie Mangum to rush from North Carolina for the final contest at the end of the July.¹⁰³ Meanwhile, he kept up a façade of calm confidence. On the day before the Fourth of July recess, John Bell said Clay’s refusal to meet Taylor halfway was “an exercise of his moral despotism” and cried out in exasperation to ask if “Mahomet will go to the mountain, or the mountain shall come to Mahomet.” Clay spoke up: “I only wanted the mountain to let me alone.” The Senate and galleries laughed.¹⁰⁴

And there matters teetered as Washington sweltered. Zachary Taylor performed ceremonial duties of his office on an exceedingly hot and muggy Fourth. The event at the partially finished obelisk that would become the Washington Monument dragged on for hours under a blazing sun, and Taylor was parched and light-headed when he returned to the White House. He downed several glasses of iced milk and devoured bowls of fruits and vegetables. By that evening he was feeling poorly, his stomach cramping, and though he was intermittently at his desk during the next two days, the cramps and diarrhea drove him to his sickbed for good on July 7. The doctors then were able to work with a will at the business of killing him with cures. They dosed him with quinine and calomel, the latter a medicine laced with mercury, which might have been marginally effective for “cholera morbus,” which the doctors had diagnosed. But it was lethal in treating gastroenteritis, which Taylor likely had. On June 9, he died. Just like the first Whig president nine years earlier, the second one died in office.¹⁰⁵

Millard Fillmore became president amid a grave crisis. The new president could match anyone as to humble origins, for his youth was framed in want, hard men, and harder circumstances, exploited by an apprenticeship that worked him like a dog at the hands of masters intent upon keeping him ignorant and dependent. He rose above it with almost superhuman resolve to acquire an education in the law and to establish himself in politics, first in New York and then in Washington, gaining a reputation as a reliable worker and an unquestionably honest man. Along the way he acquired habits and manners that would have made him celebrated for sophistication had he not been so resolutely self-effacing. His manner in fact convinced many that he was a plodding, timid intellect, but not everyone fell into the trap of thinking simplicity equated with simpleness. Clay did not.¹⁰⁶

Although retrospective accounts would claim that Fillmore’s clear support for compromise immediately calmed the tense situation, actually nobody at the time was certain where the new president stood on the compromise. Fillmore knew that the country was in trouble and that the government stood amid a dozen deadly snares, each easily triggered by the slightest misstep. Clay at least thought the compromise had a much better chance of passage without the threat of a presidential veto hobbling it.¹⁰⁷ Fillmore moved deliberately, beginning with the formation of a new cabinet, correcting Taylor’s bungling by making selections in consultation with Webster and Clay, with whom he established “intimate and confidential” relations.¹⁰⁸ Webster replaced John Clayton at the State Department with Clay’s blessing. Fillmore very much wanted Crittenden for attorney general, but tapping him was a touchy business lest his estrangement from Clay spill over to the new administration. Clay, however, assured Fillmore that he would not mind seeing Crittenden go into the cabinet. Taking Clay’s gracious gesture as an opening, mutual friends tried to reconcile him and Crittenden and restore “the pleasant days of old,” but the effort failed.¹⁰⁹

Fillmore reckoned the rising tensions in Texas and New Mexico as the most urgent crisis. A deadline of sorts prodded the administration to immediate action because a special session of the Texas legislature was scheduled for August 12 and everyone expected it to be belligerent, possibly even to act impulsively. In the latter part of July, Webster came out strongly in support of the Omnibus Bill with the clear intimation that Fillmore would sign it into law, and the Senate went into frenzied contortions to end its extended stalemate. On July 22, Clay delivered to the Senate what turned out to be his last major address in the national legislature. He was exhausted but spoke at considerable length, and fatigue with spontaneity resulted in a wandering speech that nevertheless flashed with passionate eloquence. When James Mason tried to interrupt him, Clay hurled back a thunderous verbal assault that brought the galleries to their feet. He scoffed at the prospect of a Southern Confederacy: “I say in my place never! Never! NEVER will we who occupy the broad waters of the Mississippi and its tributaries consent that any foreign flag shall float … upon the turrets of the Crescent City—never—never!” And he minced no words in condemning disunionists as traitors who deserved the fate of traitors. The galleries again exploded into such whistling, stamping, raucous cheers, and applause that David Rice Atchison nearly snapped his gavel and went hoarse repeatedly shouting “Order!” at the wall of noise.¹¹⁰

In the wake of Clay’s speech, a baffling maze of attempts to tack on amendments and counteramendments to the Texas boundary adjustment consumed day after day. Clay’s report had established that boundary on May 8, and it had gradually emerged as the principal stumbling block. All efforts to adjust it had failed, and it had remained unchanged for almost three months, until July 30.

On that day, Maine’s James Bradbury, a Democrat, came up with the idea of postponing the decision about the border by authorizing a commission of Texans and federal officials to hammer out a resolution. Putting off the thorny problem would allow the rest of the compromise to become law. Bradbury’s modification set off another dispiriting flood of amendments seeking to adjust it, but it was Georgia’s William Dawson, a Whig, who successfully proposed that the New Mexico Territory not include the region east of the Rio Grande claimed by Texas until the commission fixed a boundary. Dawson’s narrowly approved proviso was immediately and correctly perceived as a way to give Texas de facto authority over the disputed area, a backdoor way of making it more difficult to establish a border favorable to New Mexico. The fact that only one northern Whig supported Dawson’s amendment revealed a surprising level of discontent and united sectional opposition.¹¹¹

For weeks, Omnibus opponents from both North and South had been buoyant, confident that the bill would never be steered safely through the rocky shoals of Taylor’s threatened veto and the clashing sectional currents of proslavery and antislavery.¹¹² Yet by the last day of July, these same men had become quite gloomy. Clay’s adroit parliamentary skills, his tireless labors, his cajoling and coaxing, all seemed likely to accomplish the impossible: almost everyone suspected that he finally had the votes for Senate approval of the Omnibus. Clay himself was not absolutely certain of success, but he had reason to be more positive than at any time in the previous two months. As the Senate took up the legislation on July 31, though, Maryland Whig James A. Pearce gained the floor and objected to Dawson’s proviso. Leaving Texas in control of the disputed region, he said, was clearly prejudicial to any claim New Mexico could subsequently lodge, and he moved to strike the portions that established the New Mexico Territory from the bill.¹¹³

Clay was stunned. Pearce had been on board for this compromise solution ever since Clay had reported it on May 8, and it was unthinkable that he could not have understood how fragile and precarious a structure it was. As with a house of cards, removing any one of them would collapse the whole. Some have suggested that Pearce was doing Fillmore’s bidding, that the president and the Marylander had concocted this strategy with the aim of mollifying northern Whigs.¹¹⁴ Pearce intended to remove New Mexico, thinking that he could quickly cleanse it of Dawson’s distasteful amendment and then just as quickly reinsert New Mexico with no harm done and in fact everything much improved.

He was, of course, dead wrong, as Clay knew all too well. Opponents were all too willing—eager, in fact—to remove New Mexico from the bill, a move that put settling the Texas boundary in jeopardy. Now Clay’s foes from both North and South saw their opening and lunged at it. Florida Democrat David Yulee led the successful effort to remove all provisions relating to Texas as well, an excision that knocked out every brace of support shoring up grudging southern acceptance of California’s admission. Consequently, provisions relating to California were removed too, the final nudge to the rapidly collapsing house of cards that represented six months of grueling labor. All of Clay’s bargaining, negotiating, conceding, maneuvering—all was shattered in the space of minutes. Clay and his supporters sat as if poleaxed while the Omnibus collapsed. As the roll calls progressed, Clay finally could stand it no longer. He slowly rose and pulled his withered frame down the aisle and out of the chamber. He looked a hundred years old. When it was over, his followers sat staring into the distance as their triumphant foes broke into strident celebrations, dancing in the Senate’s aisles, slapping backs, and laughing wildly as if they were as smashed as Clay’s work. Seward, more roosterlike than ever, almost crowed. They had beaten the man Benton acknowledged was one of the “best skilled parliamentarians … in America or Europe.”¹¹⁵

All that remained of the Omnibus was the Utah Territorial Bill, which easily passed 31 to 18 on the following day. When the news was reported to the House of Representatives, it was greeted with loud, derisory laughter.¹¹⁶

Clay was mentally and physically exhausted. With Washington bathed in steaming temperatures, he came back into the Senate on August 1, primarily to vent his rage at a defensive James Pearce for ruining his work.¹¹⁷ The discharge left Clay spent, and his heart and soul were drained, useless for any more toil on this thankless, futile task. He left the capital for the cooler ocean breezes of Newport. The Union remained in peril, but for the first time in his life, Henry Clay was too tired to care.