CHAPTER ONE

The Slashes

IN THE YEAR 1777 the United States was less than a year old and at war. It was also deeply divided over the wisdom of that war and doubtful in the main about its conclusion. And yet for much of the country the war was a distant event. Britain chose to focus on what it regarded as the hotbeds of pro-war sentiment, which were in the Northeast. The strategic decision to isolate New England kept the war centered on New York and made it remote for the rest of the thirteen erstwhile colonies, at least for a time. Now styling themselves as sovereign states united for the purpose of fighting this war and not much else, the new United States confronted the complicated and divisive nature of their enemy. The rebellion that had become the Revolution also became a civil war. Little wonder that many did not hold out much hope for success.

This was the world that greeted Henry Clay on April 12, 1777, two years almost to the day after the shedding of first blood at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts that marked the beginning of the shooting war with Britain. In that respect, he and his country were intertwined in both origin and destiny.

Henry Clay was a member of the sixth generation of a family that had been in colonial Virginia for more than a hundred and fifty years. John Clay was the first of that line, emigrating from England around 1612. Descendants maintained that John was the son of a Welsh aristocrat, but there is no definitive proof of the claim. If John’s pedigree was unremarkable, though, his industry once he arrived in the New World was admirable. Hard work and two good marriages brought him property and prominence. His marriage to Elizabeth—his second, her third—produced Charles in 1645. Ten years later, when John died, he left a considerable estate. Charles married Hannah Wilson and commenced something of a Clay tradition for producing large families. He and Hannah had seven children, three of them girls, though the female children had a distressing way of dying young, a peculiarity that tragically repeated itself in subsequent generations. Charles’s boys, however, were not only hale, two of them were well-nigh immortal. Charles Jr., born in 1676, lived to see ninety, and his older brother, Henry, born in 1672, nearly matched that endurance, dying in 1760 at age eighty-eight. Such longevity was rare anywhere in the world, let alone in hardscrabble colonial Virginia.

The elder Charles was a prosperous planter whose lands lay on the Virginia frontier, vulnerable to hostile Indians and persistently ignored by the colonial government in Jamestown. For those beyond the sight line of the eastern elite, prosperity did not necessarily mean security, and success did not breed prudence when it came to their relations with the Crown’s neglectful representatives. Sir William Berkeley’s administration proved indifferent to mounting protests, and Charles Clay joined Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion in 1676 that chased Governor Berkeley to the Eastern Shore of Virginia and briefly set up a rival government for the colony. Bacon’s Rebellion did not last long, but its occurrence made an impression on the royal administration. Charles Clay emerged from the event unpunished.

Clay lands were originally in Henrico County, a large district that spanned both sides of the James River. In 1749, the Virginia Assembly had established Chesterfield County out of Henrico, making it the new district within which sat “The Raels,” the Clay plantation that belonged to Charles’s son, the long-lived Henry. While in his late thirties, Henry married teenaged Mary Mitchell sometime before 1709 and began a family that would also number seven children. The youngest, John, survived Henry by only two years, dying young at forty-one in 1762. Around 1740, though, he married affluent Sarah Watkins and had two sons with her before her untimely death at age twenty-five; the elder of them, also named John, was Henry Clay’s father.

John Clay was born in 1742 and at age twenty inherited his father’s plantation, “Euphraim,” in Henrico County with about twelve slaves. Three years later, he married fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Hudson, the daughter of a substantial Hanover County family. The Hudsons owned roughly five hundred acres of cultivated fields and pasturage three miles from Hanover Court House and sixteen miles north of Richmond. Elizabeth and her older sister, Mary, were to inherit this property in equal portions, a legacy sure to enhance John’s already impressive holdings.

John and Elizabeth lived at Euphraim and in characteristic Clay fashion began working on a large family. Sadly, they had limited success, for their children died with a frequency remarkable even for a time when it was frightfully easy for children to die. They lost their first girl, Molly, so quickly that she does not even appear in many genealogical charts or biographical accounts. Their second child, Betty, lived only a little more than ten years, and the third, a boy named Henry after his paternal great-grandfather, only about eight years. Even the subsequent children were for the most part frail or just unlucky: George, born in 1771 and named after Elizabeth’s father, did not reach twenty, and Sarah, born some three years later, died at twenty-one.

George Hudson’s estate technically belonged to Mary and Elizabeth after his death in 1773, but his will also stipulated that their mother could remain on the farm in Hanover County for the rest of her life. She herself was elderly and feeble, and her need for care and companionship probably prompted the Clays to move from Euphraim to the Hudson farm in early 1777. Elizabeth was heavy with her seventh child, who turned out to be her fourth son. Thus it happened that Henry Clay was born at the Hudson home in Hanover County on April 12. They named him in remembrance of both his ancestor and his dead brother.

JOHN MADE ARRANGEMENTS to establish sole ownership of the Hudson farm by buying out the interest Mary and her husband, John Watkins, had in the property. It was there, his birthplace, that Henry would spend his first years. He responded to a question many years later about its exact location by casually observing that his memory was sketchy about the matter because “I was very young at my birth.” But he could approximately place it as having been “between Black Tom’s Slash, and Hanover Court-house.”¹ The farm sat in that part of Hanover County called “the Slashes” because of the swampy terrain covered with thick undergrowth. The house was probably much like the one at Euphraim in Henrico County, though possibly more accommodating for a growing family. The Hudson home was a clapboard structure of one and a half stories, three prominent dormer windows resembling doghouses jutting from the sloping roof and offering a pleasant view through old growth trees of nearby Machump’s Creek. Two large masonry chimneys of either stone or brick rose prominently on each end of the house, a mark of affluence when poor farmers had only one chimney, often made of logs.

The old Hudson place, which John and Elizabeth named Clay’s Spring, was modest in comparison with the grand mansions of the Virginia Tidewater. Clay’s forebears had at one time owned thousands of acres, but successive generations had divided the lands among numerous heirs. Earlier, until Virginia abolished entail in 1776, eldest sons inherited the lion’s share of estates, relegating their siblings to the ranks of lesser planters. Except for his father, most of Henry Clay’s paternal ancestors had not been eldest sons.

Clay’s Spring was a handsome establishment, though. In addition to the main house, an extra room had been added around one of the chimneys, and the yard was fenced. Various outbuildings helped in the workaday business of growing corn, tobacco, and wheat as well as livestock, all with the labor of about twenty slaves. The income from the farm and Euphraim, left in the hands of an overseer, supported a growing family. In addition to John Clay (born around 1775) and young Henry, Elizabeth bore another son, in 1779, whom they named Porter.

Little remains to draw a clear picture of Henry Clay’s father, John Clay. No physical description survives, nor is there any detailed recollection of memorable events in his life. He might have been an imposing man with an air of authority, characteristics suggested by references to him in legal records of Hanover and Chesterfield counties as “Sir John Clay.” Neither he nor any of his American ancestors had been knighted, and even the supposition that the title was an honorific out of respect for the family’s aristocratic British ancestry makes little sense. Years later Henry explained away the title as merely “a sobriquet” his father had somehow acquired. It was a credible explanation suggesting that like the honorary Kentucky colonel, John Clay was respected enough by both neighbors and the courts to merit the mark of natural nobility. It was, in any case, destined to be something of a family trait.²

It was not an easy life, but it must have seemed a good one, with God not only in His heaven but also very much in the household and life of the Clays. Generally, religion was not as important for Virginians as for, say, New Englanders. The rural setting with scattered, sparse populations meant that churches tended to be isolated in both material and spiritual ways. People wed in their parlors, christened their children in their homes, and buried family in graves dug on their farms rather than among orderly headstones in church cemeteries. Noah Webster, visiting from New England, observed these practices with sniffing disdain when he noted that Virginians placed “their churches as far as possible from town and their play houses in the center.”³

John Clay expended considerable effort trying to correct that. Around the time of his marriage he received “the call.” Eventually he became the Baptists’ chief apostle in Hanover County, working to change attitudes that were not necessarily irreligious but did find the Church of England emotionally unsatisfying and spiritually moribund. After the Great Awakening swept its revivalist fervor across the country, Virginians found the mandatory nature of Anglican worship—dissenters could be fined and even imprisoned—infuriating, and a simmering discontent over the lack of religious freedom helped stoke dissatisfaction with other aspects of British rule. Presbyterians became the dominant denomination in literate areas as converts in the Tidewater and Piedmont were matched by Scots-Irish migrations from Pennsylvania into the Shenandoah Valley. In the region between—Henrico, Chesterfield, and Hanover counties—the less literate gravitated to the Baptists, whose services were long on emotion and short on complicated liturgical teachings.⁴

Because of this, the number of Baptists markedly increased in the 1760s and 1770s, particularly among lower-class whites and slaves. Preachers could be unschooled and were always uncompensated, at least by any hierarchical authority. They came to their pulpits after an extraordinary religious experience referred to as “the call.” After John Clay received the call, he organized churches in Henrico and Hanover counties, including a large congregation at Winn’s Church in 1776. Most of his flock comprised a sect known as New Light Baptists, not exactly economic levelers but noted for simple attire and the practice of calling each other “sister” and “brother” regardless of social rank or economic status. They were clearly more democratic than class-conscious Anglicans, and congregations even allowed slaves to participate in worship services. That eccentric practice alone caused Anglican planter elites anxiety over the influence of Baptists, a troubling, troublesome lot who made even Presbyterians look respectable.⁵

Baptists took such contempt as a badge of honor. They and the Presbyterians grew increasingly angry about the power of establishment Anglicans, in particular evidenced by onerous taxes and reflexive persecution. At least once John Clay himself felt the weight of Anglican anger when he was jailed for his dissent. Such experiences, though, fueled rather than suppressed enthusiasm for religious liberty. As protests over British taxes became more strident, calls for spiritual freedom matched them. The drive for independence gained momentum, and the calls for disestablishing the Church of England became more vocal.⁶

Even though the fighting was far away, Virginia was in the middle of the American Revolution from the start, and no part of Virginia more than Hanover County. The county’s burgess in the Virginia Assembly, after all, was for years the famous firebrand Patrick Henry, who had been calling the king a tyrant for more than a decade when the shooting started. For his part, John Clay openly supported independence, tying it to Anglican disestablishment and helping to circulate a Baptist petition in 1776 pledging support to the new nation if it would stand for religious as well as political liberty. John and Elizabeth were notably fiery patriots in a region known for its radicalism.⁷

Then, in 1780, John became sick. It only took him a few months to deduce that his illness was fatal, though no one has ever been able to tell what exactly was wrong with him, only that it brought about an exceedingly untimely end to his life. He was only thirty-eight years old and had been hearty enough to make Elizabeth pregnant just before falling ill. Yet his decline was rapid and remorseless. We can only guess the pall it cast over the household. Aside from the emotional distress, there were sobering practical considerations: six children, the oldest only nine and the youngest an infant, would be dependent on a thirty-year-old expectant mother. Adding to these heartbreaking burdens, Elizabeth’s elderly mother was seriously ill as well. And there was more. Reports told of British raids in the area. As Clay’s Spring became the scene of two wrenching deathwatches, the Revolutionary War came to Virginia.

On November 4, 1780, John Clay summoned several neighbors to witness his last will and testament, a simple document that named Elizabeth custodian of both plantations until the children grew up or she remarried. He wanted the estate kept intact until the children came of age in any case, which was eighteen for the girls and twenty for the boys. The oldest, George, was to inherit Euphraim, and Clay’s Spring was to be sold and the proceeds divided among all the male children. Each child, including the girls, was to have an equal share in the livestock. John left two slaves, specified by name, to each child. Henry was to inherit James and Little Sam.⁸

It was as thorough a document as the modest patrimony of John Clay warranted. The settlement of the estate’s land on the oldest son sustained the habit of primogeniture. Clay anticipated Elizabeth’s remarriage as likely for a young widow and consequently made modest provisions for her maintenance, lending for her use the Henrico County property slated for George, obviously in the certainty that he would take care of his mother should she remain a widow.

His affairs in order, John Clay lingered through his last winter. He had started it “very sick & week [sic]” and never regained any lost ground.⁹ He and his mother-in-law sank together—she would survive him by only a few months—and when spring came, shortly after Elizabeth bore him another child, he died. The child, a girl, died too.

AS CLAY’S SPRING mourned these losses, the war came not just to the Slashes but to Elizabeth’s doorstep. The British had been in Virginia for months, starting when former American general Benedict Arnold completed his transformation into turncoat by accepting a British general’s commission and setting out on a hunt for forces under the Marquis de Lafayette. Then Lord Cornwallis abandoned his indecisive southern campaign to head north out of the Carolinas. By the spring of 1781, the war’s focus had shifted to Virginia as these varied British contingents converged in the state. In the fall, the war would end there as well, when Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau at Yorktown.

That spring, however, Washington was encamped outside New York City, Rochambeau was at Newport, Rhode Island, and Lafayette was on the run from Cornwallis’s superior numbers. Virginia was extremely vulnerable, especially its isolated western settlements. The campaign mounted by Cornwallis had as its primary objective a storage depot at Point of Forks on the upper James River, and he dispatched a large force to that place. A smaller one under Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton was to harry the countryside by destroying its farms, a legitimate military objective because those farms could feed Patriot forces. Tarleton’s other goal was to disrupt Virginia’s government, which had repaired to the supposed safety of Charlottesville when the British entered the state.

Tarleton began by burning several buildings in Hanover Court House before fanning his men out across the county.¹⁰ They came to Clay’s Spring in late May, possibly the day after the family had buried John Clay. As Tarleton’s dragoons approached, Elizabeth hurried her overseer—a white man running the farm during John’s illness—out the back door, sending him scampering into the woods to avoid capture. It was a wise move. Tarleton’s men meant business.

That business was one of proficient if random destruction and simple theft. The British soldiers shouldered their way into the house, ransacked it for valuables, and packed away any food they could not eat on the spot. They smashed furniture and slashed open feather beds. It snowed feathers in the yard as they emptied the mattresses out the windows. Others chased chickens to kill and throw across their saddles. They rounded up some of the slaves to take away. Spying the new grave, they inspected it for hidden treasure by running their swords into the freshly turned earth.

Elizabeth Clay watched all this with Porter and Henry clinging to her skirts. The children were terrified. It is difficult to know how much of what happened next was embellished by family legend and postwar patriotic fervor. Possibly Clay’s campaign biographers later exaggerated events; it’s hard to resist a good story. Clay himself was quite young (only four), but the event remained understandably vivid for him for the rest of his life: the sight of those strangely costumed men on snorting horses with flashing swords that cut up the family’s beds and stabbed at his father’s grave, the smashing of furniture, the chaos of shouting men, squawking chickens, and the frightened slaves standing amid the prancing, crisscrossing horses, all under the soft snowfall of the mattress feathers; and his mother, her arm tight around his shoulder, pressing him to her side, Porter crying, her voice rising in anger, and the man they later learned was “Bloody Ban” himself—a name given him for having massacred Abraham Buford’s surrendering Patriots just a year earlier in the Carolina Waxhaws, an act that had made the phrase “Tarleton’s Quarter” a description for warfare without mercy. Possibly Elizabeth angrily denounced Tarleton, as family lore was to recall. But it is doubtful that he paused, as was later said, to pull from his pocket a small pouch from which he emptied a clutch of coins onto a table, explaining as he stalked out to mount his horse that it was to make up for the mess.

The raid was brief because the British had more important quarry. Tarleton and his men were soon heading for Charlottesville, where they put the Virginia Assembly to flight and nearly captured Thomas Jefferson at his home, Monticello. They had indeed left Clay’s Spring a mess. Grandchildren later told how Elizabeth scorned Tarleton’s gesture as much as she had him. She swept up the coins, they would say, and angrily hurled them into the fire.¹¹ This scene of this quaint family legend almost certainly did not happen. Yet, given what Elizabeth Clay faced that spring and how she managed it all, there is no reason to doubt her capacity for defiance. The destruction of her house was quite real, a grim accompaniment to the destruction of her life with the loss of her husband and baby on top of the burden of tending to her dying mother while taking care of six children. There is not a single recollection, however, of Elizabeth Clay’s ever uttering a word of complaint, let alone showing any self-pity, as she put her family’s life back together. Instead, she immediately commenced rebuilding the farm and her children’s future. She must have wept as she faced the insurmountable odds, braced for her mother’s death, and buried her husband and baby, but Henry did not see it. This remarkable woman probably did not throw Tarleton’s money into the fire, because he probably did not leave any, but in the months that followed she performed quiet deeds of even greater courage.

At least the war did not come back. In only a few months, in fact, word filtered back from the east of the British surrender at Yorktown. Yet the good luck of peace or even her personal fortitude would not better Elizabeth’s situation. For one thing, when John died he had not finished paying John and Mary Watkins for their share of Clay’s Spring. This did not pose a problem—the Watkinses were moving to Kentucky and did not want the property—but it did become a complication when Elizabeth remarried less than a year after John’s death.

The brevity of her widowhood was not unusual in a world framed by essential material want. She could not long have provided for her family otherwise. And Elizabeth herself presented an attractive prospect to suitors, a still youthful woman in possession of some measure of an estate that included salable property. As it happened, her suitor did not have to go far to find her, and she did not have to wait long to be found. He was Henry Watkins, the younger brother of her sister’s husband, John. In fact, he was even more family than that: John Clay’s mother and Henry Watkins’s father were sister and brother, making him John Clay’s first cousin. The family connections were not coincidences, nor should they be ridiculed as resulting from the ignorant practices of the inbred. Rather, they were a demonstration of the clannish nature of colonial Virginia, where the most elite families often included married cousins because of the scarcity of marriageable upper-class prospects. For the Clays and Watkinses, it was evidence of the interwoven nature of communities in rural settings.

For reasons not clear, Elizabeth delayed probating John’s will. When she remarried, however, the will stipulated the termination of her role as custodian of the plantations, the sale of Clay’s Spring, and the distribution of the assets to the children. In February 1782, everyone agreed to let the court sort the matter out. The judge ordered the property sold to retire the debt on it, with the remainder going to the heirs. Everyone apparently anticipated this sensible solution, and Elizabeth’s new husband quickly resolved the matter of debt and distribution by purchasing Clay’s Spring from the estate, a belated wedding present for his bride.¹²

Henry Watkins was a captain in the Virginia militia, a pleasant young man, Hal to his friends. He was also a man of good prospects as well as current substance, as his purchase of Clay’s Spring indicated. He brought to the marriage seventeen slaves (the family now owned a total of twenty-five) as well as livestock and two carriages. An affront to modern sensibilities, the presence of slaves was in that time simply another aspect of daily life. The aspiration to live as English country gentlemen was only just that for colonists in the decades before Henry Clay’s birth, but the wealth of the great tobacco barons and their reliance on slave labor to build grand fortunes created a southern oligarchy that lived in material grandeur and moral ambiguity. The middling farms with the modest clapboard houses—the place in the social pyramid of the Clays and the Watkinses—also relied on slavery for more than a source of labor. Social status came with owning slaves, determining everything from the circles one moved in to the girls one could court and marry.¹³

Years later, when it became politically prudent to claim impoverished origins framed by hardship, Henry Clay would say that he grew up an orphan in straitened circumstances. Campaign biographies took the cue and succeeded in creating the myth that he came of age with callused hands and in chronic want, his good character the result of his efforts to claw his way out of it. Central to that story was the depiction of him as riding a horse laden with sacks of dried corn to a gristmill on the Pamunkey River and dutifully bringing back the meal to his mother. Hanover County neighbors were said to have taken to calling Henry “the Millboy of the Slashes,” and it became a staple of credulous biographers to hang his youth on the hook of that nickname. But it was all an invention of later years, and the poverty it implies was simply never the case. Henry would have done chores, as expected of any boy on a farm, but hard toil on a plantation with twenty-five slaves, as well as long trips to a local gristmill, were not likely. Archaeological evidence indicates that there was a mill on the Clay-Watkins property in any case. Henry Clay was not an orphan, was not impoverished, and was not the Millboy of the Slashes.¹⁴

Rather, he lived in relative comfort with enough leisure time to learn the fiddle, spend languid afternoons fishing in nearby streams, and become an excellent horseman. He lived in an area with few towns, and what appeared to be villages were actually parts of plantations, their buildings in small clusters bordering cultivated fields. These self-sufficient establishments made towns unnecessary. Place names referred to trail crossings or churches or small county seats denoted as such by having Court House attached to their names, as in Hanover Court House. Roads were often only trails that crossed the region to speed travel and commerce between plantations that lay along rivers, the easiest avenues for trade, the real roads of empire. The county seat had a small store that doubled as a tavern. In Hanover Court House it was Tilghman’s Ordinary, owned by Patrick Henry’s father-in-law. There was also a courthouse with a little jail attached. The monthly court session or periodic militia muster transformed these somnolent places into centers of festivity and retail. At Tilghman’s, men gathered to play cards, discuss politics and horseflesh, and drink. During elections, the courthouse green became the setting for political speeches, some of them memorably delivered by the county’s renowned orators, Patrick Henry foremost among them. Novice speechmakers honed their skills by watching such masters and trying out material and techniques before the squinting faces of discerning crowds. Young Henry grew up observing these performances and how they played before audiences, marking what persuaded listeners and, more important, what did not. He was a quick study.¹⁵

Often the most learned man in the community was the local preacher, and a youngster’s first semblance of formal education would be under his guidance. John Marshall took lessons from the Reverend Archibald Campbell in the generation before Clay’s, and Nathaniel Hawthorne a generation afterward first learned from a country preacher as well.¹⁶ Clay probably received a few years of schooling at the Vestry House of St. Paul’s Church near his home, but details are lacking. As he grew older, he was allowed to go in to Hanover Court House, where a transplanted Englishman named Peter Deacon ran a field school in a one-room log cabin. Clay spent three years at Deacon’s school, where the basic elements of the fabled Three Rs (readin’, ritin’, and ’rithmetic) formed the essentials of a bare-bones curriculum designed to teach children under nearly impossible conditions. The product was a serviceable amount of learning, but nothing more. It was the only formal schooling of Clay’s youth, and he always lamented the deficiencies that resulted and admonished children, both his own and those of friends, to mind their books.

In Deacon’s school, students widely ranging in age and background were assembled at the same time in that one room, making for a disciplinary challenge even more daunting than the pedagogical one. Deacon had a past clouded by strong drink, and he often took the edge off the day with liberal doses of peach brandy. Mild inebriation made him an easy mark for mischievous boys, but it could also make him irascible. Deacon once struck Henry with “a magisterial blow” that left a mark for “a long time.”¹⁷

Much of Clay’s learning took place outside the classroom. In addition to studying the budding and established politicians of Hanover County, he soaked up the culture of the planter class that included a near obsession with horse racing and gambling of all kinds. He saw how men drank—Deacon was a cautionary example—how they joked, and how they argued. Boys sneaked out to drink and smoke; they tried to compromise girls, some willing but most disappointingly chaste. Mischief was usually harmless, if exasperating. And most boys were expected to go out on their own early, to become self-sufficient and ready to shoulder responsibility at an earlier age than in our time. The Revolution taught a generation that lesson with a vengeance, as youngsters had taken up arms to grow up fast with war a harsh tutor. The concept lauded by Thomas Paine in Common Sense of America separating from the parentage of Britain had practical application in the changing relations of parents and children in this new, boundless country.¹⁸

IN ONE SENSE, then, it was not unusual that Henry Clay would leave his family at an early age and strike out on his own. But in another sense, the circumstances that brought this about were peculiar.

It had to do with his mother and stepfather’s move to Kentucky. In the mid-1780s, John and Mary Watkins moved to Kentucky’s Woodford County. Soon they were sending back stories about the region’s potential and their success in it, none of it an exaggeration. John was acquiring significant amounts of land and was well on his way to becoming a leader in the growing region. In 1792, he helped establish the town of Versailles (named after the French palace, a tribute actually to Lafayette, but with the Americanized pronunciation of “Versayles”). He would participate in the convention that drafted Kentucky’s state constitution and would serve in the first state legislature. In a few short years, he became eminent in the new state’s affairs while growing rich to boot, an example that beckoned Hal to follow.

The need to support his family was the deciding factor. He and Elizabeth had added a daughter and a son of their own to a growing brood strained by the diminishing chances available in Virginia. The best lands were taken, tobacco had depleted the soil of the rest, and even the fertile Shenandoah Valley was filling up with settlers coming south from Pennsylvania. Kentucky was a place of seemingly infinite opportunity and limited risks. The decision to go was simple.

Not so simple were the matters of disposing of their Virginia property and deciding who would make the journey. As for the property, it became a case study of how estates, children, and remarriage could complicate the simplest arrangements. The eldest Clay child, George, died in 1787 (possibly 1788) before coming of age. He therefore never took possession of Euphraim, the Henrico County plantation. Apparently forgetting the provision that only loaned Euphraim to Elizabeth until she remarried, Hal and Elizabeth sold the property along with Clay’s Spring as they prepared to leave Virginia. Yet John Clay’s will clearly instructed that if George were out of the picture, the proceeds from Euphraim were to go to the other Clay children. In short, John and Elizabeth kept the money from the sale of property that did not belong to them. That they meant no injury to the children was proven years later when the mistake was corrected by a friendly lawsuit to have the property restored to John, Henry, and Porter Clay. The suit was the work of Henry, by then a successful lawyer, a career that confirmed the decision John and Elizabeth made about his future as they left for Kentucky at the end of 1791.¹⁹

Hal Watkins was a good man who never sought to take John Clay’s place for his children but instead worked hard to provide them with all their material needs while setting an example and acting as a friend. By all accounts, the Clay children responded affectionately to this amiable, even-tempered man who made their mother happy. Given that picture of a contented home, it has never been adequately explained why Hal and Elizabeth decided to leave Henry behind when they moved to Kentucky. The tradition of young men starting life early might answer except that John Clay, two years older than Henry, went to Kentucky with the other Clay siblings, Porter and Sarah. Henry could not have wanted to stay behind. He no doubt felt very much as Horace Greeley would years later when his family left Vermont after placing him in an apprenticeship. Emotionally devastated by the separation, Greeley would recall the long walk to his new place of work as the most wrenching moment in his life.²⁰

Henry Clay was never so frank in his recollection of this pivotal event in his life. Possibly he better understood the reason for it. Just before leaving Kentucky, Hal Watkins took Henry to Richmond and placed him in the employ of Richard Denny, who ran a successful emporium. Hal told his stepson that this job would be temporary. Hal had taken the measure of Henry’s magnetic personality, his quick mind and easy smile, and his ability to work hard without turning tasks into drudgery. Something about the gangly fourteen-year-old next to him in the carriage on the way to Richmond had convinced Hal that Henry should not go to Kentucky.

To that end, Hal pulled some strings and called in some favors. Colonel Thomas Tinsley, delegate to the state legislature from Hanover County and acquainted with Watkins through their militia service, had a brother named Peter who was the clerk of Virginia’s High Court of Chancery in Richmond. Using these connections, Hal Watkins secured for Henry an assistant clerkship when one came available. Until then, he would work at Denny’s store. Hal left Henry there, returned to Hanover County, and soon afterward set out westward with his family.

Although she went to Kentucky, Elizabeth Clay Watkins never really left Henry, even though they would not see each other again for six years. She loved him and seemed always confident that he would do well, that his natural talent would surmount all obstacles, that his happy manner would best all adversity. His career does not seem to have dazzled her, possibly because she had expected him to be successful. For his part, he loved her in a quiet but no less profound way. The day before he died, he would see her in his room at the National Hotel, even though she had been dead more than twenty-two years. “My mother, mother, mother,” he would murmur, perhaps trying to find with his small hand the skirts he had gripped so many years before when “Bloody Ban” had come calling and she had been so brave; or possibly it was a greeting at the end to close the circle from the farewell, here at the beginning, on the day that he and Hal set out for Richmond, leaving his mother and his brothers and sisters at the little clapboard house in the Slashes.²¹

CLAY WORKED IN Denny’s store for about a year, stocking shelves and running errands. When business was brisk, usually when the legislature was in session and the town filled with people, he helped behind the counter. Making deliveries gave him a chance to explore the city, which was at first big and imposing for a country boy. Richmond was divided into two sections. The lower town ran along the James River, the commercial center of the city, where wharves jutted into the river and played host to ships up from Norfolk, their holds full of luxurious items from all over the world as well as ordinary goods. Everything about the lower town seemed fresh, new, and substantial, because it was. A devastating fire had leveled almost the entire district in January 1787, the flames leaping from building to wooden building, consuming them as though they were matchboxes. In four short years, the lower town had risen from the ashes like a brick phoenix, masonry the now preferred, fire-resistant construction standard. Richard Denny’s store sat on what was called “Brick Row” on Main Street and sold everything from bonnets to books as well as playing cards and liquor.²²

Henry’s errands and deliveries also took him to Richmond’s other section, which sat on a range of hills and was called the upper town. There fashionable ladies and gentlemen of the merchant and governing class lived in fine homes, and there Virginia’s state government operated out of impressive buildings in varying stages of completion. Atop Shockoe Hill, the largest with the most commanding vista, the capitol was taking final shape after a design Thomas Jefferson had worked out while serving as minister to France. Jefferson based his plans on a Roman temple to which he had added Greek influences to create the “Temple of Liberty” that awed travelers. Citizens were proud of its immensity and elegance, and young Henry, who had never seen a man-made structure nearly so large, was surely impressed.²³

In 1792, an assistant’s place opened in the Chancery, and as promised, Clay was summoned to fill it. The job was important, at least for him. It was certainly a step up from the shop where he pushed a broom and ran errands. It was a step up in situation as well, taking him to the upper town. The post was modest, to be sure—assistant clerks were at the bottom of a long pecking order—and being the newest of the assistant clerks would place him lowest among the lowly boys who toiled at tedious chores that were as mindless as they were endless.

Henry’s clothes were a measure of the importance he placed on the impression he hoped to make. His suit, according to some reports, had been made by his mother, her farewell present to help him make a good start in his new life as she embarked on hers. These were his best clothes, then, and though they were not as fine or as elegant as he would have wished, he made sure they were cleaned and pressed.

Thus armed with the optimism that comes with looking one’s best, but also with the ambivalence and self-consciousness of a teenaged boy about to launch himself into a new and challenging job, young Clay entered the offices of the Chancery. The boys in the assistant clerk’s office were not much older than he, if at all, but they were quite different, a fact evident at first glance. They were jaunty, exuding a worldliness that had them surveying him with a mixture of indifference and contempt. The gulf separating them was instantly apparent in his clothes. Henry’s suit was a cotton and silk blend, salt-and-pepper “Figginy” (slang for Virginia homespun). It would never have seemed shabby in the Slashes, but the boys in the Chancery looked as if they expected it to shed hayseeds. Worst of all, Henry had tried to spruce up the coat by liberally infusing it with starch, and the unexpected result was that the coattails jutted out at absurd angles. On his gangly frame, the coat made him look like a tall bird with its tail feathers splayed. Henry’s disheveled blond hair, so fair it looked white, topped off the effect. The boys were soon laughing at him.

He laughed too. When they teased him about his clothes, he agreed that they were absurd. When they mocked his use of quaint country phrases or his mispronunciation of a word, he joined the merriment. Gradually the smart jests at his expense didn’t seem so amusing. In fact, the boys were soon disarmed by their new companion, particularly when they discovered he could take ribbing with the best of them. They were equally delighted to discover that he could dish it out just as well, summoning the hilariously appropriate ad lib effortlessly. It was clear that they had a first-class wit in their ranks, one a good deal quicker than many of them.²⁴

Henry was lucky that two of these boys were from Hanover County. They eased him into the routines of the office, and everyone was soon showing him heretofore undiscovered pleasures of the city. An early biographer claimed that Henry’s resolve to improve himself through constant study left him little time for frivolity, but that is simply a fabrication.²⁵ About the most harmless of Richmond’s amusements was the theater, where some good and many bad productions could be enjoyed fairly cheaply. Other diversions were riskier and more expensive, and could be corrosive. The most popular pastimes were drinking and gambling, the latter evidently irresistible for Virginians of all classes but particularly among gentlemen. Mid-eighteenth-century colonial governor Francis Fauquier was said—likely an exaggeration—to have single-handedly popularized Virginians’ addiction to games of chance, especially dice. The somber burdens of the American Revolution had curbed the enthusiasm for gambling, but ensuing years had revived it with a vengeance.²⁶ In Clay’s time, cards had replaced dice as the preferred way to part fools from their money, and he developed in these years a lifelong passion for card games. Gambling had become so rampant by the time Clay arrived in Richmond that the legislature, shocked by the spectacle of substantial citizens ruining themselves at gaming tables, enacted a law in 1792 prohibiting the loss of more than twenty dollars a day. It was no use, though. Even legislators who had passed the law and magistrates charged with enforcing it continued merrily to wager their way to ruin, earning the city the distinction of having more gambling “than any place the same size in the world.”²⁷

Clay did not have a great deal of money, and prudence seems to have kept his gambling ventures from getting out of hand. Others were not so fortunate. A man could lose a week’s earnings on the turn of a card. Worse, when such stakes were mixed with strong drink, wagers could lead to fisticuffs, even murder. These were sobering lessons indeed.²⁸

The biographer who depicted Clay as always bent over a desk deep in study was exaggerating, but the young man did not completely neglect his improvement. Richmond made him aware of the many things he did not know, a valuable lesson in itself. In Clay’s case, it spurred him to an intellectual program of his own devising. He would never match Jefferson’s single-minded discipline in this regard: even given the time, Clay did not have the temperament for twelve-plus hours of daily reading or the systematic disposition to arrange his studies in clearly delineated categories. He did read, of course, but he preferred less solitary forms of refinement. He joined a rhetorical society formed by young men eager to practice public speaking and sharpen their debating skills. These were exhilarating times, as the administration of George Washington coped with the French Revolution and the European war it had spawned. Arguments about how best to repair the economy and fund a stable currency stimulated debates about the new constitutional government. The club accordingly discussed history, philosophy, and economics but usually filtered the topics through the exciting aspect of current affairs.

As a member of this club, Clay found himself in the company of talented men. Edwin Burrell, Littleton Waller Tazewell, Walter Jones, John C. Herbert, Bennett Taylor, Philip Norbone Nicholas, and Edmund Root were members, and it is notable that in such a gifted group he gained the reputation for being the most effective if not the most learned speaker. Dubbed by its members the “Democratic Club,” they fancied themselves daring radicals as they applauded the success of the French Jacobins’ supposedly democratic reforms. They endorsed, as though it mattered, the Democratic-Republicans, led by fellow Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and condemned, as though it mattered, the Federalists within Washington’s administration for their ties to the British.²⁹

Yet it was neither his reading nor his debating skills that helped Clay move from his lowly post as an assistant clerk up to the main Chancery office in only a year. It was his handwriting. Clay later credited Peter Tinsley with putting him through the penmanship drills that produced his clear, neat script, ever afterward the delight of correspondents as well as historians. The claim was possibly another invention to paint his youth as less privileged. A 1793 letter indicates that Clay’s penmanship was actually quite good before he went to the Chancery. Written just weeks after he was purportedly under Tinsley’s instruction, the letter shows young Henry’s handwriting to be, if anything, more flamboyant, and his signature, adorned with scrolls and flourishes, more ornate than the clear, simple style he later adopted. Either he was a very quick study or, more likely, the “ritin’” rudiments of Peter Deacon’s school had corrected his student’s hen-scratched scrawls. It is also likely that Henry’s mother influenced him in this regard, for her handwriting was also quite neat.³⁰ In any case, attractive, readable handwriting came to the attention of the judge of the High Court of Chancery himself, none other than the great George Wythe, signer of the Declaration of Independence, possessor of a peerless legal mind, and a man suffering from a distracting tremble as well as gout in his right hand. He needed an amanuensis—the equivalent of a stenographer—and Clay’s handwriting caught his eye. Wythe asked Tinsley if he could spare the boy, and Tinsley said of course. He likely would have said so even if Clay had become indispensable, for Tinsley suspected that this was an opportunity of incalculable value to young Henry. He was right.

CHARLES DICKENS COULD just as well have drawn these characters and the circumstances that brought them together. George Wythe was a great man whose legal accomplishments were legendary and whose mentorship had shaped the characters of many who would figure prominently in both Virginia and the nation’s affairs. He acquired an extraordinary classical education, learning at first with the help of his mother, but applying himself with diligence to mastering Greek and Latin. Thomas Jefferson, whom many regarded as the best classical scholar in Virginia, judged Wythe his superior. For years this smallish, courtly man had lived in Williamsburg, where he practiced and taught law. As with Clay in 1793, Wythe had noticed thirty years earlier the penmanship of a tall red-haired youth with a splash of freckles on his face. Good handwriting had made Tom Jefferson useful then in the same way that Clay later would be. Jefferson became Wythe’s most famous student and was instrumental in having his teacher named professor of law at the College of William and Mary in 1779, the first such professorship in a country then lacking a systematic legal curriculum for aspiring attorneys. “Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance,” Jefferson had urged him.³¹

Wythe did just that before becoming a judge on the state’s High Court of Chancery in 1789 and soon afterward, as the only judge on that court, the state’s chancellor. “Such philanthropy for mankind,” it was said of him, “such simplicity of manners, and such inflexible rectitude and integrity of principle, as would have dignified a Roman senator, even in the most virtuous times of the Republic.”³²

From the start, Clay charmed the old man, and Wythe captivated Clay. As had happened to other young men over the years, Clay’s initial awe steadily gave way to admiration and affection. Wythe had counseled the greatest men of his age, including two future presidents (Jefferson and James Monroe), a future U.S. attorney general (John Breckinridge), a future judge of the Virginia Supreme Court (Spencer Roane), and two governors of Virginia (Wilson Carter Nicholas and Littleton Waller Tazewell). Yet all of these relationships had become easy and enduring friendships, for Wythe was not only brilliant but kind, unpretentious, and, even at nearly seventy, when Clay met him, youthful.³³

Clay spent four years in Wythe’s employ and essentially became his private secretary. Clay’s primary duty was to take Wythe’s dictation of Chancery decisions and reports. After Wythe reviewed the copy, Clay made corrections and revisions and incorporated the literary references, usually in Greek, that Wythe often included in his decisions. This mild form of “pedantry,” as one writer has described it, was a small vanity on Wythe’s part but big trouble for Clay. He had absolutely no knowledge of Greek, and he had to copy with meticulous care the characters as though drawing hieroglyphics. The task added hours to his chores, but he never complained, and his work was always on time and neatly accomplished.³⁴

Wythe noticed both the attitude and the industry. He opened his library to the boy and loaned him books as a way of suggesting what to read. He apparently avoided quizzing Clay about the subjects in order to prevent the acquaintance with books from becoming a chore rather than a pleasure. Instead, he encouraged free-ranging discussions that included everything from religion to politics, covering subjects from comportment to conscience, all framed by the meditations of great authors in great books. Thus while laboring at a copy desk Henry Clay received not just room, board, and a modest wage, but also a worldview broader than any vista he could have otherwise imagined, his guide not so much the chancellor of Virginia but a kind old man whose watery eyes saw promise in the gangly bumpkin with a ready smile and practiced pen. Clay always remembered that George Wythe had “the courtliest bow I have ever seen,” one that the boy took to imitating for the same reason that he emulated the speaking techniques of effective orators. After four years with Wythe, Clay’s deficiencies in formal schooling as well as in his manners were almost eliminated. When he left Wythe, Clay knew how to converse in intellectual company and how to act in the best circles of society.³⁵

What exactly did Henry Clay learn from this remarkable teacher? Though he enjoyed listening to the old man read Greek, Henry never showed any facility for languages and never learned Greek or Latin, always to his regret. And despite Wythe’s passion for learning as an end in itself, Clay never developed an intellectual curiosity beyond the goal of learning a thing for its practical benefits. Wythe’s library was surely important in the formation of the adult Henry Clay, but the example of Wythe himself proved more central to Clay’s education.

Wythe’s role in the founding of the new nation and in securing Virginia’s ratification of the Constitution were admirable endeavors, but his desire to have the very idea of America serve a broader purpose was nothing short of exhilarating. Liberty in America could become an opportunity for all humanity! That was a notion so compelling that it could merit a life’s work. To preserve and to improve the Founders’ gift to the world, thereby to promote the progress of people everywhere by preserving the liberty of men at home, made the struggling young republic a dazzling experiment.³⁶

But it was a troubling one as well. In those four simple words—“the liberty of men”—an idea explained in Jefferson’s majestic Declaration as an inalienable right direct from the hand of God—rested the most troubling contradiction in the American experiment, in which the grand quest for human freedom was soiled by human slavery. Wythe clearly noted the incongruity, as did many others of his time, but he was unique in the way he resolved it, at least as it touched his own life. He reconciled for himself the clash of freedom and slavery sooner rather than later, in fact immediately: he did not liberate his slaves in his will, as several Founders would do, but freed them outright with a stroke of a pen. More than that, he prepared them for freedom by having them taught trades to match their talents and inclinations. A few stayed with him, but only as employees earning fair wages, such as his elderly cook, Lydia Broadnax. A young mulatto named Michael Brown was another. Wythe taught Michael to read and write.

Henry Clay already technically owned slaves through his father’s bequest, although one apparently went to Kentucky with the Watkinses, while the fate of the other is unknown. Yet what he saw in the Wythe household must have puzzled him. It was a bold challenge to the established order of things in the only world he had ever known, one that included slavery as a natural consequence of skin color and birth. Free blacks lived in Virginia, but laws restricted their freedom, prohibiting them, for instance, from bearing arms or voting. Clay mostly knew blacks only as slaves, an exotic people not just because of their color but because of their language, often a Creole pastiche of African tongues and Old World English that could make them difficult to understand. More than that made them difficult to understand, though. Clay’s youth in Hanover County had etched strong impressions into him about blacks as people, whether slave or free, and those impressions would prove deep-seated and enduring. He would never surmount the prevailing opinions of his time that deemed blacks to be intellectually inferior and morally compromised. Yet Wythe’s example proved as persuasive as it was puzzling. Like the old man, Clay came to view slavery as a blight, its proponents monstrous to the degree of their enthusiasm for it, its victims the prisoners of a foul travesty, everyone trapped by the cruel hoax it revealed in a land celebrating liberty.

Moreover, Clay knew that George Wythe had apprenticed his slaves to prepare them for freedom. He watched Michael Brown learn his letters. Clay would remember that.³⁷

WHILE MANY OF the lessons Clay learned under the guidance of George Wythe concerned how to make a life, one of the most important had to do with how to make a living. Age had not dulled Wythe’s legal expertise, and Clay watched the old man’s mind work with growing admiration.

One case that came before the High Court of Chancery was especially instructive because it showed how the law was a constant bulwark even when challenged by popular sentiment. Several Virginians brought suit seeking relief from debts owed to English creditors, claiming that the British government’s partial violation of the 1783 Treaty of Paris canceled those obligations. It was a clever dodge, disguising transparent self-interest by playing on anti-British prejudice, but Wythe was not convinced. He ruled against the debtors, insisting that the Crown’s failures to honor other parts of the treaty had nothing to do with Americans’ commitments to private English creditors. The debtors promptly appealed to the federal circuit court, and the case was heard by Chief Justice John Jay in his capacity as a circuit judge. The appellants brought in formidable legal talent. Patrick Henry and John Marshall argued their side before a packed courthouse. Henry Clay watched wide-eyed as these celebrated champions presented their arguments with compelling oratory. Patrick Henry was at the height of his spellbinding powers. When speaking to juries he had no equal in Virginia, and his very appearance, his dour expression, hawk nose, and broad, thin mouth emphasized by surprisingly large eyes, fascinated beyond the power of his inimitable voice, and that alone was powerful enough. He relied on his magnetic personality and way with words rather than study and application, for Patrick Henry was indolent to the point of laziness. Juries did not care. His ability to draw, as Edmund Randolph noted, not so much from the law as “from the recesses of the human heart” was irresistibly persuasive, at least for juries. John Jay, however, was not swayed by the approach. Wythe’s decision was soundly based in the law, and Jay sustained it.³⁸

Clay was mightily impressed, though, by all points of the law and its practitioners. Here was a profession that provided opportunities for grand public gestures yet was also anchored in the rituals of procedure and traditions of precedent. The law offered an avenue to prominence and achievement, and Clay resolved to travel it. He would certainly have wanted George Wythe to be his teacher in this new project, but the formality of the undertaking made it far more taxing than pointing out some books and chatting about them in idle moments. Wythe’s duties as chancellor consumed too much time, and taking on a new student was out of the question.

Although efforts to systemize legal training into a standard mode of instruction were already emerging in certain parts of the country, they were random and rare. That Wythe himself was the first professor of law in the United States evidenced the newness of formal legal training, and most lawyers came to the craft by “reading” law under a practicing attorney. The system had many failings. Uneven instruction was an obvious one, and the possibility that lawyers would exploit students by turning them into glorified copyists was another.³⁹

Ideally, the aspiring student performed clerical duties in return for access to law books and individual guidance, the idea being that such work exposed the mind to the forms and formulas of the law and fixed those elements by rote and repetition. After achieving an adequate level of proficiency, the apprentice was ready for examination before the bar by a panel of three judges from either the General Court or the High Court of Chancery, sometimes both. The questioning took place in open court and was usually more casual than rigorous, with queries probing a candidate’s character as much as his knowledge. Successfully negotiating this bar examination was only a step to another stage of apprenticeship, the equivalent of moving to the status of journeyman in the legal guild. Newly licensed lawyers practiced in the lowest tier of courts. Only leading attorneys argued cases in the appellate courts, a slight concession to the irregular quality of lawyers the system produced.⁴⁰

In late 1796, Wythe asked Robert Brooke to teach Clay the law and thus saw to it that Clay had an earnest, conscientious teacher with excellent credentials. Robert Brooke had just completed a term as governor in 1796 and had become the state attorney general. When Clay moved out of the back room of the Chancery, he was again physically moving up in the world. It was the custom for a law student to join the household of his teacher, and for the next few months, Clay would live in the home of the state’s highest legal officer.⁴¹

Brooke found Henry a quick student. Building on the preliminary readings and stenographic work Clay had done for Wythe, he moved the boy rapidly along. In less than a year, Clay was ready for his examination. On November 6, 1797, Paul Carrington, William Fleming, and Spencer Roane, all judges of the Virginia Court of Appeals, found Henry Clay competent to practice law in the commonwealth of Virginia and granted him his “legal certificate.”⁴²

At twenty years of age, he was now Henry Clay, Esquire. Richmond was less than twenty miles from the Slashes, but it could not have been farther from the limits of that place had it been a mountain on the moon. The transformation from bumpkin in the swamps of Hanover County to attorney at the Virginia bar was only one facet of the change in Henry Clay during the pivotal six years he spent in Richmond. Physically he had not so much blossomed as grown like a weed, his stature accentuated by his spare build. Yet what had once been a gangly and ill-clothed boy had become, under careful observation and the tutelage of good men, an agile and tastefully dressed young man. Young Clay had come to Richmond with a winning way and an easy smile, but his mentors and companions taught him the etiquette of the drawing room as well as the rough pleasantries of the gaming table. He learned what to drink and, more important, how to be drink’s master rather than its servant. He moved in circles that included the best minds of the passing, current, and coming generations, and integrated their sense of celebrity and purpose into his own persona. His white-blond hair, always a tad tousled, was never ponytailed in a queue but always worn short, in what was called “the French style,” as befitted a true republican. He modeled his gestures and speaking style on the great orators he had seen on Richmond’s stages and in its courtrooms, using his long-fingered hands and baritone voice to persuasive effect, in the manner of Patrick Henry. He pondered the moral dilemma of human bondage and came to regard it, as did his mentor George Wythe, as a repugnant evil, an opinion no less sincere because it was freighted with the prejudices of his time. And his gift for friendship had pulled elders and contemporaries alike into his embrace. Francis Taliaferro Brooke (Frank to his friends), his teacher’s younger brother, and Tom Ritchie (the Brookes’ brother-in-law), who would become an influential newspaper editor, were among them, as were the boys in the clerk’s office at the Chancery, the men of his debating society, many destined for a measure of greatness themselves, and countless others who were part of an ever-widening circle of acquaintance and friendship.

And yet for all that, Clay knew even as he stood before his examiners that November day that his time in Richmond—in Virginia, in fact—was at an end. The city boasted an embarrassing abundance of lawyers, and a new one’s ascent would certainly be slow. Even grand achievement brought rewards modest in the scale of things. John Marshall lived moderately well only because he had logged long days and built an enormous practice, the work of years, too long for a young man in a hurry. Virginia friendships could take one only so far as well, for they would always be trumped by family connections, often more essential for success than merit.

So Clay was packing even as he framed his new law license. His destination was never in doubt, for the appeal of his own family connections determined it from the start. To the west was Kentucky, where his mother and Hal had set up Watkins Tavern in Versailles and had made it one of the largest and most praised hostelries in the state. His brother John was a prosperous merchant in Lexington, the fastest-growing city in Kentucky. Just over those mountains, the ones dimly visible as a blue cloud just above the horizon, was the new place of Clay’s family. It would be the place of his future.

In 1797 he started out, laden with his belongings, the accumulated experience of the previous six years, and the always ready smile that started at the side of his wide mouth before broadening into a fetching grin. A host of his mannerisms were adopted from admired men and close acquaintances, including the studied self-confidence with which he set out for Kentucky. At this early stage of his life, those mannerisms were really more affectations than self-realized qualities. Except for the smile. That was his own.⁴³