CHAPTER THREE
IN THE SPRING of 1805, Aaron Burr came to Kentucky. His generous advocacy for western interests in the 1790s had always made him popular beyond the Blue Ridge, but his messy public and private life did not play well in the East, and by 1805 his political career had come crashing to earth with a resounding thump. When he resigned the vice presidency a few days before his term expired on March 4, 1805, he was under indictment for murder in not just one but two states.
Burr was an enigmatic man whose complexities have bedeviled modern attempts to understand him as much as they bewildered the people of his time. Charming and suave, he could enchant women and sway men with equal ease, often clouding their better judgment. His many friends defended him as a misunderstood patriot wronged by his many enemies. Those enemies just as vehemently described him as a sinister opportunist whose oily charm was only a mask for dark motives. People still argue over who was right about Aaron Burr. Possibly they all were, as Henry Clay would have occasion to discover.
Burr’s problems began with the presidential election of 1800. The Electoral College gave both Thomas Jefferson and Burr, ostensibly the vice-presidential candidate, the same number of votes and threw the election into the House of Representatives. Because Burr refused to step aside, it took multiple ballots and some maneuvering to elect Jefferson, whose bitterness about Burr’s behavior irreparably estranged them.1 President Jefferson effectively excluded Burr from any meaningful role in his administration, and the Democratic-Republicans dropped him from the ticket in 1804, a rebuke made all the more obvious by Burr’s replacement, George Clinton, another New Yorker. Burr tried to recover his career by running for governor of New York, but political rival Alexander Hamilton helped to defeat him. The two engaged in a mounting quarrel that ended on July 11, 1804, at Weehawken, New Jersey, as they faced off with cocked pistols. The most famous duel in American history killed Hamilton. In terms of his career, it killed Burr too.
New Jersey and New York indicted him for murder. Burr fled, eventually returning to Washington where he presided over the Senate, an odd figure of defiant innocence and putative guilt, shielded from arrest and punishment by the fact that murder was not a federal crime and extradition was unlikely, partly fortified by the fact that Hamilton had been pointing a pistol too, and by the fact that many, after all, hated Hamilton. But it was not enough to clean the stain of putative guilt, so Burr said good-bye to the Senate and headed west to Pittsburgh. He floated down the Ohio River on a large, well-appointed flatboat, stopping along the way to warm greetings and friendly faces. The farther west one went, the more Hamilton was hated by those who also remembered Burr as their region’s champion. The farther west Burr went, the friendlier were the faces.
One of Burr’s first stops was Blennerhassett Island, home of wealthy Irish immigrants Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett. Their beautiful Palladian mansion in its charming pastoral setting was a world apart, and Burr basked in its serenity. He was a delightful and fascinating guest, and everyone got on famously. The Blennerhassetts often visited Kentucky, where their many connections included prominent families such as the Harts and the Browns, so adding Burr to their collection of acquaintances seemed both natural and advantageous. When he left after a few days, they were sorry to see him go and eager for his return. They had no way of knowing that his visit would change their lives, that his plans would destroy their home and ruin their island.2
Burr headed for Cincinnati and then to Kentucky, meeting along the way with people interested in digging a canal around the rapids of the Ohio River. In fact, the wealthy and famous greeted him wherever he turned up. At Frankfort he stayed at former U.S. senator John Brown’s Liberty Hall, and in Lexington he attended a concert at the popular hotel Traveller’s Hall. Also in Lexington he met a young attorney named Henry Clay. As he did everyone else, the handsome and dashing Burr captivated Clay.3
From Lexington, Burr traveled overland to Mercer County to meet with Kentucky U.S. senator John Adair. In Nashville, Burr met Tennessee militia general Andrew Jackson and commissioned him to build boats, a hint that Burr’s trip had purposes other than social. Another was his meeting with the United States Army’s senior officer, James Wilkinson, at Fort Massac on the Ohio. The two knew each other from their service together during the Revolutionary War, and Wilkinson gave Burr letters of introduction to important people in New Orleans, where Burr’s three-week stay, beginning on June 26, saw him feted at parties and honored by local dignitaries. The Mexican Association, a group that advocated the annexation of Mexico to the United States, was particularly enthusiastic. The association’s president was also the mayor of New Orleans, Dr. John W. Watkins, who happened to be Henry Clay’s first cousin and former brother-in-law.4
By the time Burr left New Orleans on July 14 to travel back through Tennessee and Kentucky, his journey was attracting attention. Kentucky’s Federalist minority was a small group, but it was vigilant, especially Humphrey Marshall, one of Lexington’s first settlers in the 1780s, and Joseph Hamilton Daveiss, who had become Kentucky’s United States attorney. Both men had crossed swords with Clay, whose redistricting bill in the state legislature had gerrymandered Jo Daveiss out of his seat. These Federalists were well connected: Humphrey Marshall was U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall’s cousin, and both he and Daveiss had married sisters of John Marshall. Because they were good Federalists, they reflexively opposed Kentucky Republicans, but they differed in their response to the implacable Republican majority. Marshall was such a snob that he made the highest Federalist look positively egalitarian, and he nursed a blinding hatred of political opponents. Some have explained Marshall and Daveiss’s obsession with Burr as stemming from their desire to avenge Alexander Hamilton, whom Jo Daveiss so admired, it was said, that he took “Hamilton” as his middle name in tribute. Daveiss did admire Hamilton, but his middle name came from family, not fawning adulation of the arch-Federalist, and Marshall’s primary reason for impugning Burr was not to exact revenge for Hamilton’s death but to discredit Kentucky Republicans.5 On the other hand, Daveiss was as much a patriot—something he ultimately proved with his life—as a partisan. Long irritated by Republican attacks on Federalists’ patriotism, he smelled something rotten about Burr, squinted at his travels, and grew dimly aware, he thought, of his plans. In due course, Daveiss believed he had stumbled on a monstrous conspiracy to detach part of the western United States and violate federal law by invading Spanish territory in the Southwest. For his part, Marshall believed that implicating Republicans in these plans would show everyone a thing or two about who the real patriots in Kentucky were.
By early 1806, Burr was back east raising money for some sort of adventure, and Daveiss believed he could prove it was nefarious. He alerted the national government about his suspicions in a January 1806 letter to Jefferson. At the very least, Daveiss said, Burr and prominent westerners intended to take Spanish Mexico by force. Beyond that, they probably planned to separate the western part of the United States to make it part of Burr’s new empire. The fact that Daveiss said he had the names of conspirators gave weight to his charges, but the list was simply incredible, a Who’s Who of western politicians visited by Burr in his travels. Daviess claimed he could implicate federal district judge Harry Innes, U.S. congressman John Fowler, senior United States Army general James Wilkinson, Kentucky appellate court judge Benjamin Sebastian, U.S. senator John Adair, Indiana territorial governor William Henry Harrison, Jefferson’s attorney general John Breckinridge, and even Henry Clay. In a later letter he admitted that he no longer believed Breckinridge and Clay were conspirators, but even so the list remained sobering. If true, this was a monstrous conspiracy indeed.6
Humphrey Marshall very much intended to make people believe it was true. That summer of 1806 he brought editor John Wood from Richmond to establish a Federalist newspaper in Frankfort. Joseph Street, a young clerk Wood had met in Richmond, became his partner in the Western World, a paper that Marshall filled with allegations about Aaron Burr and his Kentucky friends, all Republicans. The paper revived old rumors from the 1790s that accused Kentucky Republicans of involvement in the so-called Spanish Conspiracy, one of many shadowy schemes, it was whispered, to separate the West and join it to Spain’s southwestern empire. The Louisiana Purchase, not patriotism, had made such plots irrelevant, said the Western World, which darkly reminded its readers that Republicans had not always been the true-blue Americans they now only pretended to be.7
By the time Burr returned to the West in the fall of 1806, the Western World had given rise to alarming stories about large numbers of men assembling on Blennerhassett Island, the construction of boats there and elsewhere, and the purchase of arms.8 The Western World fanned the flames, and U.S. Attorney Daveiss felt the increasing heat. Reports about food being stockpiled on Louisville’s wharves and boats nearing completion in its dockyards caused him to make an anxious trip to Louisville to see for himself, and what he saw did anything but calm him. News that hundreds of men had gathered on Blennerhassett Island in fact convinced him that Burr’s plans were about to launch. He urged U.S. district judge Harry Innes on November 5, 1806, to arrest Burr for plotting an invasion of Spanish territory. Innes, who had been on Jo Daveiss’s original list of conspirators, was not so sure.9
Meanwhile, Aaron Burr heard that Jo Daveiss wanted him thrown in jail. He raced from Lexington to Frankfort to hire a lawyer, and the man he sought out agreed to represent him. It was Henry Clay.
AFTER THINKING ABOUT Daveiss’s request for several days, Innes ruled against issuing a warrant without a proper investigation: nobody should be arrested simply because Jo Daveiss thought he might be guilty. As the judge was reading this decision, Aaron Burr strode into the courtroom followed by Henry Clay and other prominent Republicans, all clearly tired of the Western World’s rumor mongering and the widespread innuendo it had encouraged. Taking the offensive, they demanded a grand jury investigation, confident that it would settle the matter once and for all. Innes wanted it settled too. He ordered a grand jury impaneled on November 12, 1806.10
People thronged into Frankfort from all over the Bluegrass to see a first-rate show. On November 12, Burr appeared in court accompanied by Clay and local counsel John Allen. The crowd scrambled for the few remaining seats, Judge Innes began his instructions to the grand jury, and Jo Daveiss stood up to ask for a postponement. The crowd groaned as Daveiss explained that one of his key witnesses had not arrived. Davis Floyd was a member of the Indiana territorial legislature, Daveiss weakly explained, and that body was still in session. A wave of laughter swept over the assembly as it realized the man Daveiss believed to be the quartermaster for Burr’s army was at that moment helping to govern Indiana. Innes dismissed the jury and then granted Burr’s request to address the court. Just a few days before, Burr said, Henry Clay had offered Burr’s help in summoning witnesses, but Daveiss told Clay that the court would see to it. Burr demanded that the avoidable fiasco perpetrated by the U.S. attorney be recorded as the reason for the grand jury’s dismissal.11
Burr’s audacity was effective theater, but it only spurred Daveiss to greater efforts. Assured that Floyd would come to Kentucky, and armed with a list of other potential witnesses, Daveiss asked Innes to convene another grand jury on December 2.12 From Louisville, Burr asked Clay to represent him at the new hearing, but this time Clay said no.
The young attorney hesitated, because his situation had dramatically changed. Just a week after the abortive grand jury incident, the Kentucky legislature selected Clay to replace Senator John Adair in Washington. Adair was a replacement himself, having been appointed to fill John Breckinridge’s seat when Jefferson tapped Breckinridge for attorney general. Adair unexpectedly resigned in a huff when the legislature elected John Pope for the term beginning March 1807, a gesture Adair took as a personal rebuke, and Kentucky thus needed a short-term stand-in. Young Clay, thought the legislature, was just the man.13
Now that he was to be a United States senator, if only briefly, Clay worried about the propriety of representing a man suspected of violating federal law and possibly even plotting treason. Burr promised a handsome fee and assured Clay that Congress never conducted important business until the first of the year, but Clay remained cautious. Only after friends convinced him it would be dishonorable to abandon Burr did he consider relenting. A letter from Burr vowing that he had “no design, nor have I taken any measure, to promote a dissolution of the Union or a separation of any one or more States from the residue” finally resolved the matter for him. Clay went to Frankfort.
It was a mistake.14
When the second grand jury convened on December 2, 1806, Burr confidently entered the crowded courtroom with Clay and Allen. After Innes instructed the grand jury and it had retired, Clay stood to address the court. The entire proceeding, he said, was simply a case of political grandstanding by Daveiss. Clay cast doubts on the reason the first grand jury had been fruitless, intimating that Daveiss had not wanted Burr present to defend himself; Daviess had asked for a postponement so that he could wait until Burr left Kentucky. Only then, Clay said, had Daveiss asked for this grand jury, before which he planned to slander an absent Burr. But Burr had not left Kentucky and was very much a presence in the courtroom, a fact painfully evident when Daveiss slowly rose to ask for another postponement. The crowd groaned as it had before while the U.S. attorney explained that Davis Floyd was present as requested, but two other important witnesses, including former U.S. senator John Adair, had not arrived.15
Henry Clay leaped to his feet, loudly protesting this thoughtless treatment of his client. He angrily called the first grand jury proceeding a “farce and pantomime” and asked if Burr was again “to have his time and attention diverted from his own affairs, to be tortured and obliged to account to this court for every action, even those of the most trifling nature, in order to gratify the whim and caprice of the Federal Attorney?”
Jo Daveiss lost his temper. Clay, he barked, was interfering with the court’s duty to conduct its investigation, and he informed the grumbling crowd that no statute required the authorities to inform Clay or his client about a grand jury proceeding.
Now Clay lost his temper. He shouted that his client could not help but be concerned about the U.S. attorney’s overreaching to destroy the reputation of an honorable and patriotic American. Did the U.S. attorney mean to say, Clay asked, that Burr had no right to be present? He reminded the crowd as much as the court that this whimsical calling and dismissing of grand juries was unprecedented. If the court now sanctioned such capricious procedures, innocent men would lose the protection of the law, everyone would be subject to prosecutorial persecution, and soon Daveiss would be indicting people completely on his own, never bothering to call a grand jury.
Innes gaveled down this free-ranging exchange. Daveiss could have another postponement, he said, but only until the next morning. He looked levelly at the U.S. attorney and expressed regret over dismissing the November 12 grand jury. At least then, Innes mused, Daveiss was missing only one witness; now he was missing two.16 That night Judge Innes spent a delightful evening dining at Liberty Hall with host John Brown and his guest of honor, Aaron Burr.
The next morning the U.S. attorney was all business. He began the day by handing the grand jury foreman an indictment against John Adair, the very man whom Daveiss had cited the day before as an essential witness and the reason for delay. Daveiss also made clear his intention to question all witnesses before the grand jury, a practice Clay had already protested as unprecedented.17 The jurors had enough aptitude, Clay said, to ask their own questions without being steered by Daveiss’s “ingenious and dangerous novelties.”
“The only novelty which I see in this court,” Daviess snapped, “is Mr. Clay.”
There was a pause as Clay slowly drew a large breath. “I presume, sir,” he said solemnly, “that if on this occasion I be thought to indulge too freely in expressing the honest sentiments of my mind with regard to the extraordinary request of the Attorney, a desire of preserving the rights of my fellow citizens will be the only cause imputed to me. For their rights and for the liberty of my country I shall never cease to contend.” The baritone rose as though to shake the windowpanes: “The woods of Kentucky, I hope, will never be made the abode of inquisitors, or our simple establishments exchanged for the horrid cells of deception and tyranny.” He concluded with the definitive insult: even a British court would not allow what Daveiss was proposing.18
Nor would New York, said Burr, his observation rendered from his years as the state’s attorney general, but coming after Clay’s rousing performance, something of an afterthought. Innes ruled that Daveiss could not question witnesses but only answer jurors’ inquiries on points of law.19Daveiss tried another tactic the following day. He proposed to provide jurors with slips of paper containing appropriate questions to ask the witnesses. Clay and Allen were in the process of protesting this new ploy when Burr, who had been shuffling through the slips, quietly said he had no objection to the questions or their manner of presentation.
Burr was right about the questions, at least. The grand jury returned to the courtroom at about 1:00 P.M. to report that the evidence was insufficient to indict John Adair. Daveiss promptly handed the foreman an indictment of Burr, and the jurors retired to begin questioning witnesses, but it was not until the following morning, when the jurors said they wanted to interview the Western World’s editors, John Wood and Joseph Street, that the inquiry seemed near concluding. Neither Wood nor Street had been on Daveiss’s witness list—strange omissions, because for months they had been printing extravagant claims about damning evidence that would convict Burr and his Kentucky Republican friends. Now, before a grand jury and under oath, Street and Wood sheepishly admitted that they had no such evidence at all. Wood, recently estranged from his young partner, even declared that as far as he knew, Burr was completely innocent.20 At 2:00 P.M. the grand jury issued the legally stipulated declaration that the U.S. attorney’s indictment was “not a true bill,” but added the forceful statement, “The grand jury are happy to inform the court, that no violent disturbance of the public tranquility, or breach of the laws, has come to their knowledge. We have no hesitation in declaring, that having carefully examined and scrutinized all the testimony which has come before us, as well on the charges against Aaron Burr [and] John Adair, that there has been no testimony before us, which does in the smallest degree criminate the conduct of either.” The courtroom erupted into shouts and applause as the jubilant crowd escorted Burr, Clay, and Allen from the building. Humphrey Marshall, who had written most of the Western World’s now admitted fabrications, sneered that the grand jury’s statement sounded as if it had been written by the scoundrel Burr or, worse, his Republican attorneys, very likely that rascal Clay.21
CLAY HURRIED HOME to Lexington, not even pausing to attend the ball celebrating Burr’s vindication. He had to pack and make arrangements to turn his legal practice over to fellow attorney William T. Barry before setting out for Washington. The second grand jury had delayed him two weeks, and he would already arrive several weeks after the final session of the Ninth Congress had convened. Before Clay departed, Burr came to Lexington to thank him for his efforts. Clay was more certain than ever that Burr was innocent. He refused to take a fee.22
Clay had won election to his first, short stint in the national legislature handily, 68 to 10 over George Bibb, a testament to his popularity in the Kentucky statehouse. Even Felix Grundy had voted for him.23 Now he was eager to reach the nation’s capital, where he looked forward to “dining on oysters at the city on Xmas day.”24 His route took him across the Ohio River to Chillicothe, Ohio, and from there to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), by boat. A long ride in a stagecoach completed the journey. He traveled alone except for a manservant because Lucretia was too far along in her pregnancy, her fifth in eight years of marriage, to risk the trip, which was a wretched ordeal by any standard. Clay took note of the country’s miserable roads as uncomfortable stagecoaches bounced him along, and he concluded that something should be done about the nation’s primitive transportation system. With that first journey to Washington, he felt the glimmer of an idea, a project for a life’s work.
He also suffered a slight pang of alarm, one that became an even more nagging worry the closer he came to Washington. At every stop, starting with Chillicothe, he heard disturbing rumors about Aaron Burr and troubling stories about his plans. In Ohio, Clay continued to defend Burr and cited the Kentucky grand jury’s decision. He assured people that Burr was merely planning to colonize lands he had bought in Louisiana. Shortly after he left Chillicothe, however, Clay heard that President Jefferson had issued a proclamation that certain citizens were planning an unlawful attack on Spanish territory. Moving out of the insular world of the Bluegrass, Clay could assess Burr’s reputation east of the Blue Ridge, where he was detested by eastern Republicans as vehemently as he was hated by western Federalists. Clay considered the possibility that Burr was capable of anything, a notion that was perhaps more than the deluded idea of an obsessed, partisan prosecutor. Jefferson’s proclamation gave Clay pause. As he embarked on this next stage of his rising career, he realized the sickening possibility that he had begun it with a serious mistake.25
Reports about Burr’s unraveling plans dogged Clay’s journey, and he entered Washington nervously a few days after Christmas in 1806. Possibly because he was preoccupied, Clay never recorded his first impression of the capital, but we know from other travelers during this time that it was anything but imposing. Its enormous size alone—“magnificent distances” was one charitable description—made its scattered, partially finished public buildings look raw and isolated. Washington was not much of a town at the end of 1806, let alone a national capital. Clay entered it through the small village of Georgetown. He crossed Rock Creek and rode past the President’s House up the grandiosely named Pennsylvania Avenue, which was often a sluice of mud, toward Capitol Hill. The Capitol itself was still under construction, its perimeter littered with building materials and scrap. The weather was cold, and the swampy Potomac bottoms bordering the town to its south that fouled the air and sickened people in summer made the chill penetrating and bitter in winter. The town would fill out gradually, and Clay would be there to see it. The weather in both summer and winter, however, remained unpleasant at its extremes.26
Clay arrived so late in the session that he had difficulty finding a room in the boardinghouses scattered across Capitol Hill. After two weeks of living like a vagabond, he moved into Frost and Quinn’s boardinghouse with his cousin Matthew Clay, a congressman from Virginia.27 By then, Clay had presented his credentials to the Senate, and on December 29, 1806, he took his seat. Some senators noted his youth, but no one apparently minded that Clay was only twenty-nine years old, too young by more than three months to be a United States senator. Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire described Clay on his first day in the Senate as “a young man—a lawyer—his stature is tall & slender.” Plumer instantly liked Clay. He “had much conversation with him, & it afforded me much pleasure. He is intelligent, sensible & appears frank & candid. His address is good & manners easy. So much for the first impression—I hope a further & more intimate acquaintance, will not weaken, but add force, to these favorable impressions.” Plumer was a keen observer and had ample opportunity as a fellow boarder at Frost and Quinn’s to take the measure of the affable young Kentuckian with a flair for camaraderie, regardless of political party. By the end of the session, Plumer, a Federalist, was describing the Republican Clay as “my friend.”28
The Senate chamber was on the ground floor of the Capitol, “an elegant apartment, with handsome furniture” that was “adorned with full length portraits of the late unfortunate king and queen of France [Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette].”29 Senators sat at wooden desks on chairs cushioned by red leather with a beautiful new carpet underfoot. Despite these stylish touches, the building was poorly constructed, and falling plaster frequently flecked their desks and the new carpet.30
For all his ease as he began attending Senate sessions, Clay was vaguely unsettled by the persistent rumors about Aaron Burr. On his first day, Clay told William Plumer that he had been reluctant to represent Burr before the second grand jury hearing. He showed Plumer the letter from Burr asserting his innocence. Clay assured Plumer that Daveiss had been overzealous, that the grand jurors were of the highest character, that everyone in Kentucky except for partisans knew Burr was guiltless. Clay, in short, whistled with a somewhat strained certainty as the dark gathered around Burr, possibly to dim the reputation of his former counsel as well.31
It soon got worse. When Clay called on Thomas Jefferson, the president showed Clay a sheet with cryptic markings, a key to a code for sending secret messages, and told him that its author was Aaron Burr. For Jefferson, this “cipher letter” sealed Burr’s infamous role as the author of a treasonous scheme; but many now doubt that Burr had anything to do with the letter. Jefferson, however, embraced it as proof positive of Burr’s guilt. Clay’s little twinge became a swirling panic. He wrote home, whistling ever more forcefully, that surely no one could blame him or his friends for Burr’s treachery.32
The question of Burr’s treachery—its nature, its breadth, even its very existence—has never been settled, but Henry Clay now believed that Burr was guilty of something and had duped him into swearing otherwise. He never forgave him. He would not see Burr again until 1815, when Clay was touring some courtrooms in New York City and happened upon him, an encounter Burr apparently planned. Clay did not recognize the aged Burr at first. Burr walked toward him, his hand extended. Clay refused to take it. They made awkward small talk punctuated by pauses until Burr impulsively said that he would like a private meeting. Clay told Burr where he was staying, but Burr did not visit, and they never saw each other again. The refusal to shake hands, the uncomfortable conversation with its silent gaps, the proffer of an address but no specific appointment, all told Burr what he already knew. Clay would never forgive him.33
BURR WAS A cloud over the start of Henry Clay’s national political career, the association making the president suspicious and Clay’s Senate colleagues wary. The consummate gambler, however, bluffed his way through. On his third day in the Senate, he made his first speech, a demand that the West be given its due with the creation of a federal circuit court for Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Federal district courts in the region were badly overburdened, and appeals to the U.S. circuit courts required expensive and time-consuming travel over abysmal roads to the East. Clay headed the committee that considered his proposal and returned a bill creating a new U.S. circuit that would in turn require a new Supreme Court justice. The bill passed, one triumph made better by another when Thomas Todd, Clay’s political friend and Harry Innes’s brother-in-law, became the new associate justice. “The ardent, eloquent and chivalrous Henry Clay” had brazened his way through the first crisis of his legislative career.34
But the consequences of his relationship with Burr persisted. Convinced by the cipher letter that a crisis loomed, Jefferson issued a proclamation calling for Burr’s arrest and asked Congress to suspend habeas corpus.35 Clay’s role as Burr’s Kentucky counsel had already made him a curiosity for newspapers throughout the country, and they began implying that Clay had used “improper measures to vindicate” the man the president was now accusing of treason. Clay found himself in a quandary about how to respond to Jefferson’s actions. He privately told William Plumer that he did not see the necessity of suspending the writ, but that “the delicate situation in which, he as (late councilor for Burr) would not only prevent him from opposing it, but oblige him to vote for it.”36 It would be one of the very rare occasions that Clay did not vote his conscience.
He continued to brazen his way through. Just as he had in Kentucky, Clay became a passionate advocate for government-sponsored internal improvements. He wanted a canal on the Kentucky side around the falls of the Ohio River and managed to surmount adamant Republican opposition to such local projects by creating a committee, chaired by him, to study the issue. Clay also supported a toll bridge across the Potomac River and a canal connecting Delaware and Chesapeake bays.37 Yet in many matters he remained loyal to Republican principles of limited government. His proposed constitutional amendment to limit federal judicial power over land disputes within the states died in Congress, but it illustrated his thinking that the states should retain fundamental rights in the federal system. Even his growing nationalism over the years would never weaken his commitment to that standard.38
His outspoken manner earned the admiration of some. When Clay made an impassioned speech against continuing slave importations, Senator John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts wrote that Clay was “quite a young man—an orator—and a republican of the first fire.”39 His new friend William Plumer commented that Clay “as a speaker is animated—his language bold & flowery” and that he often spoke “with great ability & much eloquence.”40 George Hoadley, a visitor to Washington from Connecticut, wrote home that there was “a great dearth of [oratorical] talent” in Congress, but that “Mr. Clay a young man from Kentucky” had made a considerable splash during his first term in the Senate. According to Hoadley, Clay used “correct language” and spoke “with very great capacity.”41
Others, however, found his manner arrogant and grating for one so young and untried. Indeed, Clay was often more impressed by his performances than even his admirers were. He boasted to his father-in-law about his warm reception in Washington and how he had been praised for scoring points in several Senate debates.42 Yet fellow Kentuckian Buckner Thruston complained that although Clay was “a damned good speaker … he never says anything touching the questions.”43 Plumer admitted that Clay “does not reason with the force & precision of [James] Bayard [of Delaware].” And Senator Uriah Tracy once scoffed at the young man “in the plenitude of puppyism” as he tried to intimidate Clay into shutting up, if only for just a while. Tracy might as well have tried to dam the ocean. The young Kentuckian gained the floor and mockingly recited a poem:
Thus have I seen a magpie in the street,
A chattering bird, we often meet;
A bird for curiosity well known,
With head awry
And cunning eye
Peep knowingly into a marrow-bone.44
Clay’s theatrics rather than clear, concise logic drew the most comment and occasional disdain, and such behavior would have been fatal in a body that placed a high premium on collegiality and ordered itself on hardening rules of seniority. Yet Clay earned grudging respect for his ability to work for hours on the most detailed matters, in committee and in full session, staying at tasks well into the night and coming away refreshed rather than weary. Over the years, his endurance became legendary, but in this first session he proved his willingness to take on any task and tackle any chore. He chaired two Senate committees, served on two others, and got his way as much by wearing down his opponents physically as by swaying them with dazzling speeches.45
His stamina carried over to his socializing. He brashly told Plumer that he had come to Washington for “pleasure” and to make money. Kentucky clients placed him on a $3,000 retainer to argue their cases before the Supreme Court, and he spent most evenings at Washington’s gaming tables. Plumer found Clay’s compulsive amusements disconcerting, and he could be an insufferable braggart. He told Plumer that in one night at cards he won $1,500, and on another evening he lost $600. Despite his homely appearance, Clay was “a great favorite with the ladies” and attended “all parties of pleasure—out almost every night—gambles much here—reads but little.”46 Senator Tracy had a point about puppyism.
Plumer complained that Washington’s leading men were too miserly to entertain and that dinner invitations were rarer than hen’s teeth, but Clay could always find a party, likely because he often became the life of it. These gatherings threw him together with many who became enduring admirers, including more than a few ladies. Margaret Bayard Smith, whose husband was the founding editor of the National Intelligencer, the administration’s unofficial newspaper, was well on her way to dominating the capital’s social scene. Quick in conversation and clever with a pen, she became one of Clay’s dearest friends. Clay also met the wife of Secretary of State James Madison, Dolley Payne Todd Madison, one of those cheerful people always ready to embrace instant friends. Dolley had family in Hanover County, Virginia, and though she and Clay were not related, they decided to become unofficial cousins. For the rest of their days, she would always greet him across crowded rooms as Cousin Henry and throw back her head with a throaty laugh when he shouted back a hello to Cousin Dolley.47
WHEN CONGRESS ADJOURNED, Clay remained in Washington to attend the Supreme Court’s early spring session before heading home. Lawyers from all over the country crowded the boardinghouses, including Frost and Quinn’s, and Clay was mildly surprised to find among them Humphrey Marshall, whom he would oppose in one of the cases before the Court. They conducted themselves with cool cordiality, but when Marshall proved formidable and Clay asked for a rehearing, the Federalist angrily accused Clay of acting from personal rather than legal motives.48
It was a sour way to end his first, and to his mind otherwise successful, venture in national politics. A temporary senator in the truest sense, a brief replacement for a replacement, Clay had occupied his seat for only a few weeks, but the men who had watched him breeze into town, charge through its legislative halls and social salons, and then vanish again into the West knew they had seen someone remarkable and that they would see him again.
Clay was glad to get home. His return in April was more than usually merry because a baby was waiting for him, a little girl whose birth he had just missed. She was his second daughter. They named her Anne Brown Clay after her aunt Nancy Brown in New Orleans, a good choice because like Aunt Nancy, Anne would become a vivacious, clever girl. Clay cherished all of his children, but something about Anne always made him especially happy. A man who had countless friends, he would come to regard this daughter as among his very best.
The difficulties over Aaron Burr nevertheless troubled Clay’s homecoming. Neither Humphrey Marshall nor Jo Daveiss believed that Clay was guilty of any criminal act, but his defense of Burr was embarrassing now that Burr had been arrested like a thief in the night and was slated for a treason trial in Richmond. Kentuckians who had earlier sung Burr’s praises now denounced him as a scoundrel and a traitor. Clay continued to reassure them that no one had been imperiled by Burr’s recklessness, but it was a hard sell, especially when he discovered that Burr had defaulted on most of his debts and many of his backers were financially ruined. Luckless Harman Blennerhassett was one poignant example. Clay found him penniless in a Lexington jail, his home lost, his island swarming with Virginia militia, his fortune consumed by the bottomless maw of Burr’s shadowy scheme.49 No other attorney would touch this political pariah, but Clay took his case.
While Clay was negotiating for Blennerhassett’s freedom, larger trouble loomed for the Irishman. He too had been indicted for treason and would be taken to Richmond to stand trial. Ironically, newly minted Supreme Court associate justice Thomas Todd heard the case in his capacity as the new U.S. circuit judge, his place on that bench a result of Henry Clay’s recent legislative achievement. Clay wanted to fight Blennerhassett’s extradition—he was genuinely concerned that Blennerhassett would be physically harmed on the way to Richmond—but the poor man wanted the chance to exonerate himself. Clay appeared before Todd on July 16 to say that his client would make the trip but also to declare that the warrant for Blennerhassett’s arrest was of dubious legality and his safety uncertain. Todd had little leeway about the warrant, but he did arrange for an armed guard to escort Blennerhassett to Richmond. There Harman Blennerhassett’s luck would change to the extent that a jury’s failure to convict Burr made all of his alleged accomplices unlikely targets for prosecution. Finally given his freedom, Blennerhassett never managed to rise from poverty, and the years dealt him one blow after another. More than thirty years later, Clay learned that his widow, Margaret, was living in a New York tenement where she was struggling to support her severely afflicted son. He tried to persuade Congress to give her some money, a small compensation for the destruction of her home on the Ohio River so many years before. Congress tabled the matter, however, and she died before it could be reconsidered, another casualty, even after all those years, of Burr’s obscure plans and her husband’s bad judgment.50
NOW UNDER THE sole editorial guidance of Joseph Street, Humphrey Marshall’s Western World attacked Clay during the summer of 1807, but he easily won election to the state legislature. As Clay entered the House that fall, so did Marshall, its solitary Federalist, setting the stage for a series of clashes between the two that became the stuff of legend.51
The Kentucky House made Clay its speaker at about the same time that Aaron Burr again emerged as a source of controversy. His acquittal in Richmond had only spurred the Jefferson administration to greater efforts to try him on other charges, possibly in Kentucky, where many of his misdeeds had supposedly occurred. Jefferson’s new attorney general, Caesar A. Rodney—another Clay friend from his time in Washington—asked Clay to prosecute Burr in some western venue, but Clay declined. He did not have the time, he said, and there were also ethical issues. Clay had no doubts about Burr’s guilt, but attorney-client privilege barred further involvement with his case.52
Humphrey Marshall clearly intended to make trouble, and he began by taking aim at Judge Harry Innes. The Western World charged that Innes had favored Burr in the grand jury proceedings because he was mixed up in Burr’s conspiracy. For good measure, Street renewed rumors about the infamous “Spanish Conspiracy” of the 1790s, placing Innes in the thick of it. Armed with these unfounded accusations, Marshall insisted that the Kentucky legislature demand that Congress begin impeachment proceedings to remove Innes from the federal bench. Speaker Clay could not engage in debate under a strict interpretation of the rules of order, so he simply established a new precedent, one he would later employ when he became Speaker of the House in Washington. He temporarily stepped down from the Speaker’s chair, took the floor, and mounted a spirited attack on Marshall’s resolutions.53
He disparaged them as groundless in the first place and prejudicial in the second. When charges against Innes had first appeared in the Western World, the judge had requested an investigation to clear up the matter, and now Clay helped frame a compromise in which the Kentucky House merely called for a congressional investigation.54 Innes’s friends, however, were riled up. Thomas Bodley, the judge’s son-in-law, accused Marshall of land fraud, perjury, and altering court records. The House appointed a committee to investigate, selecting eleven committee members itself and leaving it to Speaker Clay to choose the remaining five.
The land fraud charge was pointless because such an accusation could be leveled against virtually every legislator, but the committee’s inquiry into his behavior otherwise turned out badly for Marshall. With an 11 to 4 vote, the committee recommended his expulsion from the House for “moral turpitude.” Although the entire House failed to follow through, citing insufficient proof, Marshall was humiliated at home and disappointed by Washington, where Congress that spring voted to leave Innes alone. Emboldened, Innes sued Joseph Street for libel, another potential setback for Marshall, who had written many of Street’s articles.55
Yet Marshall and Street were unrelenting. In the spring and summer of 1808, when John Allen ran for governor, they smeared him as a Burr accomplice and predicted that if elected, he would be Henry Clay’s puppet. Clay took up the gauntlet to defend Allen and lament how candidates for public office had become the target of vicious personal attacks. Clay explained that many who did not believe Burr to be guilty in the fall of 1806 now believed that he was, and that Allen should not be blamed for being among that sizable majority.56
Allen lost the election, but at least he lost to a fellow Republican, Charles Scott, giving Clay some measure of satisfaction. Furthermore, Federalist attacks did not hurt Clay among his constituents. His popularity had never been higher, and he easily won reelection to the Kentucky House in the summer of 1808. Humphrey Marshall, neither expelled nor repentant, won reelection too. During the previous session, before everything had turned personal, it had been devilishly difficult to make the legislature productive. Now, in an increasingly contentious setting, it was doubly so.57
That reality was highlighted when Clay returned to the Kentucky House in the fall of 1808 to face a serious challenge for the Speakership. When he lost 36 to 31 to William Logan, Clay’s friends tried to soften the defeat by saying that members had wanted him unrestrained by House rules to speak out against people like Humphrey Marshall. But the Speakership had not prevented Clay from challenging Marshall in the previous session. Federalists saw Clay’s defeat as a rebuke and chortled over his disappointment. Now he was back on the floor and separated from Marshall by only one seat, where a big, jolly German immigrant named Christopher Riffe sat between them.58
WHEN THE SESSION opened, the legislature received a message from the governor that President Jefferson had requested all state militias readied for possible war with either Great Britain or France. It was a grave response to the worsening international situation. After selling Louisiana to the United States in 1803, Napoleon had rekindled war with Britain, a conflict that did not end for another eleven years and eventually embroiled Americans in a nasty war of their own. In the meantime, increasing troubles abroad plunged them into spiteful arguments at home.
During the first two years of this new round of European warfare, America’s merchant shippers basked in their country’s neutrality while growing rich from a bountiful commercial carrying trade. That abruptly changed in 1805 when a British fleet under Lord Nelson demolished a combined French and Spanish force off Spain’s shores at Trafalgar. The resulting British domination of the world’s oceans made them an inevitable enemy to American mariners. In that same year, at Austerlitz, Napoleon smashed Austrian and Russian armies to make himself master of all Europe. Thus Britain’s fleet controlled the oceans but was powerless to assail Bonaparte, and Napoleon with his victorious army could only sullenly gaze at the sea.
The result was a peculiar war of indirection: beginning in 1806, Britain issued a series of decrees called the Orders in Council, which authorized the seizure of ships bound for French-controlled ports unless those ships first stopped at a British port to pay fees, submit to inspection, and obtain permission to proceed. Napoleon responded with his own decrees that sanctioned seizing any merchant ship that had entered a British port when it arrived at one he controlled. The state of affairs was from the start an exasperating affront to American pride.
The British managed to achieve an even more infuriating insult. They crewed their ships through impressment, simply another word for compulsory conscription, a venerable policy that the Royal Navy applied with great energy during the war with the French. Officers and their burly, club-wielding hearties—press gangs, they were called—combed pubs for drunkards and other likely wastrels on British soil, but the Royal Navy also sought out able-bodied seamen on American merchant ships at sea, confident that American crews were riddled with British deserters. In many cases that was true, but it is likely that more than several thousand American citizens fell victim to British impressment during the Napoleonic Wars. Such abductions were simply intolerable to the young nation.
An uneasy situation became much worse because of a serious incident off the Virginia coast. In June 1807, HMS Leopard stopped USS Chesapeake and insisted on boarding her to search for British deserters. When the American captain refused to submit to this indignity, the Leopard fired three broadsides into the Chesapeake, killing three of her crew. Royal Marines then boarded the Chesapeake and took off four men, only one of whom, it turned out, was a deserter. The country exploded as news of this incident spread, and Jefferson could successfully have sought a declaration of war, but he instead employed what he believed would be effective commercial measures, specifically, a thorough embargo on all foreign trade.
Clay fervently supported Jefferson’s policies. Humphrey Marshall, however, did not. For several weeks, he successfully prevented a vote on Clay’s pro-administration resolutions with procedural tricks and various motions of his own. Despite efforts to appease Marshall by amending Clay’s motions, the final vote was 64 to 1, the stubborn Federalist alone dissenting.59
Clay and Marshall’s disputes by now had become quite personal, and their colleagues watched with grim fascination and vague apprehension as the two neared their boiling points. The subject that finally brought the two to blows seemed trivial at first. As soon as he could afford it, Henry Clay had become one of the best-dressed men in the state. He bought only the finest imported English broadcloth and linen and employed only the best tailors. The results were trim, tasteful suits and crisp linen shirts, obviously expensive though fashionably subdued. During this session, however, Clay began wearing a homespun denim suit, a conspicuous gesture to promote American goods for American consumption. He made his intention even more apparent on January 3, 1809, with his “Homespun Resolution” calling for legislators to wear only American clothes from thread to garment. The following day, Marshall made a gesture of his own. Entering the House chamber clad in the best imported British broadcloth, he called Clay a demagogue for making an issue of foreign manufactures. Clay questioned Marshall’s patriotism. Marshall called Clay a liar.60
That did it. The two were about ten feet apart. Clay turned as though stunned and then lunged toward Marshall, his arms extended and hands clenched. Members rushed between them, several holding Clay as he thrashed wildly. Trying to free himself, he accidentally punched an innocent bystander. The big German Christopher Riffe stepped between Clay and Marshall, his booming voice shouting, “Come poys, no fightin here, I vips you both.”
Clay, panting, regained his composure and was released. He immediately apologized to the House but disdainfully stared at Marshall as he declared that he had been provoked to violence because Marshall was not an honorable man. Marshall shouted, “It is the apology of a poltroon!” He was wrong on both counts: it was not an apology, and Clay was not a coward. That evening as Clay returned to his lodgings, he foolishly resolved to prove that.61
“After the occurrences in the House of Representatives on this day,” he wrote to Marshall, “the receipt of this note will excite with you no surprise. I hope on my part I shall not be disappointed in the execution of the pledge you gave on that occasion, and in your disclaimer of the character attributed to you. To enable you to fulfill these reasonable and just expectations my friend Maj. [John B.] Campbell is authorized by me to adjust the ceremonies proper to be observed.”62
These “ceremonies proper to be observed” meant a fight with weapons, potentially to the death—in short, a duel. The practice was banned by most states, including Kentucky, but duels were not uncommon, particularly for men of the upper class with their sensitive pride and sharpened honor. Duels were sometimes seen as the only respectable way to resolve a truly serious dispute, particularly one involving questions of character. The words Clay and Marshall had swapped made this an essential question of character for both. Clay had said that Marshall was a tacit traitor, a dishonorable scoundrel. Marshall had called Clay a liar, a sneaking coward. Clay on the night of January 4, 1809, believed he had no choice but to challenge Marshall to a duel. Marshall believed he had no choice but to accept.63
Their seconds—representatives who made the arrangements, Major John B. Campbell for Clay and Colonel James F. Moore for Marshall—set the appointment for January 19 and drew up the rules. Clay and Marshall would stand ten paces apart and hold their fire until hearing the command “Attention! Fire!” A misfire would be counted as a discharge. If one fired before the other, he had to remain in position until the other man fired. The seconds themselves would strictly enforce these rules by shooting down the man who violated them.64
Occasionally everything about these affairs was for show, easily stopped by the fabled “mutual friends” who engineered a reconciliation, at least for public consumption. This was not one of those affairs. For two weeks Clay and Marshall grimly and deliberately prepared to kill each other. Although the choice of weapons was customarily the province of the challenged party, Clay wanted to acquire a pair of pistols. Pistols, as it happened, were fine with Marshall. He was spending his days diligently practicing with one at the home of a friend.65
As the day neared, Clay and Marshall went to Louisville. The two with their respective companions separately crossed the Ohio near Shippingport to avoid the bad form of spilling blood in their home state. Indiana would do for a killing. Early on January 19, everyone met in a clearing near Silver Creek. A physician was present.66
Back in Lexington, Lucretia’s sister Susannah Price was deeply troubled by the news. She could only imagine the strain on Lucretia, now far along in yet another pregnancy. Worried about how the shock of bad news would affect her sister and the baby, Suky Price hurried out to Ashland. If Henry Clay got himself killed up in Indiana, Lucretia would be a twenty-seven-year-old widow with four children under the age of eight and another on the way. Yet Suky found both Lucretia and Ashland strangely calm. The sisters visited as Lucretia tended to routine household chores. Neither woman mentioned the duel. Suky wondered with growing unease whether Lucretia possibly did not know what was happening that day somewhere north of the Ohio River. She could not bring herself to tell her. The hours passed. Late in the afternoon, a rider turned from the main road into Ashland’s drive and approached the house. It was a messenger from town. He handed Lucretia a note.
THAT MORNING, HER husband and Humphrey Marshall had gone through with their duel. At the measured distance they stood sideways to make themselves smaller targets and at the command fired almost simultaneously. Marshall missed, but Clay slightly grazed Marshall along his abdomen near the navel. Both men wanted a second shot. This time Clay’s gun misfired, and again Marshall missed. Both wanted a third shot, and in this round, Marshall finally hit his target by wounding Clay in the thigh, causing Clay’s shot to go wide. Clay stumbled while shouting that he wanted another round. The physician, however, insisted on examining the wound. Although Clay was lucky that the bullet had not struck bone, he was clearly in no shape to continue. His friends ended the fight.67
They took Clay back across the river to Louisville, where Dr. Frederick Ridgely patched him up at the home of a friend. After all the excitement, Clay could not rest, and that same day he wrote to a friend to describe the duel and to say that he was already on the mend. It is very likely that he also wrote to Lucretia—it would have been most out of character for him not to—but no letter to her from him survives.
It almost seemed an afterthought, then, that a member of the legislature remembered Lucretia at Ashland and sent the messenger whom she and Suky watched approaching the house that afternoon. Lucretia read the note and passed it to her sister. “Thank God,” Lucretia quietly breathed, “he is only slightly wounded.” Suky quickly scanned the note. She looked at her sister in amazement. Lucretia had known all along. Suky exclaimed in gushing, laughing relief about Lucretia knowing all along, after all. She stared at her sister—calm, brave young woman.68
The seconds, Campbell and Moore, each wrote narratives of the affair that were published in the newspapers. Clay and Marshall, they proudly reported, had behaved honorably. The Kentucky legislature censured them for conduct unbecoming to members, but that was only an expected shrug of official shoulders, and the two resumed their seats without further ado. In fact, friends gave Clay backslapping congratulations along with chuckled regret that he had not finished Marshall off.69
Beyond her stoic words of relief to Suky, there is no evidence as to how Lucretia felt about all of this, but she must have been churning with anxiety before and greatly relieved afterward. And it would have been normal for her to be very angry at the risk her husband had selfishly taken, honor and reputation aside. In a few weeks, she had their third daughter. They named her Lucretia Hart Clay, after her calm, brave mother.
WHILE CLAY RECOVERED, the legislative session ended. He returned home to oversee the last stages of construction on the main part of the Ashland mansion, but he would soon expand it even more. In late 1813, he began two wings that flanked and were connected to the main house at right angles, a plan supplied by famed architect Benjamin Latrobe. Clay’s growing fame eventually made Ashland a destination for admirers who were as pilgrims drawn to a shrine. Aside from its rising renown as a Bluegrass showplace, Ashland was to be a working farm where grains, hemp, and blooded livestock could flourish. With several other Kentuckians, Clay purchased a thoroughbred named Buzzard, making this expensive stallion the first horse in the United States to be owned by a syndicate. Buzzard earned his owners considerable sums in stud fees and established Ashland as the home of racing champions. By 1811, Clay owned sixty-five horses.70
From the very beginning and throughout Henry and Lucretia’s lives, Ashland rang with the laughter and shouts of children. Everyone who knew her smiled on Lucretia, quiet and unassuming in society but warm and loving with children, whether her own or those of friends or eventually her grandchildren. That made what happened to Theodore, their oldest son, all the more tragic. The date is unfixed, but the event itself was vividly etched in his parents’ memories. Theodore fell and suffered a severe head injury. Convinced that Theodore would otherwise die, Lucretia’s brother-in-law Dr. Richard Pindell took drastic action. He relieved the pressure on the child’s brain with a procedure called trepanning, the drilling of a hole in the patient’s skull to drain fluid from the cranium. The procedure was as dangerous as it was grotesque, but Theodore survived it and seemed to get better. Henry and Lucretia were greatly relieved. And that too made what later happened to Theodore all the more tragic.71
Relatives were important to the Clays. Henry regularly visited his mother and stepfather at Versailles and handled their legal affairs. Clay’s half sister, Martha “Patsy” Watkins, lived in Lexington, most likely with the Clays for a time, before she married William Blackburn. Lucretia’s family too remained close even across great distances. James and Nancy Brown in New Orleans were always in touch, although Nancy joined a family chorus complaining about Lucretia’s unreliability as a correspondent. In one instance, Nancy “was delighted at finding that Lucretia had overcome her repugnance to writing” and celebrated the rare event with an immediate reply.72 Yet Lucretia’s dislike of writing was only seldom shaken off, and then as the years passed not at all. Clay finally explained to a friend that Lucretia “is so out of the habit of writing that she now hardly ever writes to me.”73
In June 1808, Lucretia’s father died at his home on Mill Street. Clay and Thomas Hart’s oldest son, Thomas Jr., were named executors of the enormous estate, and its extensive land holdings would take years to sort out. Hart left the house to his wife and settled upon her a generous allowance. The remainder of the estate was distributed to his surviving children and sons-in-law, and Lucretia’s portion significantly increased the Clays’ assets.74
Thomas Hart, Jr., died unexpectedly in 1809, and Clay had to shoulder the responsibilities of settling his brother-in-law’s estate as well.75 Such obligations with business dealings and political activities would have overwhelmed most men, but Clay’s industry and stamina saw him through. He even expanded his holdings, investing in local manufacturing concerns and in 1808 purchasing Traveller’s Hall, the place built in 1802 for “Genteel Guests Only,” the hotel where Aaron Burr had attended a concert on his first visit to Kentucky. Clay renamed it the Kentucky Hotel and leased it for $900 a year to Cuthbert Banks, who had run Olympian Springs for Thomas Hart and who had sold to Clay the first 125 acres outside of town that became Ashland. At the age of thirty-one and with a bullet scar on his thigh, Henry Clay was one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the region. He had worked hard for it all. Lucretia could have said the same.76
CLAY RETURNED TO the Kentucky House of Representatives in December 1809 for the last time as a member. In only a few weeks the legislature had to replace Buckner Thruston in the U.S. Senate because he had resigned to accept a judicial appointment. Henry Clay and the current speaker, William Logan, stood for the post, with Clay winning 63 to 31. He was again to be a replacement, but with more longevity this time, as fourteen months remained on Thruston’s term. Clay immediately resigned from the state legislature, with compliments to Logan on his honorable conduct during their brief contest, and headed home to pack his bags. He started for Washington in the dead of winter. The lateness of the season kept Lucretia from making the trip.77
Clay took his seat on February 5, 1810, as the capital was concluding its first year of James Madison’s presidency. “Cousin Dolley” was now First Lady, and she had established a tradition of Wednesday evening parties at the President’s House, lively affairs with food, drink, and spirited conversation. The rigors of brutal cold and wretched accommodations on Clay’s journey, however, had made him sick. The nightly revels of his previous stay in Washington were unappealing on this trip.78
Instead, he threw himself into his work in the Senate. Considerable opposition to Jefferson’s Embargo had developed in the closing days of his presidency, particularly in New England and Mid-Atlantic states dependent on shipping. Clay had considered the domestic consequences of the Embargo as the price of patriotism, the only way short of war to maintain American honor. Popular upheaval, however, compelled the Embargo’s repeal. The Non-Intercourse Act was passed early in Madison’s administration to replace the Embargo. It reopened U.S. trade to the world except for Great Britain and France.
When Clay entered the Senate, Congress was discussing the impending expiration of the Non-Intercourse Act. Because the law had proved distressingly easy to skirt, many in Congress wanted to replace rather than renew it. Yet a considerable number of Republicans had lost their enthusiasm for economic retaliation. Everyone hated the Embargo, and both Great Britain and France had laughed at Non-Intercourse. In addition, government revenues plummeted with the decline in trade, unbalancing the Treasury’s books and nudging budget-conscious Republicans toward mild panic. As the Federalist minority cried for a return to free trade, Republican factionalism made it difficult for Congress to unite behind a policy. In fact, the Eleventh Congress began to dither and derange itself with such abandon that one observer called it a bunch of “blathering bitches.” Virginian John Randolph, one of its more acerbic members, simply stated that “a more despicable set was never gathered together.”79
The House sent a bill to the Senate that would close U.S. ports to British and French merchant vessels and warships, although the measure was obviously aimed at Britain: the Royal Navy’s blockade kept French ships from reaching American ports. But the real purpose of the bill was to open trade for American ships with any nation. A sliver of the restrictive policy, and barely a sliver at that, remained in the proposal with the pledge to reopen U.S. ports to Britain and France when they stopped violating American neutrality. As an instrument of coercion, it wasn’t much of a bill to begin with, but the Senate completely emasculated it by removing all retaliatory commercial sections. This newest version of the bill sniffed that British and French warships could not come into U.S. ports, but admitted both nations’ merchant vessels.80
Clay watched this unfold with mounting disgust. His first speech in the Eleventh Congress foreshadowed those of the next two years. At first his fiery voice would be a lone one as it urged a more belligerent policy, but in due course he would lead a chorus.81 He did not like the House bill, but he thought it far better than what the Senate had produced. The nation had tried peaceful resistance to European arrogance, Clay shouted; “when this is abandoned, without effect, I am for resistance by the sword.” He preferred “the troubled ocean of war, demanded by the honor and independence of the country, with all its calamities, and desolations, to the tranquil, putrescent pool of ignominious peace.” He scoffed at those who whined that the nation’s economy could not sustain a war against Britain, a strutting commercial tyrant that compounded conceit with man stealing. Americans had the armed power in its militia to conquer British territory unaided: “the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.” Those who defended the British by saying their navy protected Americans from French aggression were merely submitting “to British slavery upon the water, that we may escape French subjugation upon land.” He appealed to America’s Revolutionary spirit and envisioned its renewal for the current generation in the forge of war.82
Clay’s lone voice could not defeat the bill in the Senate, but the House refused to accept it. A new round of blathering finally produced a real monstrosity, Macon’s Bill No. 2, a hodgepodge of measures that reopened unrestricted trade with everyone in the world, including Britain and France. If either the British or the French dropped their restrictions, Congress crowed, the United States would renew nonintercourse with the other. In short, Congress abandoned a policy that had consistently failed to shape events, but in the same breath pledged to implement it again, this time as much as a reward for good behavior as punishment for bad. Even North Carolina representative Nathaniel Macon, who reported the bill out of committee, hence its name, opposed it. It passed both houses, though, and Madison signed it into law.
Macon’s Bill No. 2 dismayed Clay, but he continued to work for federally sponsored internal improvements, greater military preparations, and domestic industries. In Kentucky, the Embargo and Non-Importation Act had encouraged infant manufacturing concerns, and their investors wanted Congress to protect them from foreign competition. Clay and others tried to persuade Congress to take a small step in that direction.83 On March 22, 1810, his fellow Kentucky senator John Pope proposed an amendment to a naval appropriations bill that would have required the secretary of the navy to favor the purchase of domestic naval supplies. Pope’s goal was to boost Kentucky’s hemp farmers, whose cordage could be used to rig the American navy, but the idea raised New Englanders’ suspicions. When James Lloyd, Jr., of Massachusetts tried to remove Pope’s amendment, Clay jumped to his feet and made a lengthy plea to support domestic manufacturing and promote American self-sufficiency. Casting his gaze beyond Kentucky hemp growers, Clay soared into a sweeping nationalism that decried conflicts between the country’s producers and merchants that often put different sections at odds. Lloyd’s New England depended on foreign commerce for its wealth, and Clay observed that “Dame commerce will oppose domestic manufactures. She is a flirting, flippant, noisy jade, and if we are governed by her fantasies, we shall never put off the muslins of India and the cloths of Europe.” The producing sections of the nation, he predicted, would nevertheless manufacture all the goods the American people needed sooner rather than later.84
Clay’s rejoinder to Lloyd struck a chord throughout the country. Many newspapers reprinted it as an indisputable case for national self-sufficiency, and it became a cornerstone for what Clay later dubbed the American System, a program for national unity and prosperity through internal improvements and domestic manufactures.85
Near the end of the congressional session, Clay concluded that he did not much like the Senate. Its constraining rules and staid style meant that few ever said what they actually meant, and many sugared their words into palatable but empty confections. Although certain that a full term in the Senate was his for the asking, Clay was unhappy. He discussed his feelings with friends and decided instead to seek election to the House of Representatives in the Twelfth Congress. A vacancy had recently occurred in his district, and he could have it right away, but he did not want to make Kentucky choose yet another replacement for the Senate with only one session remaining. Instead, William T. Barry stood in a special election for the House seat in the remainder of the Eleventh Congress. Clay meanwhile remained in the Senate, but he also stood for election in his district for the congressional term commencing with the Twelfth Congress. Clay easily won this contest and for a brief interval held the unique position of being a sitting senator as well as an elected congressman.86
IN JUNE 1810, off the Florida Keys, a British warship, HMS Moselle, mistook USS Vixen for a French warship and opened fire. The British captain apologized for the mistake, but Clay was furious that the American commander had not defended the flag. When a man is hit upon the nose, Clay muttered, he does not first ask “the person giving it what he means” before “avenging the insult.”87 Meanwhile, Americans were doing some insulting of their own. A group of settlers in Spanish West Florida staged a revolt to seize control of Baton Rouge and all the land from the Perdido to the Mississippi rivers. They asked the United States to annex the region. With Congress out of session until the fall, Madison consequently had to make some important decisions. He annexed the area seized by rebels in West Florida, claiming that the territory had been a part of the Louisiana Purchase, and planned to ask Congress to endorse his judgment. Most important, however, was the president’s reaction to Napoleon’s startling announcement in late summer that he would respect U.S. neutrality. Bonaparte was lying to make Madison invoke the terms of Macon’s Bill No. 2, but the president lunged at the gesture nonetheless. Accordingly, the United States announced its intention to resume nonintercourse against the British if they did not rescind the Orders in Council in three months.
Clay was late in returning to Washington from Kentucky that fall. He brought Lucretia with him, and because she was about five months pregnant, they set a slower pace than was his habit. Lucretia took no pleasure in lively social scenes, but she soon met her husband’s new friend, the vibrant hostess Margaret Bayard Smith, who found Lucretia to be “a woman of strong natural sense, very kind and friendly.” The quiet woman from Kentucky was the polar opposite of her spirited husband. She had “no taste for fashionable company or amusements, and is a thousand times better pleased, sitting in the room with all her children around her … than in the most brilliant drawing room.”88 It was true that Lucretia was thoroughly devoted to her children, and apparently some had remained at Ashland, a cause for both Clays to worry. In any case, Washington society did not impress her much. Unadorned and unaffected, Lucretia clearly did not care whether Washington society was impressed with her. She radiated an unshakable sense of self. Margaret liked her.89
THE SENATE COMMITTEE on Foreign Affairs studied the portion of President Madison’s message dealing with West Florida and framed a bill to make it part of the Territory of Orleans. The effort started a lively debate over territorial expansion, and Clay waded into it. A lengthy discourse by Delaware Federalist Outerbridge Horsey opposed adding West Florida to the United States, and Clay responded on December 28, 1810. He traced the region’s history back to the seventeenth century to prove that everything west of the Perdido River was always part of Louisiana and was thus included in the 1803 purchase.90
Territorial expansion at the expense of Spain might seem unjust, especially because Spain was fighting Napoleon, but Clay pointed out that it was a predatory world: better the United States claim the land than someone else. He responded to fears that American behavior could provoke war with Britain by asking, “Is the time never to arrive when we may manage our affairs without the fear of insulting His Britannic Majesty? Is the rod of British power to be forever suspended over our heads?” In point of fact, Clay, like other westerners, saw this modest extension of American dominion as only a beginning. He declared a “hope to see, ere long, the new United States (if you will allow me the expression) embracing not only the old thirteen States, but the entire country East of the Mississippi, including East Florida and some of the territories to the north of us also.”91It was an impetuous statement. Worse, it would prove an impolitic one.
On December 31, Massachusetts Federalist Timothy Pickering challenged Clay’s assertion that the part of West Florida in question was in the Louisiana Purchase. Pickering waved a letter that Jefferson had submitted to the Senate in 1805, a communication from Maurice de Talleyrand, at the time Napoleon’s foreign minister, clearly stating that Napoleon never intended that any portion of West Florida would be included in the Louisiana Purchase. The Talleyrand letter was indeed definitive proof that Clay was wrong, but Jefferson had given it to the Senate with the understanding that it would remain secret. To change the subject, Clay pounced on that facet of Pickering’s evidence. He moved that the Senate censure Pickering for violating a pledge of secrecy. By then the hour was late, and New Year’s loomed. The Senate voted to take the matter up again on January 2, 1811.92
Clay began that day by reading an amended resolution for censure, setting off an acrimonious debate that accomplished precisely his goal of diverting attention from the substance of the Talleyrand letter to the dubious process by which it had come to light. After lengthy discussions that at one point focused on whether to include the words “palpable violation” versus “unintentional violation” and even stalled on the possibility of removing the syllable “un” from “unintentional,” Clay got his relatively mild censure through the Senate. Federalist newspapers knew their men had been gulled and called for the “censuring of Clay for his censorious resolution.”93
In the wake of all this, the Senate postponed extending the Orleans Territory. The following day, however, President Madison requested secret authorization to seize every acre of Spanish Florida if military necessity required it. Clay chaired the Senate committee that recommended granting the administration’s request, and a bill doing so passed both houses on January 15, 1811.94 Like his pro-expansion speech, his role in this questionable initiative would come back to haunt him.
Clay tended to be testy and impulsive at this stage of his political career, prone to speak first and reflect later, but he was also ill during these weeks. A nagging cold along with a painful inflammation of his gums may have blunted his better political instincts.95 The eventful final session of the Eleventh Congress had already put him on record several times in ways he would later rue, but his effort to prevent the recharter of the Bank of the United States would eventually cause him the most regret.
Congress had chartered the Bank of the United States in 1791 for a term of twenty years. The Bank was the brainchild of Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, who wanted a financial institution to stabilize the currency and fund the country’s enormous national debt. The Bank was controversial from the start. Jefferson and Madison and their followers, later labeled Democratic-Republicans, opposed it because they believed it was unconstitutional. The Bank worked, however, a practical fact that diminished Jefferson and Madison’s distaste for it during their presidencies. Their secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, had come to see it as indispensable to a sound economy and urged its recharter as it neared expiration in 1811. Congressman James Madison had been the most vociferous critic of the Bank at its creation. President James Madison was now silent about it.
Opposition to the Bank nonetheless persisted across the country. Old Republicans continued to fear that interpreting the Constitution so loosely would set a pattern to make it eventually meaningless. Others had less abstract reasons for opposing the national bank. Many states—Kentucky was one of them—eased credit and solved chronic currency shortages by chartering their own banks. These state banks both competed with and were forced to submit to the Bank of the United States, whose control of credit almost always struck freewheeling state bankers as shortsighted and overly restrictive. State governments also taxed state banks and chafed at the national bank’s policies that impinged on their state institutions, sometimes to diminish their revenue. The irritation translated into reflexive opposition to the Bank of the United States, and in no place more vigorously than Kentucky, which flatly instructed its congressional delegation to oppose its recharter.96
Clay held stock and served on the board of Kentucky banks opposing recharter, but he was guided by more than plain self-interest. In time, he was less consistent in opposing federal initiatives, especially when they benefited the West, but in 1811 Clay still believed in states’ rights and strict constitutional construction. In February, when the Senate began debating recharter, he sincerely thought that the Bank was unconstitutional.
In the Senate, William Harris Crawford of Georgia, a close friend of Albert Gallatin, took the lead in urging recharter. A native Virginian like Clay, Crawford was burly, ruggedly handsome, and popular, with a reputation for making careful arguments in an affable way. He was an effective advocate for the Bank, and a formidable adversary for those opposing it. On February 11, 1811, Crawford made a strong case for the Bank’s constitutionality. Three days later the Bank’s opponents began their case with Virginia’s William Branch Giles’s uncertain challenge of Crawford’s argument. Possibly because Giles was Gallatin’s political enemy, he framed his case against recharter in an especially cautious manner. In fact, many who listened to the first part of his speech were not sure whether Giles opposed or supported recharter. Not until his conclusion did he timorously declare that the Bank charter should expire.97
It was precisely the sort of performance that Clay found so exasperating about the Senate. On February 15, he was acerbic and unkind as he sarcastically lampooned Giles for his irresolute approach. Giles had “discussed both sides of the question, with great ability and eloquence, and certainly demonstrated to the satisfaction of all who heard him, both that it is constitutional and unconstitutional, highly proper and improper to prolong the charter of the bank.” He compared Giles’s speech to a fabled performance by Patrick Henry. Busy with numerous cases, Henry entered a courtroom one day forgetful of which side he was representing. He set forth a brilliant case, but it was against his client, who finally caught Henry’s attention and whispered that he had “ruined” him. Henry paused before muttering not to worry. He immediately launched into a dazzling oration refuting everything he had previously said, and won the case.98
Clay’s flashy impudence was unfortunate. If only because he could, he chose to make Giles squirm and the Senate uncomfortable, but his reputation as an enfant terrible would be hard to live down, particularly when enemies later recalled it as foreshadowing a dismissive arrogance of those less quick and less clever in floor debates. He was that day very much the puppy Senator Tracy had disparaged, in all its plenitude.
Yet he was also that day the shrewd lawyer who could marshal a broad array of persuasive reasons why the Bank of the United States was dangerous to American liberty. State banks were smaller, less centralized, and easier to control, he said. He co-opted his opponents’ arguments in the Kentucky Insurance Company debates to describe the hazards of a national money power. He assailed Crawford’s claims about “implied powers” giving Congress the authority to charter a bank. The formulation was too elastic and too prone to abuses that would make the states servile rather than sovereign. The speech was well argued, but the mean-spirited barbs at the beginning were its most memorable parts, and therein lay a high irony. Eventually, Henry Clay would behave in exactly the way he had described Patrick Henry. Eventually, every attack he made that day against the Bank he would later try to refute with glittering praise of it. Those who had looked down when Clay made Giles twist on his wit would remember. They would not let Clay forget.99
The Senate evenly divided on the question at 17 for and 17 against, leaving it to the elderly, ineffectual Vice President George Clinton to break the tie. Everybody had anticipated this awkward possibility, and Clinton fortunately had a speech ready explaining why he would side with the nays to kill the Bank of the United States. Clinton’s words sounded strangely familiar, though, and some suspected that Clay had ghostwritten the speech the night before the vote. Clay’s innocent smile and insistence that he had only taken Clinton’s dictation to help an old man were unconvincing. The Senate was not altogether sorry to see Clay go.100
CONGRESS ADJOURNED ON March 3, 1811, and the Clays rushed back to Kentucky, as Lucretia now appeared ready to have her baby. Henry and Lucretia spent anxious days on the road but finally arrived at Ashland at the end of the month. In a downstairs room that would become the dining room after a subsequent remodeling, Lucretia had a healthy boy on April 10 “with less inconvenience … than she ever before experienced.”101 They named him Henry Clay, Jr., a pledge of great promise and a bright future; a pledge in that name also of great expectations, a heavy burden. Henry Clay the elder was certain the boy would be up to it.