CHAPTER FOUR

The Hawk and the Gambler

THAT SUMMER AT Ashland, Henry Clay judged war to be inevitable. French violations of American neutrality continued, but he believed the fight would be with Great Britain. While tending to a mountain of business and legal work, Clay queried his neighbors about the overwrought international situation and what it meant for American security, especially on the frontier.¹ Westerners resented British attacks on American shipping and the impressment of American seamen, and they were convinced that the British were encouraging Indians in the Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana territories to make war on American settlers. The charismatic Shawnee warrior Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa (whites called him “the Prophet”) were uniting northwestern tribes to block white expansion, and westerners imagined that British schemes abetted that effort. Actually, the Indians did not need Britain to rile them up over American encroachment on their lands, but such subtleties were easily buried under reflexive anger at Redcoats and raw terror caused by angry warriors. The West had a simple solution: conquering Canada was the best way to get rid of the British.

Clay intended to have Congress address these concerns when he returned to Washington in the fall to take his seat in the House of Representatives. The growing crisis prompted Congress to convene in early November, and Clay hurried to put his business affairs in order as he planned the trip for his family. Lucretia had not liked leaving the children (now six with the addition of Henry Jr.) at Ashland the previous winter, and she insisted that she would go to Washington only if they came too. He so wanted her with him that he agreed, although taking the whole family over the narrow, rutted roads to the capital promised to be a memorable ordeal.

Clay also carefully packed a sample of Kentucky wine made from Madeira grapes as a gift for President Madison. In 1807, a similar offering to Thomas Jefferson had mortified Clay when the president served it with considerable ceremony to a large gathering only to discover that the wine had gone quite bad. Clay made certain that this batch slated for Cousin Dolley’s table would do credit to Kentucky’s vineyards, tangible evidence of western sophistication and industry.²

Clay returned to a very different Congress from the one he had left in March. Irate constituents embarrassed by the doings of the “blathering bitches” had turned out many representatives. The result was that almost half of the membership was new and inexperienced. The Twelfth Congress was also remarkably youthful. A considerable majority were under forty, and, like Clay, most were under thirty-five. One Federalist described them as “young politicians, half hatched, the shell still on their heads, and their pin feathers not yet shed.”³ They became quite well organized, though, unlike their opponents, even earning a label, a sure indication of a coherent faction. Caustic John Randolph called these new members War Hawks. He did not mean it as a compliment.

The Clays lodged at a boardinghouse with congressmen who all held similar views, especially the prickly one that Britain had insulted American honor long enough. They were a fire-breathing lot, soon known as the War Mess, an extraordinary group of young men who lived, ate, and worked together in such compatibility that they could finish each other’s sentences. With the exception of South Carolinian Langdon Cheves and fellow Kentuckian George M. Bibb (who had taken Clay’s place in the Senate), Clay was the oldest, but both Cheves and Bibb were senior by only a year, and Clay immediately became the leader of the group that included Felix Grundy, now a congressman from Tennessee, and two other South Carolinians, John C. Calhoun and William Lowndes, both only twenty-nine years old. Calhoun was late arriving because Floride (pronounced “Florida”) Calhoun was giving birth to their first child, but the War Mess wasted no time in making plans for the upcoming session. On Sunday, November 3, the day before Congress convened, a caucus of Republican members, most of them freshmen, got their first look at the War Hawks in action when they drummed up support for Clay to be elected Speaker. The following day, Clay’s friends tossed him into a contest that included several aspirants, the veteran Georgia congressman William W. Bibb prominent among them. Clay won going away, taking the Speakership with a 75 to 38 vote. The War Hawks had mobilized swiftly.⁴

Some members were already calling this tall Kentuckian “the Western Star” in tribute to his truly meteoric rise to the Speakership. Clay’s election to the post was unprecedented. At thirty-four, Clay was the youngest Speaker of the House, his closest rival for that honor being Jonathan Dayton, whose service in the mid-1790s had begun when he was thirty-five. Sworn in by William Findley of Pennsylvania, Clay made brief remarks, settled into the ornate Speaker’s chair, and got down to the business of filling House committees and appointing their chairmen. In this regard, Clay as Speaker wielded considerable power to steer the House’s direction. He was careful to appear balanced in distributing appointments across the political spectrum, but he made sure that there were War Hawk majorities and friendly chairmen on key committees. John Randolph was so senior, for instance, that he had to have a place on the Foreign Relations Committee, but Clay also appointed New York War Hawk Peter B. Porter chairman and chocked the committee with other War Hawks to suppress Randolph’s obstructionism if not smother his voice. Clay also appointed compliant chairmen to head other committees central to addressing the British crisis and provided them with War Hawk majorities as well. He placed messmate Langdon Cheves at the head of Naval Affairs, loyal Republican Ezekiel Bacon at Ways and Means, and South Carolina War Hawk David R. Williams at Military Affairs.⁵

Clay’s hand in shaping these committees was not exceptional in itself, but the level of control he exerted was remarkable and innovative. Before Clay, Speakers were primarily parliamentarians issuing rulings on points of order and determining who held the floor during debates. They did not vote except to break ties and did not engage in debate. As for the latter custom, Clay resolved to depart from it early and often as the House confronted crucial foreign and domestic policy issues, a practice he had resorted to as the Kentucky Speaker of the House. When necessary, Clay temporarily left the Speaker’s chair and the House became the “Committee of the Whole” while he participated in debate. His most significant innovation, though, rested in changes to House procedures that allowed him to control its operations through the deft use of his appointive power. As a result, committees conducted congressional business based on his priorities. He reshaped House routines by establishing new standing committees in addition to select committees and increasingly referred questions to both. The practice increased efficiency while enhancing his control over the legislative agenda.⁶

Clay was unfailingly fair as a presiding officer. He was nevertheless iron-fisted when dealing with the most vocal critics of an aggressive foreign policy. Federalists tried to impede the War Hawks at every turn, but their numbers (37 of 142 congressmen) hampered these efforts. In the face of that towering majority, Federalists like Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts contemplated giving Clay and his friends as much rope as they needed to embark on an unsuccessful war, discredit themselves in the process, and make way for a Federalist resurgence. But regardless of party, senior congressmen were stunned by this group of unknowns led by the upstart Clay. These veterans griped about the rapid, undeserved rise of the War Hawks. Quincy was typical in his contempt: Clay, he said, was “bold, aspiring, presumptuous, with a rough overbearing eloquence, neither exact or comprehensive, which he cultivated and formed in the contests with half-civilized wranglers in the county courts of Kentucky, and quickened into confidence and readiness by successful declamations at barbecues and electioneering struggles.”⁷

John Randolph, nominally a Republican, was fearlessly nasty and tireless in opposing the War Hawks. Randolph was usually uncontrollable under the best of circumstances, and previous Speakers had simply resigned themselves to his legislative antics and personal crotchets. Randolph had started his political career as an ardent Republican and fervent supporter of fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, his distant cousin, yet he gradually came to judge President Jefferson’s nationalism as heresy. By Jefferson’s second term, Randolph had drifted into an informal alliance with Old Republicans, called such because they embraced small government and strict constitutional construction, but also called Tertium Quids (meaning “third somethings”) or just Quids, because they were neither Republican nor Federalist. These untethered Quids, with Randolph at their fore, feared that war with Great Britain would imperil the country, increase federal power, and cost a pile of money. They were right about all three, of course, and Randolph’s relentless warnings were effective enough to take something of the shine off the War Hawk agenda.

Aside from being a tireless Cassandra, Randolph was a peculiar character. Occasionally he could act as if he were stark raving mad. Either a childhood illness or an affliction later labeled Klinefelter’s syndrome had made him a beardless, high-voiced, sexually impotent adult (this last confirmed by a postmortem in 1833).⁸ But most of all, his odd condition made him irritable and vicious, quick to anger, and usually spoiling for a fight. In fact, conflict was mother’s milk to Randolph as he galloped up to Washington from his Virginia plantation, Roanoke, swigging brandy and erupting over perceived insults to his politics or his person, his hair-trigger temper as likely to be touched off by one as the other. He took an instant dislike to Henry Clay and quickly tested the new Speaker’s will.

Randolph regularly brought his hounds into the House chamber, turning them loose to lope among the desks and lounge in the aisles. When Congressman Willis Alston of North Carolina once complained that the large dogs were in the way, Randolph strode over to a startled Alston and rapped him with a cane, and that was the end of that. Clay’s predecessor, Joseph Varnum of Massachusetts, watched this violent show of temper, weighed Randolph’s reputation for wrath, and decided that discretion was the better part of parliamentary protocol. Randolph’s dogs remained a House fixture at the pleasure of their owner. Clay had been Speaker only a few weeks when Randolph bounced into the House chamber, a huge dog at his heels. Clay immediately summoned the doorkeeper and quietly told him to remove the animal from the House of Representatives. Everyone fell silent as the doorkeeper did Clay’s bidding. Randolph was silent as well. He never brought a dog into the House again, but he never forgot the last day he had, and never forgave the man in the Speaker’s chair who had not blinked.⁹

OVER TIME, CLAY’S transformation of the Speakership would become legendary, showing future Speakers how to exploit appointive and parliamentary authority in previously untried ways. Not until after the Civil War, though, would the country see another leader utilize the post’s potential to the same extent as did Henry Clay. He augmented the Speaker’s clout gradually, achieving it through many trials and occasional errors rather than through the systematic application of a preconceived plan.¹⁰ When he was done, he had transformed the latent potential of the job into a lively dynamism of power and purpose. His friend William Plumer, observing that the post was “an office you did not want, but an office that wanted you,” had predicted that Clay would “preside with dignity over” the House. Nobody could have known that he would also direct its affairs with such certainty that it would be the start of his reputation as a legislative dictator.¹¹

Clay would have called it leadership. In the Kentucky statehouse, he had refused to be a mere enforcer of rules, a glorified ringmaster bringing order to fractious debates and controlling factious debaters. The legislature held pride of place in a government featuring a ceremonial executive, and Clay brought that philosophy of legislative supremacy to Congress from the start. The formula was syllogistic: the Speaker is the head of the majority party, the legislative majority should shape government policy, ergo the Speaker should coordinate and direct the government’s course.¹²

Passive presidents are targets of contempt in the modern American political setting, and too often that relatively recent attitude is projected back to criticize the seemingly submissive executives of the early Republic. Yet the Framers, with good reason, had established the legislature in the first article of the Constitution, and George Washington himself had described Congress as the first wheel of government. The Revolutionary generation’s contempt for kings stemmed from that generation’s fear of unchecked power. A chief executive submitting to the will of the people in the form of a dominant legislature was not just the normal but the desirable form of government in an enlightened age. The locus of power in the presidency tended to subvert that ideal, of course, but the principle existed in any case, and the political establishment embraced it.

Thus Clay’s views on legislative supremacy were in step with those of President Madison, who led House Republicans in the 1790s but never became Speaker because he could not envision melding the roles of floor leader and presiding officer. Becoming the president had not altered his opinion that Congress should take the initiative on most political matters. Madison’s annual messages to Congress (what today are called State of the Union addresses) presented his observations about issues, but he believed the legislature should craft the policies to address them. The year 1811 brought into Congress a Speaker who intended to lead rather than simply moderate, steering the course of a government whose president was only too happy to let him.¹³ The coincidental convergence of the aggressive legislator and the acquiescent executive makes it easy to overvalue Clay’s part in reshaping the Speakership as an institution, for the situation was in many ways simply a result of complementary personalities and temperaments. Other Speakers would not have Clay’s ability to lead, to speak, and to maneuver; other presidents would not be so willing to yield to anyone else on policy matters.¹⁴

While Clay insisted that the British revoke the Orders in Council or face war, tension on the western frontier erupted into actual fighting. In the fall of 1811, Indiana territorial governor William Henry Harrison advanced on a large Indian settlement at Prophetstown near Tippecanoe Creek. For almost three years followers of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa had been gathering to swell Prophetstown’s population. Nervous settlers finally demanded military protection from the perceived Indian threat that everyone suspected was a dark British project. Harrison’s expedition was ostensibly to negotiate an understanding with these Indians and lessen strains on the frontier, but both sides were armed and edgy. Tecumseh was not at Prophetstown that fall, but his brother and his warriors attacked Harrison’s forces, precipitating a disastrous battle for the Indians. As a military engagement, the fight was indecisive, but as a symbolic event with momentous consequences it had few peers. Tecumseh surveyed the setback at Tippecanoe Creek and resolved to cement an alliance with the British. Most westerners mistakenly assumed that such an alliance had existed for years. It did now.

Americans celebrated the battle as a victory, but the news was alloyed for Clay and his neighbors. Many Kentuckians had marched with Harrison, and some would never return. Jo Daveiss died leading a charge against an Indian position. Clay and Daveiss had not only settled their differences from the Burr affair but had become friends, serving together as members of Lexington’s Masonic Grand Lodge of Kentucky (Daveiss was the eighth Grand Master). Clay turned over much of his legal practice to Daveiss when departing for the Eleventh Congress and tried to secure government contracts for him. In the end, Daveiss died a hero in what amounted to the first engagement of the coming war. Clay often invoked his name as a martyr to American security and American honor, another reason to bring low the British.¹⁵

But it was another event that sent the capital into mourning that winter and had members of Congress tugging on black armbands. The day after Christmas, the Richmond Theatre in the Virginia state capital was consumed by a fire that started late in the evening performance. The raising of a chandelier onstage was the cause, its candles touching off the flammable scenery. The blaze quickly spread, and the audience responded in panic to the classic terror of fire in a crowded theater. As everyone clawed toward a single exit, women and children were trampled in the chaos. About seventy of the more than five hundred patrons perished, most burned beyond recognition. Governor George William Smith and former congressman and senator Abraham Bedford Venable were among the dead, as was Mary Clay, the young daughter of Henry’s cousin and fellow congressman Matthew Clay, who collapsed as if dealt a hard physical blow when he received the news. Henry hurried to Matthew’s rooms and sat with him through the night as his cousin shook with grief. For once, the Speaker was at a loss for words.¹⁶

CLAY BEGAN THE push to challenge Britain by letting others make the case. Over John Randolph’s protests, the Foreign Relations Committee called for a more muscular military. Randolph screeched that a sizeable army was necessary only to implement plans to wrest Canada from Great Britain, and privately he mused that the War Hawks’ real goal was to overtake the presidency. Meanwhile, when Madison asked Congress to authorize 10,000 additional regular army troops for a three-year term, the Senate more than doubled the number, a move by Madison’s enemies to embarrass him. Republican members such as William Branch Giles disliked the president and detested Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. They knew that the government could never raise 25,000 men and could not pay for them if it did, and that any bill trying to authorize it would demonstrate the administration’s incompetence.¹⁷

Clay realized that a large military increase could break the budget, but he also liked the boldness of the Senate’s 25,000-man figure. The House received the Senate bill on Monday, December 30, 1811, and the following day went into the Committee of the Whole so that Clay could come down to the floor and discuss it. He began with a small concession to those fearful of its costs by proposing a scheme to stagger the appointment of officers to new regiments. As for complaints that 25,000 new recruits was excessive, Clay admitted the number was unwarranted for a country at peace but was, if anything, too small for a country likely to be at war. Yes, he said, the American militia had always been dedicated in their defense of the nation, but trained regulars were indispensable in a fight against the seasoned veterans of a militaristic enemy. To the question “What are we to gain by war?” he responded with his own question: “What are we not to lose by peace?” and promptly answered it: “Commerce, character, a nation’s best treasure, honor!” He dismissed the claim that Britain was doing the world’s work by fighting Napoleon: “We are called upon to submit to debasement, dishonor, and disgrace—to bow the neck to royal insolence, as a course of preparation for manly resistance to” a French invasion! “It was not by submission,” he thundered, “that our fathers achieved our independence.”¹⁸

The British goal, said Clay, was not only to deprive Napoleon of supply. Great Britain also aimed to dominate all the world’s commerce by compelling the United States to submit to Britain’s maritime regulations.¹⁹ Allow the English navy to control trade between foreign ports, he warned, and soon it would control trade between New York and New Orleans. “When the burglar is at our door, shall we bravely sally forth and repel his felonious entrance, or meanly skulk within the cells of the castle? … Shall it be said that … we pusillanimously cling to our seats here rather than boldly vindicate the most inestimable rights of the country?”²⁰ Stoked up against the image of British burglars, the House agreed that an additional 25,000 constables seemed about right. After the Senate made a few minor changes, President Madison signed the military expansion bill into law on January 11, 1812.

Madison was not done, though. He had requested 50,000 short-term volunteers in addition to the regulars, prompting a debate in the House on the constitutionality of sending the militia into Canada, which was after all foreign territory. Clay again came down from the Speaker’s chair to say that the president had the power to use the militia as a preemptive defensive force. Clay supported, he proclaimed, “an exertion of the national energies in every form, in prosecution of the war in which we are about to engage.” John Randolph boiled. Preemptive defensive force? America about to wage war? Such belligerence, he raged in a letter to a friend in Virginia, proved “the depravity of my species!”²¹

As the War Hawks continued their preparations for war, even Republicans began to wonder about the speed and scope of the effort. Langdon Cheves’s Naval Affairs Committee drafted a bill for the construction of twelve 74-gun ships and twenty frigates. The proposal marked such a startling departure from traditional Republican objections to large, costly navies that the legislative world of the House of Representatives almost halted on its axis. Naval expansion and the taxes it required during Federalist John Adams’s presidency had united Republicans who had then and thereafter always resisted such initiatives as a pillar of Jeffersonian small government philosophy. Federalists slyly smiled as old and some young Republicans alike looked askance at a world now turned upside down. A committee headed by a Republican and dominated by Republicans envisioned a naval building program far more ambitious than anything the Federalists had ever proposed. Aside from reflexively balking at the enormous cost, many Republican members, particularly westerners, insisted that the naval project was quite unnecessary. They could fight the British in contiguous Canada, they said, and the country hardly needed a navy to do that. That was the course of debate when “the Western Star” again came down from the chair on January 22, 1812, to express his views on the proposed bill.

He agreed that the war should be taken to the British in Canada, but any hesitation, he said, as to whether it concerned American military might on land or sea sent a message of weakness to London. Clay reminded the House that the martyred Jo Daveiss had written that a larger navy was essential to protect American commerce, a crucial element of western development. Without a navy, Clay said, the United States could not secure the Gulf of Mexico and protect New Orleans. Losing New Orleans would block the mighty Mississippi River, the route to the world’s oceans, and collapse the West’s economy. Clay’s arguments persuaded some, but not enough to win passage for massive naval expansion. Congress eventually passed a smaller appropriation for naval construction, while the original bill went down to defeat 62 to 59. Having been given enough rope by the Federalists, the War Hawks seemed to be reaching the end of it.²²

In fact, the prospect of an expensive war made even some of Clay’s allies nervous. When Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin proposed new taxes and loans to address shrinking government revenues, opponents doubted the War Hawks would agree to them. Randolph sneered privately that their incessant jabbering reminded him of “the talk of children,” but Clay came out so resolutely for Gallatin’s plan that most Republicans followed his lead and passed the measure.²³

Clay’s legislative successes during these months have caused historians to debate the weight of his role in bringing about the American declaration of war in 1812. Some see his accomplishments against long odds and traditional Republican scruples as proving that he was the prime mover. Others insist that he only directed the legislative side of a coordinated effort between the War Hawks in Congress and the executive branch, where President Madison and Secretary of State James Monroe were just as effective behind the scenes as Clay was on the public stage.²⁴ At the time, opponents of war were convinced that Henry Clay was pushing Madison into war rather than cooperating with him, and they imagined plots and cabals surrounding the effort. Clay, they deduced, used the Republican congressional caucus presidential nomination as leverage, delaying its choice of Madison for a second term and even threatening to support another candidate if Madison did not toe the War Hawk line. Rumors in February 1812 told of “a grand Caucus” that had already secretly met to nominate DeWitt Clinton of New York for president and Clay for vice president.²⁵ Yet the source who declared that Clay was holding the nomination hostage was Federalist Josiah Quincy, hardly a Clay confidant. Clinton would have been an especially odd choice for a Clay cabal in any case. He unsuccessfully challenged Madison in 1812, but on a ticket supported by the Federalists and the antiwar Republicans, a coalition completely incompatible with the War Hawk program.

President Madison began to dispel uncertainty about his attitude when he released a set of documents to Congress that were soon notoriously known as the John Henry letters. In 1809, Canada’s governor-general James Craig had employed Henry, an Irish rogue with dubious claims of being an accomplished spy, to meander around New England evaluating Federalist anger over Madison’s policies. Henry planted himself in Boston for several months, whence he dispatched increasingly fanciful messages to Governor Craig, such as the prediction that Massachusetts would ally itself with Britain in the event of war. Craig died before Henry could collect for his services, and nobody else in the British government would pay him any attention, let alone pay him any money. The Madison administration was not so cautious. By early 1812, Henry was desperate for cash and offered to sell his information to the American government. Secretary of State Monroe persuaded Madison to pay Henry the government’s entire secret service fund of $50,000 for his letters. After several weeks, Madison released the documents to Congress, and they caused a sensation. The damaging allegations of New England disloyalty and the British desire to exploit it inflamed the country. A few temperate voices pointed out that the letters really did not say anything, certainly did not pin names to any misdeeds, and were likely the work of an audacious fraud, but the War Hawks drowned out such prudence with the “proof” of British perfidy and Federalist treason.²⁶

A few days later, on the morning of March 15, Clay met with Monroe. Apparently they discussed how to persuade the nation to make war, for later that day Clay sent Monroe an aide-mémoire summarizing what to do if Britain maintained the Orders in Council and continued impressment. He noted that while awaiting the USS Hornet, due soon from Europe with intelligence about British intentions, the president should ask Congress to impose a thirty-day embargo to allow American ships to return home unmolested, after which Congress would declare war on Britain. It was an extraordinary plan, for it proposed that both Congress and the president move into uncharted territory. After the American Revolution, the United States had traded blows with France, Barbary pirates, and Indian tribes, but the country had never fought a declared war. Clay pointed out to Monroe that the Constitution clearly placed the authority for going to war with Congress, but that it was “within the scope of the President’s constitutional duty to recommend such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”²⁷

The uncharted, complicated nature of these actions was further demonstrated by the fact that even as the United States rattled its saber at Britain, merchant ships under American flags ferried supplies to British troops fighting Napoleon on the Spanish peninsula. Reports that French corsairs were attacking these American merchant ships prompted Madison to ask Congress for a sixty-day embargo on U.S. trade (twice the length Clay had requested) to provide more time for news of British plans to arrive. Again the House went into the Committee of the Whole, and Clay joined the debate to support the measure “as a direct precursor to war.” After the thorough efforts to ready the nation for a fight, Clay was astonished that some would cover the country “with shame and indelible disgrace by retreating.” In fact, Clay said that if French attacks persisted, Americans should face down proud Napoleon too. At that, John Randolph had heard more than enough. He leaped to his feet. These calls to belligerence were too perilous, he bellowed, to let pass without deliberation. A proper pause and reflection would show everyone that the United States was far from prepared to fight a war with anyone, let alone powerful Britain, and certainly not both the British and French empires. Clay responded. Randolph retorted. Followers of each spoke on their respective champion’s behalf, giving the impression in their vehemence that the issue was closely joined, but when the votes were counted, it was not really close at all. Clay’s side won, 70 to 41. The Senate extended the embargo to ninety days, the House concurring to avoid additional delay, and Madison signed the bill on April 4. By his own plain declaration, Clay meant for this action to be a preliminary to war. Congress agreed that it was likely to be perceived that way and called for a hundred thousand volunteers for a six-month enlistment.²⁸

Then everyone waited for the Hornet, none more anxiously than British minister Augustus John Foster, whose usual affability was being greatly strained by events. Foster hosted pleasant gatherings at which he listened attentively to American complaints, but he could not for the life of him make out what all the fuss was about. Clay especially bewildered Foster. He respected Clay’s talent and understood the reason for his influence, but he was flummoxed by Clay’s treating the European crisis as if it were “the Game of Brag.” Clay told Foster that for Americans, war was necessary in the same way that a duel was necessary “to a young officer to prevent his being bullied and elbowed in society.” Likewise, said Clay, the end of the war, like the conclusion of a harmless duel, “would probably leave them both better friends than they had ever been before.” Foster listened in amazement and could only nod, frowning, when Clay told him that France would either compensate America for its maritime losses or face American guns as well. Young Mr. Foster did not understand young Mr. Clay at all.²⁹

IN APRIL A series of editorials calling for war appeared in the National Intelligencer, their language so combative that many were convinced that Clay had written them to manipulate Madison. The Federalist press condemned him for trying to drag the country into an unnecessary war, but the editorials were actually the work of Secretary of State Monroe. Madison had already made up his mind on the matter as well. He was convinced that any news from Great Britain held out only a dim hope for peace.³⁰

The Republican congressional caucus had nominated Madison almost unanimously for a second term, but the death of the elderly vice president George Clinton a few weeks earlier complicated the selection of a running mate. Clinton had not presided over the Senate in weeks because of his illness, making necessary the appointment of a president pro tempore, Clay’s friend William Crawford. When the caucus nominated seventy-year-old John Langdon of New Hampshire, another elderly Republican, he declined, forcing the party to turn to Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who was very much a friend of the War Hawk agenda. By then, the Hornet had arrived from Europe. The news was not good.

Britain had no intention of changing its policies, and no meaningful arrangement had been made with the French. Clay dismissed the problem with France as a mere diplomatic delay, a minor setback, but he railed at Britain’s continuing determination to assail American merchant ships and abduct sailors. He was confident that sooner or later Congress would have to declare war.³¹

He worked hard to make it sooner. At some point between May 25 and May 29, Speaker Clay and a group of congressmen met with President Madison. The date is uncertain because the meeting was extremely private, but shadowy reports of it later described Clay as browbeating the president into sending Congress a war message. Such impertinence was highly unlikely, however, even if it had been necessary, which it was not. Madison was already in agreement with the War Hawks, as evidenced by his administration’s covert but no less effective editorializing by its principal foreign officer, James Monroe. Actually, Clay most likely only assured Madison that he had the votes for a war if Madison wanted one. Private meeting aside, word soon leaked out that Madison would send a war message to Congress. John Randolph intended to challenge it. Clay and the War Hawks were ready for him.³²

Clay was adept at using floor managers to shut down long-winded opponents who stalled proceedings with rambling speeches. A prearranged signal or a preconceived plan prompted designated members to call for a point of order or to ask the Speaker to apply a pertinent rule, giving Clay parliamentary cover to gavel down obstructionists. John Randolph had transformed obstruction into an art form, and on May 29, 1812, he planned a virtuoso performance, convinced that Madison’s message could arrive at any moment. When Randolph gained the floor, Clay had temporarily turned over the chair to William Bibb of Georgia, which proved to be a mistake, for Randolph was able to get well along with his plan to snarl matters up before Clay could do anything about it. No motion was under consideration, but Randolph announced that he had heard “rumors to which he could not shut his ears,” and that these rumors “impelled him to make a last effort to rescue the country from the calamites, which he feared, were impending over it.”

Then he was off to the races: Napoleon was as much to blame for attacks on American shipping as were the British, Randolph was intoning, when one of Clay’s floor managers, John C. Calhoun, saw what was happening and objected that Randolph was speaking against a motion that did not exist. Instead of snapping down his gavel, Bibb ruled that Randolph had indicated that he intended to make a motion of his own, if in a vague sort of way, and therefore he could continue. Across the chamber, Clay stopped his conversation and stiffened. He whirled and strode purposefully to the Speaker’s platform, where he more or less shooed Bibb out of the chair, settled into it himself, and immediately recognized Calhoun, who repeated his objection. Clay told Randolph either to make a motion or to sit down. Randolph indignantly appealed Clay’s ruling to the House, but it sustained the Speaker. Left with no other alternative, Randolph sullenly moved “that it is not expedient at this time to resort to war against Great Britain.” Clay then declared that House rules required Randolph’s motion to be put in writing. This was really too much, Randolph sputtered; he again appealed to the House, and again lost. Exasperated, he barked in protest over being compelled to make his motion in writing. Clay idly mused that no, actually Randolph was not compelled to do anything. He did not have to make the motion at all.

Randolph was already furiously scratching his motion on a piece of paper. He handed it up to Clay, who read it to the House. Thinking all protocols now satisfied, Randolph ostentatiously announced he would at last begin the debate on the motion, but Clay recognized Hugh Nelson—a delicious irony for the Speaker, because Nelson was a member of Randolph’s own Virginia delegation. Nelson helpfully reminded Clay of a House rule requiring a vote on whether to consider a motion before it was debated. Clay seemed reflective, innocently admitting that he had completely forgotten about that particular rule, but nodding that Nelson was almost certainly correct. Randolph was stunned. On the verge of being thwarted with procedures, blocked by colleagues, shut up by the Speaker, he wailed that his right of free speech was being violated. “The meanest beggar,” he shouted, “has a right to come here and state his grievances,” which was neither exactly true nor clearly pertinent. Nevertheless he lectured the House, claiming that his lengthy service made him thoroughly knowledgeable about its rules. Clay broke in to remark curtly that Randolph’s seniority was irrelevant to the propriety of a Speaker’s ruling. Other members piped up to say that Clay was in the right, and Randolph decided not to lodge a third, equally futile appeal. Clay, victorious, could not let it lie—a bad habit. He delivered a brief but sanctimonious lecture of his own that patiently explained that orderly debate required a strict adherence to parliamentary rules. Coming at the end of the remarkable procedural contest, the House vote of 72 to 37 not to consider Randolph’s motion was anticlimactic.

It was Friday afternoon, and the House adjourned for the weekend. For two days Washington buzzed with talk of the dramatic showdown on Capitol Hill. On Monday, June 1, however, everyone had something even more spectacular to talk about. A message from President James Madison arrived in Congress. It asked for a declaration of war.³³

CLAY IMMEDIATELY REFERRED the president’s communication to the Committee on Foreign Relations, and two days later Chairman John C. Calhoun reported a bill declaring war on Great Britain. Clay wanted the ensuing debate to be open to the public, but Madison did not, and Clay reluctantly agreed to have the House clear the galleries and close its doors. Federalists protested, Randolph stormed, and Clay wavered, sensing that secrecy at this juncture would mark a bad start for a perilous undertaking. He was also likely disappointed over not having the chance to be center stage at an impressive spectacle. But Madison had his reasons, and though it has never been clear what they were, they were persuasive enough to make Clay rule that debate would occur in closed session. The following day, on June 4, 1812, the House passed a declaration of war by a vote of 79 to 49. The Senate deliberated longer but finally passed a slightly different declaration 19 to 13 on June 17. The House planned to take up the Senate bill the following day.³⁴

That evening the Madisons held a levee attended by all of the important people of Washington, including Augustus John Foster. The British minister found Madison polite and hospitable but “ghastly pale.” Clay and Calhoun, on the other hand, mingled among the guests with supreme confidence. The next day the House voted 85 to 44 to accept the Senate’s minor changes, and later that day Madison signed the bill. “We shall have War,” Clay exulted in letters clearly meant for publication, “and, as I think it ought to be at present, War with England alone.” He firmly believed everyone was as enthusiastic as he was. “Every patriot bosom,” he sang, “must throb with anxious solicitude for the result. Every patriot arm will assist in making that result conducive to the glory of our beloved country.”³⁵ Yet from the very start of the war, patriots’ bosoms were precious few, throbbing or otherwise. Federalists opposed the war almost to a man, and some in New England tried to impede the war effort.

John Randolph published a pamphlet describing the events of May 29, when Clay had cut him off, as a plot to stop debate and stifle free speech. Clay answered in the National Intelligencer that he had only enforced House rules, that members had repeatedly sustained him, and that to allow endless speeches without regard for procedure prevented the House from conducting its business. Randolph had taken the maneuvers to silence him quite personally, but Clay’s response intensified his wrath, especially because he thought Clay was a boor beneath his notice. Clay’s rulings, he said, had been inconsistent and his conduct a flagrant abuse of power, “prostrating, from motives of caprice, temporary convenience, or party spirit,” the basic principles of free government.³⁶ Beneath all the bombast was a kernel of truth, for Clay had indeed used parliamentary procedure to silence opponents, a practice that would eventually give him a reputation as a dictator. But Randolph’s anger was not just bluster. Clay had made a dangerous enemy.

For the moment, however, Clay had his hands full controlling his friends. Even his allies were worried about paying for the war they had just authorized. Anxiety over raising taxes caused some to suggest eccentric alternatives, such as lifting trade restrictions against Great Britain to fatten the Treasury with import taxes on British goods. Only days had passed since Congress had declared war on the British, but half the members of Congress saw nothing incongruous about reestablishing trade with them: the vote was 60 for and 60 against. Clay announced that the tie gave him the satisfaction of casting the deciding vote “to manifest his decided opposition to the measure.”³⁷

The long session was coming to a close just in time. In early June, Lucretia had gone home with the children, accompanied by her brother-in-law Dr. Richard Pindell, and Clay already missed her. During all the tumult leading to war, Lucretia had been Lucretia—hushed, unassuming, and kindhearted. Margaret Bayard Smith counted this “good woman [and] most devoted mother” her friend, pondering how she preferred to sew and play with her children rather than trade empty jests with fashionable company. When Margaret Smith fell ill, Lucretia took in the Smith children to let Margaret rest. Once Lucretia brought all the Clay children to the Smiths’ house, where they spent an afternoon making flower wreaths, Lucretia cheerfully enjoying the fun as much as any of the youngsters. Margaret liked to hear Lucretia play the piano and smiled at how the children danced around her. Lucretia liked Margaret too, for she had little to do with those she did not like, and in Mrs. Smith’s company Mrs. Clay did not even mind carriage rides to pay social calls. Yet she was always eager to return to Ashland.³⁸

The congressional session did not end until July 2. Clay lived as a bachelor as he tied up loose ends in the capital. He rode horseback each morning out to Georgetown to sip mineral water at Dr. John Ott’s soda fountain—young people giggled that it could make one “high”—and worked with renowned architect Benjamin Latrobe on plans for new buildings at Transylvania University. The final social function he attended before heading for Kentucky was a dinner the War Mess generously held for Augustus John Foster, who was also leaving Washington for Halifax and from there for London. Foster could have been excused for being more bewildered than ever. He had received his passport after the declaration of war and was grateful for the party, but he noted that Clay “was very warlike.” Mr. Foster did not understand Mr. Clay at all.³⁹

Yet matters were to become even more bewildering. As Congress was voting for war, an ocean away the British government was suspending the Orders in Council. The British saw the repeal of the Orders as a major concession, but the gesture did not change anything for Americans. There was still impressment to resist, and preparations for war continued.⁴⁰

ON HIS WAY to Lexington, Clay was glad to hear that American armies were already on the march with an invasion of Canada led by General William Hull, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and Michigan’s territorial governor. Lexington celebrated Hull’s exploits, Congress’s actions, and Henry Clay in particular at a public dinner on July 27. Toasts to Clay, the war, and Congress continued well into the evening. No one entertained the slightest doubt about the country’s certain triumph.⁴¹

Clay wrote frequently to Secretary of State Monroe, with whom he had developed a close working relationship, and to Secretary of War William Eustis. Clay wanted western volunteers deployed, if for no other reason than to bolster the region’s morale with the sense that it was being useful. He became a champion of Indiana territorial governor William Henry Harrison and took every opportunity to tout Harrison’s military skills and universal popularity. Clay had always preferred that Harrison be placed in command of western troops, and that feeling only strengthened when word arrived in Kentucky that William Hull had called off his invasion and was retreating to Detroit. Clay was pleased that Kentucky troops sent to reinforce Hull’s forces were at last going to get into the fight. Clay addressed volunteers as they were about to head north, reminding them that “they had the double character of Americans and Kentuckians” to uphold.⁴²

The news coming from Hull’s army was troubling, though. Aside from the obviously aborted invasion as a military setback, Clay worried that the administration’s political enemies could point to it as proof that the country had not been prepared for war. As the news from Detroit grew darker, Clay warned the government that a disaster could be in the offing. He would take no pleasure in being right.⁴³

Clay had little regard and less respect for William Eustis. Madison had appointed him to the War Department after first taking office in 1809 because Eustis was that rare animal, a loyal Republican from New England. He was adequate in his position in peacetime, but he lacked the organizational skills to manage his department during a war. By the fall of 1812, Clay’s voice was among a chorus seeking his removal. Clay’s frustration over clear evidence of incompetence in Washington was combined with impatience over slow communication between the West and the federal capital. He stood it as long as he could—which was not very long—before taking at least some matters into his own hands.⁴⁴ At Clay’s urging, Governor Charles Scott summoned Kentucky’s most important political figures to a meeting on August 25, 1812. They planned to discuss the military situation in the Northwest, but in the end they did considerably more. The group, which included Clay and Governor-elect Isaac Shelby, advised Scott to appoint William Henry Harrison a brevet major general of Kentucky militia with instructions to reinforce Detroit. After this astonishing action by this extraordinary meeting, Clay wrote to Monroe admitting that Kentucky had no authority to take such a step but insisting that the emergency at Detroit made it necessary to bypass the War Department. Nobody seemed to mind that Harrison was not from Kentucky.⁴⁵

Despite its audacity, Kentucky’s initiative was already too late. Over the strenuous protests of his officers, William Hull surrendered Detroit and its garrison to British general Isaac Brock on August 16, 1812. By the time Kentucky heard about this, the state also had bad news about the evacuation of Fort Dearborn (modern-day Chicago) and the massacre of many of the refugees by Indians. Harrison sped the pace of his preparations and recruiting. He chose Lucretia’s younger brother, Nathaniel Hart, to serve as his brigade inspector, and he asked Lucretia’s husband to accompany the expedition to the Northwest as his adviser. Clay obviously declined—though we do not have his response to Harrison, he did not go with the army—but he stayed in touch with Harrison to offer advice and encouragement.⁴⁶

Clay thought that Hull’s surrender was utter treachery and urged that he be tried and executed. Despite the fact that he had never swapped an angry word with an Indian, Clay was full of advice about the best way to fight them. While Lucretia packed for their return to Washington, Clay frantically attended to business details. In early October, they set out with their three youngest children. The three older children were in school.⁴⁷

Clay found the government virtually paralyzed by military calamities. Unexpected American naval victories in single-ship fights with Royal Navy frigates bolstered spirits somewhat, and the recent capture of HMS Macedonia by the United States under Stephen Decatur was reason for celebration. At a grand ball, the Macedonia’s colors were placed at Dolley Madison’s feet, but the depressing performance of American armies remained a cloud over otherwise merry events.⁴⁸ Intent on ignoring that cloud, Clay redoubled his efforts to support the administration, encourage American commanders, and fend off the unrelenting criticism from Federalists and John Randolph. The second session of the Twelfth Congress was a short one, but Clay left the chair to speak on the floor with even greater frequency, always optimistic, always confident. To friends in private, however, he was gloomy. Military operations had been wretchedly planned, and President Madison’s “mild & amiable virtues” were “wholly unfit for the storms of War.”⁴⁹

That was in private. Clay’s public posture was intent on stiffening American resolve, even if he had to assume an occasionally illogical position to do so, such as the one he took in early December. Nonimportation against the British in 1811 had included provisions for the policy’s termination if Britain repealed the Orders in Council. American merchants in Europe, unaware of the declaration of war, consequently responded to the British repeal in June 1812 by gleefully purchasing British goods and shipping them to the United States. Yet the war meant that nonimportation was not lifted, and customs officials accordingly seized these cargoes when they arrived in U.S. ports. The distress of American shippers was palpable, and sympathy with them was easy because they had not imagined themselves doing anything in the least wrong. Clay’s ally Langdon Cheves argued that these merchants should be compensated for their losses.

On December 7, the House was constituted into the Committee of the Whole, and Clay spoke at length against compensation. He conceded that these Americans abroad had not known about the declaration of war, but that ignorance did not absolve them from obeying the law until they were officially informed that it was no longer in force. He would bend only to the extent of partial compensation for a very few, recommending that in all other cases the law be enforced.⁵⁰ It was a muddled performance further marred by a nonsensical solution. All the shippers had obviously acted from the same ignorance, so it was both pointless and unfair to accommodate only a few and punish the rest. Congress enacted a very lenient measure that fully compensated most of the merchants. Most representatives did not go so far as John Randolph—he privately called Clay’s speech a “rant of which the delivery was as bad as the matter,” and then parsed it for grammatical errors—but they plainly dismissed Clay’s reasoning as deeply flawed.⁵¹

It was a small crack in the Speaker’s armor, but a chink even so. As the House considered a bill to swell the army by twenty regiments, Randolph and Federalist Josiah Quincy did not confine their acerbic remarks to private letters. Only great exertions by Clay’s floor managers kept those comments brief and to the point. Keeping them civil was impossible. Beginning on January 5, Quincy used his speech opposing army expansion to attack the war and to describe James Madison, James Monroe, Albert Gallatin, and even Thomas Jefferson as French lapdogs. The administration’s supporters, said Quincy, were “sycophants, fawning reptiles, who crowded at the feet of the president, and left their filthy slime upon the carpet of the palace.”⁵²

That language set off a two-day outpouring of Republican outrage, concluding with the House resolving itself into the Committee of the Whole and Speaker Clay taking the floor. He began disingenuously with the claim that he was quite unwell and unprepared to speak. He then commenced one of the most commanding and effective discourses of his career, one that spanned the next two days. The tour de force dispelled any doubt about Clay’s armor and arsenal; in this recital he proved himself quite well armed and very dangerous indeed. As he disdainfully mocked instances of Federalist disloyalty, furiously narrated examples of British perfidy, and laced his remarks with sweeping expressions of patriotism, the Western Star made his friends gleam and his enemies squirm. “If we are united,” Clay roared, “we are too powerful for the mightiest nation in Europe, or all Europe combined. If we are separated and torn asunder we shall become an easy prey to the weakest of them. In the latter dreadful contingency, our country will not be worth preserving.” It was the kind of rhetoric schoolboys would commit to memory and budding politicians would try to imitate. Twenty-five years later, Abraham Lincoln would deliver a speech to the Springfield Lyceum that spoke of combined European armies being unable to take a drink from the Ohio or place a track on the Blue Ridge, words that echoed his hero Henry Clay.⁵³

Clay turned on Quincy with menacing fury. How dare he attack the venerable patriot Thomas Jefferson! When Quincy “shall have mingled his dust with that of his abused ancestors, when he shall be consigned to oblivion,” Clay boomed, everyone will yet remember the greatness that is and always will be Jefferson. Clay turned on the Federalists. He sneered at their delicate and recently recovered devotion to liberty, certainly absent in 1798 when they had shamelessly trampled on their country’s most basic civil rights. On he went, the hours passing, until he dramatically asked for everyone’s indulgence. He was too exhausted to continue, he croaked, collapsing theatrically into a chair, insisting that he had more to say, promising to continue on the morrow.⁵⁴

Throughout the evening the news tore through the capital about what Clay had done on the floor of the House that day and that there was more to come. Throngs of people streamed up muddy Pennsylvania Avenue and crowded into the Capitol. As Congress opened the day’s session, House galleries sagged and groaned under the weight of a multitude. Clay stood and waited for the silence, breaking it with a cadenced repetition of his earlier attack on Quincy, his baritone rising to the ceiling as he accused the Federalist of outraging “all decency.” Spectators and representatives alike sat forward. This was going to be good.

Clay did not disappoint. He outlined the causes of the war and dismissed the false optimism of thinking that Britain’s repeal of the Orders in Council changed anything. The Orders were only part of the reason for war, he explained, as he narrated the grievances that had finally compelled the fight to preserve American honor. The country required, said Clay, the means necessary to fight a successful war and secure a principled peace. He ended, his voice pounding to a crescendo: “In such a cause, with the aid of Providence, we must come out crowned with success; but if we fail, let us fail like men, lash ourselves to our gallant tars, and expire together in one common struggle, fighting for ‘seamen’s rights and free trade.’”⁵⁵

He basked in the whistles, shouts, and applause, Western Star rising. The bill passed.

The Republican press lauded Clay and denounced Quincy as “dead to every honorable and every patriotic feeling of the human heart.”⁵⁶ Quincy’s friends warned him that Clay was trying to goad him into a barbaric southern duel. He simply responded to Clay’s attacks by politely calling the Speaker a liar.⁵⁷

Unfortunately, terrible news about the war soon began to trickle into Washington. In the Northwest, winter weather had stopped Harrison’s offensive as isolated American forts were besieged. On January 22, an American force that included many Kentuckians ranged too far from the main army and was captured at Frenchtown (near modern-day Monroe, Michigan) on the River Raisin after suffering heavy casualties. Clay’s cocounsel in the Burr trial, John Allen, was among those killed. The British marched away most prisoners but left the wounded under Indian guards supervised by a few British soldiers.

Captain Nathaniel Hart, Lucretia’s younger brother, was only slightly injured in his knee, but was unable to march with the other captives. When the Indians commenced what would be known as the infamous River Raisin Massacre, Nathaniel bought his life with a bribe. One of the Indians agreed to take him by horseback to safety, but on the way, he was shot and scalped. His youthful widow had two little boys. The younger was named Henry Clay Hart.⁵⁸

THE SHORT SECOND session of the Twelfth Congress came to a close, and Clay prepared to return with his family to Ashland. The unrelenting bad news had put him on edge, and at a dinner in his honor hosted by French minister Louis Sérurier, he was gloomy and rude. Clay spoke privately to Sérurier in sharp terms. If the United States did not have evidence of French friendship soon, he snapped, Americans would have to look for friends elsewhere.⁵⁹

Madison had already announced his plans to call a special session of the new Thirteenth Congress to meet at the end of May 1813, so Clay’s time in Kentucky would be brief. In addition, getting to Kentucky seemed to take a lifetime because Lucretia was five months pregnant with their eighth child. After reaching Lexington, though, Clay was not altogether sorry he would soon be going back to Washington. Many Kentuckians were disillusioned with the war. The battle and massacre on the River Raisin, where so many beloved neighbors had been killed or captured, left communities deflated and somber. Clay was beginning to doubt Harrison’s abilities. That he had been Harrison’s unstinting champion was disquieting.⁶⁰

In early May, the Clays headed back to Washington and found everyone’s mood a bit brighter because of diplomatic rather than military developments. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, Czar Alexander I was more than chagrined that Britain would be distracted by an American war. He offered to mediate the Anglo-American conflict as soon as it started, a proposal that finally reached the American government in the spring of 1813. Madison leaped at this potentially happy way to end this most unhappy war. He immediately sent Treasury secretary Albert Gallatin and Delaware Federalist James A. Bayard to Russia, where they and U.S. minister John Quincy Adams would, Madison hoped, sit down with British counterparts under the benevolent gaze of the Czar of all the Russias. As it happened, none of this would be so easy—the Senate rejected Gallatin’s nomination because his appointment ostensibly left the Treasury untended, and the British simply rejected the Russian mediation offer as mischievous meddling—but at least the prospects for a negotiated peace appeared to be improving.

The Thirteenth Congress, however, was in a foul mood from the start. Some of the president’s strongest opponents, including Randolph and Quincy, were not there, either by their choice or because of their constituents’ displeasure. Randolph claimed that he was happy to be “no longer under the abject dominion of Mr. H. Clay & Co.”⁶¹ In the place of those implacable foes came others, though, such as New Hampshire Federalist congressman Daniel Webster, a young man with an imposing dark, broad brow and a voice as deep and commanding as Clay’s. Madison would hear more vocal criticisms from Republicans too, especially in the Senate. Clay had a job of work maintaining support for the administration in this Congress.

The House convened on May 24 and again selected Clay as Speaker, but the vote was 89 for Clay to 54 for Connecticut Federalist Timothy Pitkin, with five votes scattered among other candidates, an indication of slipping support for the war and the man seen as its principal advocate.⁶²

Clay selected the reliable War Hawk John C. Calhoun to head the Foreign Relations Committee, which would handle most of the president’s message to the special session, but the Speaker was anxious and quick-tempered. One portion of Madison’s message covered Britain’s military reliance on Indians, with details about alleged atrocities in the northwestern theater of war. Clay made what Webster called “a furious speech” insisting that a select committee look into these matters. Clay also ejected from the floor of the House a stenographer who worked for the Federalist Republican, an anti-administration newspaper published in Georgetown by arch-Federalist and Maryland congressman Alexander Hanson. Hanson’s vigorous opposition to the war at its beginning had sparked riots in Baltimore in the summer of 1812, and the mob that had destroyed his press very nearly killed him and his associates. Now Clay’s banishment of Hanson’s reporter to the gallery (four others from friendly newspapers remained on the floor) ignited considerable controversy. Calhoun defended the action, but the Federalist press knew who was responsible. They berated Clay for “petty tyranny” and upbraided him for favoring only reporters who approached him “in the submissive style of supplication.”⁶³

Clay had a larger problem than hostile newspapers. Opponents and friends alike were certain to be unhappy about what Madison really wanted from the special session, which was for Congress to address the looming financial crisis. The government simply had to have more money to finance the war.⁶⁴ Albert Gallatin had asked for new taxes before leaving for Russia, and Madison’s message to the special session imparted urgency to the subject. Republicans instinctively opposed direct taxes, and Clay carefully approached the problem of persuading them to accept the need for new revenues. He called caucuses to address groups and cajoled individuals in the House cloakroom and the capital’s taverns. He quashed Federalist proposals to tax only special interest groups, an obvious ploy to divide Republicans, and he honed his skills for conducting informal negotiations and brokering confidential deals.⁶⁵

Many things in Washington were done then as they are done now, but the town was more intimate and relationships could be quite informal, especially because the population was small, even when Congress was in session. People greeted each other on the street by name, visited in homes or rooming houses, attended the theater together, and did much of their politicking at social events. An urgent matter could merit an unannounced call at a cabinet member’s home where a cool drink on a porch in the day or cigars and brandy in the evening helped to hash things out. Clay became a master at this friendly type of negotiation in both private and social settings, and the elegant levees and dinners hosted by the Madisons presented the perfect opportunity to persuade the reluctant and reassure the faithful.⁶⁶

During the early part of the summer of 1813, however, James Madison contracted an intestinal ailment so serious that Dolley darkened the executive mansion and cleared her crowded social calendar. For several weeks the president could not leave his bed, and the entire capital hung on every word of news, fearful that he might die. Congress consulted with Vice President Elbridge Gerry as the British began raids in Chesapeake Bay that brought them up the Potomac River within fifty miles of the capital. Lucretia had just given birth to Eliza Hart Clay, and Henry made plans to send everyone to safety at Margaret Bayard Smith’s place in the country. Nancy Hart Brown was also in Washington with her husband, James, a new senator from Louisiana, and she planned to go to the Smiths’ as well if the British marched on Washington. Everyone relaxed when the British tide ebbed back into the Chesapeake. The capital was safe, for the time being.⁶⁷

And slowly it looked as though Madison was too. His recovery was gradual, though, keeping him indoors, preventing his return to social events, and spawning rumors that his convalescence was less than hopeful. As Congress approached the end of the special session, Clay’s enemies worried that Madison’s death might put the Speaker in the presidency, because fate had ironically realigned the line of succession. Elbridge Gerry was almost seventy, seven years older than Madison, and occasionally ill himself. The line of succession specified that the death of the president and vice president would bring to office the Senate’s presiding officer, the president pro tempore, an arrangement that sustained as much as possible the stability of vice-presidential succession. If the post of president pro tempore were vacant, however, the Speaker of the House became president. To ensure that no such vacancy existed, vice presidents routinely relinquished the chair to a president pro tempore during the final days of a session in order to have that post filled should a catastrophe occur during the congressional recess. Yet that summer, Gerry did not like what he saw at all. He weighed the prospects of Madison’s recovery, gauged his own frailty, and presumed that the Senate would elect obstreperous William Branch Giles, an avowed enemy of the administration, president pro tempore. Gerry broke tradition and did not step down, thereby making the selection of a president pro tempore unnecessary. Alexander Hanson’s Federal Republican raged that if Madison died, Clay would likely murder Gerry to become president, but Gerry was willing to risk it. A lung hemorrhage, not a homicidal Speaker, killed Gerry a year later, and by then Madison had fully recovered. Yet had both Madison and Gerry died while Congress was in recess, Henry Clay would have become president of the United States. It was perhaps the best chance he ever had.⁶⁸

THAT OCTOBER, THE Madison administration learned that the British had rejected the Russian mediation offer but had substituted a proposal for direct negotiations either in the Swedish city of Gothenburg or in London. The proposal coincided with improvements in the American military situation. In September, Commander Oliver Hazard Perry defeated a British naval squadron on Lake Erie, securing those important waters for the United States. Losing control of Erie meant that the British had to flee the Northwest, and William Henry Harrison was close on their heels to defeat them on the Thames River. Tecumseh reportedly was killed in this engagement, supposedly by Clay’s friend Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, shattering the Anglo-Indian alliance and paving the way for American control of the frontier. Yet a failed expedition against Montreal alloyed these triumphs, and Madison gloomily contended with ongoing criticism. He eagerly searched for an honorable end to the war.

On January 6, 1814, Madison accepted the British offer for direct negotiations at Gothenburg, but slow communications over great distances subjected the process of bringing together British and American commissioners to frustrating delays. Bayard and Gallatin, in Saint Petersburg since summer (Gallatin had ignored his rejection by the Senate), already knew about the British offer and left frigid Russia that January for London. There they awaited instructions, thinking their presence might speed negotiations. John Quincy Adams remained at his post in Saint Petersburg, so the American commissioners themselves were spread across Europe.

Madison was committed to retaining this team. After appointing Senator George Washington Campbell to take over at Treasury, he again placed Gallatin’s name before the Senate, this time successfully. Madison also considered including U.S. Minister to France William H. Crawford on the peace commission, but Napoleon had suffered a devastating defeat at Leipzig in October 1813 and nobody knew what the future held for France. Madison thought it best to keep Crawford in Paris. Instead, the president turned to Henry Clay, his most reliable champion in Congress and the man whose imprimatur on any peace would ensure its acceptance as honorable. Clay was reluctant to leave the country indefinitely, but duty won out. Finally, veteran diplomat Jonathan Russell, the newly appointed minister to Sweden, would also be on the American peace commission because Sweden would host the negotiations.

French minister Sérurier was thrilled that Clay would be part of the commission, allaying concerns that the administration might concede too much to the British. Federalists, suspecting that Clay would indeed be just that inflexible in negotiations, would have blocked his confirmation if they had possessed the votes, but they comforted themselves that the Kentuckian would have to defer to Adams, the former Federalist and loyal protector of New England’s interests.⁶⁹

Clay stepped down from the Speakership and resigned from Congress on January 19. As South Carolina War Hawk Langdon Cheves took his place, the House voted 144 to 9 to commend Clay for his service as Speaker, the 9 “composed of those whose approbation … Henry Clay never courted, if he desired it.”⁷⁰ He arranged for Lucretia and the children to return to Ashland, received his instructions from Secretary of State Monroe, and headed for New York to join Russell and set out for Sweden. Clay was confident that everything would be settled in months.⁷¹

The John Adams sailed from New York on February 25 to commence a horrendous journey over persistently mountainous seas lashed by freezing rain. Clay, Russell, and the delegation’s secretary, Christopher Hughes, Jr., bore up fairly well in the cramped and malodorous quarters. All were game pranksters, as it turned out, and youthful “Kit” Hughes (he was twenty-eight) was as fond of puns as he was openly excited about the adventure before them. Unfortunately the ship’s captain fell ill and became deranged, adding to the nightmares of the seven-week passage that finally deposited the American commissioners and staff at Gothenburg on the west coast of Sweden. For all their trouble, they discovered they were early—or at least everyone else was late.⁷²

In Saint Petersburg, John Quincy Adams learned about the peace commission only a couple of weeks earlier and was under the logical impression that Clay and Russell would not leave the United States until early April. Adams was still in Russia but started for Sweden immediately after hearing that the commission was assembling there. Meanwhile, Gallatin and Bayard sat comfortably in London mulling British suggestions that the talks be moved to London or somewhere in the Netherlands. Hearing that Clay and Russell were in Gothenburg, they sent a messenger suggesting the change.⁷³

The messenger found Clay alone in Gothenburg. Russell had gone to Stockholm, a journey of more than two hundred miles across the Scandinavian peninsula, to present his credentials as U.S. minister. Gothenburg is bathed by the Gulf Stream, making for more moderate temperatures than one would expect in a place facing the North Sea. Clay filled his days exploring the area and examining the Swedish canal network, just the sort of internal improvement he envisioned for America. At night, local dignitaries hosted elaborate dinner parties for the exotic Kentuckian whose sparkling conversation and ready smile fascinated the men and charmed the women. Clay deserted the rustic inn where he and Russell had lodged after first arriving to move into a more comfortable apartment. The weather was wet, but the people were gracious, and he was happily settled in when Gallatin and Bayard’s letter arrived. The suggestion that he and Russell pick up and move to another place for the negotiations exasperated him, and he flatly refused to conduct talks in the enemy’s capital, an arrangement that could be interpreted as American capitulation. At best he would reluctantly agree to move negotiations to Belgium, a grudging acceptance of Britain’s claim that its proximity would speed communication between London and the British commissioners. The town of Ghent—“a most delightful place, in every respect,” Kit Hughes reported—was designated for the honor.⁷⁴

The John Adams was still in the harbor, but Clay wanted to see something of Europe. He supposed that negotiations might be quickly concluded and he could be home by midsummer, so this would be his only chance to visit storied foreign places steeped in history. He left word for Russell coming back from Stockholm and Adams coming in from Saint Petersburg that he was leaving them the ship to take to Ghent while he and his servant, Washington grocer Frederick Cana, made their way overland soaking up the countryside. It seemed like a good idea at the time—Clay had developed a love of travel that would endure for the rest of his life—but Gothenburg’s relatively mild weather soon gave way to the harsher Nordic climes that tested a traveler’s fortitude. Clay saw Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Amsterdam on the way to Ghent, where he finally arrived on June 28, and despite the discomfort of the journey, he never regretted it.

Diplomatic protocol required envoys on ceremonial occasions to wear elaborate attire that included a coat adorned with extensive gold braiding. Clay looked quite smart in what would ever afterward be called his “Ghent coat.” He had indeed come a long way from the Bluegrass and his Ashland. He was a lifetime away from the Slashes.⁷⁵

BAYARD, ADAMS, AND Russell were already in Ghent, and Gallatin arrived about a week after Clay. Initially they all stayed at the Hotel des Pays-Bas, but they soon rented a house belonging to the Baron de Lovendeghem on the Rue des Champs. They impatiently waited for their British counterparts. Gallatin had told British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh that the American delegation was heading directly to Ghent, but the five commissioners and their secretaries waited and waited as days turned into weeks with the British failing to appear. The Americans fumed over all the empty talk about a Belgian location speeding communication with London.⁷⁶

In addition, events in Europe had changed everything to their disadvantage. In early April, the alliance led by Britain defeated Napoleon’s army, forced him to abdicate his throne, and sent him into exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. The British people exulted in the victory, but they darkly regarded upstart Yankees who had seemed willing with their distracting war to thwart Bonaparte’s defeat. They wanted the British government to punish Americans with a harsh settlement. British tardiness was possibly a tactic, another sign that they intended to press their newfound advantage for a one-sided peace.⁷⁷

The Americans in Ghent also got on each other’s nerves. While still at the Hotel des Pays-Bas, the men dined together at 4:00 P.M. every day. Adams groused in his diary about the late hour. After eating, the men lingered at the table to “drink bad wine and smoke cigars, which neither suits my habits nor my health, and absorbs time which I cannot spare.” He told them that he would dine alone at 1:00, a schedule he kept only one day because Clay “expressed some regret that I had withdrawn from their table.” It was a magnanimous gesture that actually touched Adams, though he would never have shown it to his companions. When writing to his wife, Louisa, however, Adams was different, revealing that behind the mask of the stern, unsmiling Puritan lived a man eager for approval and longing for friendship. Louisa wrote him that she had heard Henry Clay was “one of the most amiable … men in the world,” and John Quincy wrote her that what she “had heard of the character and temper of Mr. Clay” was entirely accurate. He assured her that he and his fellow commissioners were getting along splendidly. He continued in that vein throughout his time in Ghent, always insisting to Louisa that he and Mr. Clay were the best of friends—a sad and poignant lie, because contrasting temperaments and evolving circumstances would increasingly put them at each other’s throats.⁷⁸

Louisa Adams might have been fooled, but the other members of the commission knew the truth of it. Almost from the start, Clay and Adams could barely stand each other’s company. They were vastly different in temperament and background, and their habits were a study in contrasts. Clay had been able to sustain professional relations with disparate and disagreeable men, but he had never been forced to live with them day in and day out, had never been compelled constantly to work with them on touchy tasks, and had never found himself confronting someone so persistently humorless and purse-lipped. Clay was by nature cheerful and optimistic; Adams was reflexively pessimistic and gloomy. Adams was well educated, well read, and well traveled; Clay had little formal education and read only when he had to. Clay never missed a party, reveling into the wee hours playing cards and drinking. Adams regarded parties as a waste of time, thought gambling was squalid and ruinous, and verged on teetotalism. He retired early and rose before dawn to read dense books, write in his diary, and pore over his own paperwork. Clay found documents tedious and turned most of them over to his private secretary, Henry Carroll. Adams openly disapproved of Clay’s habits as self-indulgent. Clay openly disdained Adams as insufferable and opinionated. And lurking beneath all these differences were dangerous similarities: both were stubborn, always convinced they were right and irritable when told they weren’t.

Clay’s lifestyle as well as his attitude frayed Adams’s nerves. The Kentuckian’s room was just next door to Adams’s and was often the scene of card games that ended about the time Adams was rising to read his Bible and answer his mail. Jonathan Russell joined in these late-night revels, and Adams resented Clay and Russell’s friendship, sourly noting that Russell always followed Clay’s lead when the commissioners hashed out disagreements.⁷⁹

John Quincy Adams was officially the head of the delegation, and as they waited for the British, he insisted on keeping everyone busy with regular meetings. These pointless exercises irked Clay. Boredom made everyone testy, but Clay at least appeared cheerful and confident, a merry attitude that Adams found grating. He would have been surprised to discover that Clay was putting up a brave front to hide his own churning anxiety. Clay frequently wrote to his friend Crawford in Paris and confessed that he was pessimistic about America’s chances for an acceptable peace.⁸⁰

The British commissioners finally arrived on the evening of August 6. Admiral John James, 1st Baron Gambier, officially headed the delegation, which included Dr. William Adams, a prominent scholar of maritime law, and Henry Goulburn, undersecretary for war and the colonies, who at thirty was the youngest of the three and, as it turned out, the most active of their number. Historians have painted these men as nonentities, which is unfair. While not blessed with sparkling talent, they were hardly incompetent. Rather, they were second-tier government officials on Lord Castlereagh’s very short Foreign Office leash and burdened with his impossible instructions. Impressment was not negotiable. They were to adjust the northern United States border in Canada’s favor, to insist on the establishment of an Indian buffer state in the Northwest, and to announce that the United States declaration of war had terminated New England fishing rights off eastern Canada.⁸¹

Contention between the commissions began right away. Lord Gambier’s opening remarks declared the British desire for peace, and Adams responded with a similar statement, but as Henry Goulburn drily and methodically presented Castlereagh’s impossible terms, everything slowly unraveled. His presentation left the Americans stunned and silent. Almost every word Goulburn had uttered was completely unacceptable to the United States. After a pause, Bayard broke the silence. He asked what in the world the British meant by an Indian preserve as some sort of buffer state. Affecting an irritating air of self-importance, Goulburn refused to elaborate, and Clay promptly interjected that clarification was completely unnecessary because there was not going to be any Indian buffer state. The American commissioners rose from their seats. They would send a response soon, they said.⁸²

Over the next two days, it became clear why Goulburn had been so defensive when Bayard queried him in the first meeting: the British commissioners were not authorized to stray a particle from their instructions, even to the extent of explaining them. Now it appeared that everything was at an impasse, and they awkwardly asked for a delay in the talks. Messengers traveled across the English Channel to the Foreign Office and back, and Gambier finally announced that discussions could resume on August 19.

The impossible instructions had gotten worse. The Indian buffer was not negotiable, period. The British demanded complete military control of the Great Lakes including all shorelines, the continued right to navigate the Mississippi River, and the cession of territory in Maine to facilitate communication between Nova Scotia and Quebec. Britain also wanted to retain possession of American coastal islands they had seized during the war, particularly Moose Island in Passamaquoddy Bay. Capping this incredible list of demands was a warning—delivered with enough menace to make it a threat—that the Americans should not keep London hanging while awaiting instructions from Washington. After a few weeks, the terms might not be so generous. The dazed Americans adjourned to prepare a written response.⁸³

Adams believed that as the commission’s chief he should be the primary author of any communications to the British, and he drafted a response for his colleagues to review, a sequence that repeatedly occurred throughout the negotiations. Yet the other Americans soon discovered that Adams really wanted only praise for his lofty prose, not recommendations for revisions, and certainly not any criticisms. He sulked and brooded when his drafts came back marked up, with Clay’s corrections usually the most pointed and tactlessly blunt. He laughed at Adams’s pompous style and pretentious appeals to Providence. He sarcastically disparaged the New Englander’s figurative allusions as showy and affected. Gallatin’s role as peacekeeper between these antagonistic peacemakers grew. He often interceded to incorporate everyone’s views into final drafts and gradually emerged as the delegation’s leader despite Adams’s official designation as its chief.⁸⁴

Revised instructions from Secretary of State Monroe arrived. These new orders gave the American commissioners more latitude, especially permission to drop objections to impressment, which the end of the European war had made an irrelevant issue. Clay was emboldened by the arrival of these new directives to call what he suspected was Britain’s bluff about ramping up its demands. At a dinner party he curtly told Henry Goulburn that if Americans needed instructions from home, they would very well take the time to get them. Warming to this delicious chance to speak plainly, he told Goulburn that British demands were completely unreasonable. London might as well demand that the United States cede New York or Boston. If young Goulburn thought Clay was talking out of school, a note from the American commissioners soon showed otherwise. They rejected the Indian buffer state and British military control of the lakes.⁸⁵

Clay persisted in his belief that the British demands were too incredible not to be an absurd, audacious bluff. Yet even he had to admit that if it was all just a game, Gambier and company were playing it very seriously. On September 5, their sixteen-page manifesto denounced American expansionism, insisted on the Indian buffer, and demanded that the United States take responsibility should the talks collapse. The delegation studied this document in Adams’s room. Clay snapped that such impertinence deserved only the briefest response, no more than a half page at most, but Gallatin quietly remarked that duty required an observance of proper procedure. The commissioners began framing an answer, but Clay still fumed and resolved on his own to call this latest British bluff: he asked Goulburn to look into securing him a passport.⁸⁶

The talks were clearly stalled. Social events occasionally brought everyone together, and sporadic, vaguely insulting notes passed between the commissions, but as October passed, no official meetings took place. The Americans sent discouraging reports home about excessive British demands, and the Madison administration released them to the press. Congress, boiling with anger, distributed additional copies as pamphlets. While Americans excoriated the British, shellacking them in a war of words, the British army, no longer preoccupied with Bonaparte and able to turn its full attention to North America, laid plans to shellac the Yankee upstarts and win the war. Very bad news from America was soon on its way to Ghent.⁸⁷

JUST AS GAMBIER was showing a little flexibility about the Indian buffer state and control of the Great Lakes, the American commissioners received news in early October that shattered their hopes for a favorable peace. With talks mired, Clay and Kit Hughes were touring Brussels when word arrived that the British had captured and burned Washington, D.C., on August 24. Insufferable Henry Goulburn wanted Clay to hear about his country’s disastrous misfortune as soon as possible. Pretending to be thoughtful by supplying Clay with the latest newspapers, he made sure to include those with news about Washington. Clay was inconsolable over the capital’s destruction and somberly contemplated the consequences for the negotiations. When he learned that the British were working on a projet (a draft treaty), he insisted on writing the response.⁸⁸

On October 8, the British delivered not a draft treaty but a note that clearly reflected the changed situation. While it softened the demand for an Indian buffer state, it heavily peppered that bit of sugar with insults and other imperious requirements, such as a directive that the United States make peace with the Indians and restore all land they had possessed in 1811. For good measure, the British insinuated that the Louisiana Purchase had been an illegitimate transaction, a gratuitous affront apparently thrown in to keep Goulburn in practice. As a quaint American idiom would have described him, Clay was loaded for bear. He tolerated little editorial counsel from his colleagues as he furiously drafted the response. He defended American territorial expansion, denied an American plan to seize Canada, and snarled that even British insults would not bait him into mentioning (which he proceeded to do) British barbarism and the atrocities of their Indian allies on the American frontier. The inclusion of Indians in a treaty would be unprecedented, Clay said, but he allowed that such an article might be acceptable since Indian conflicts were likely to end in any case when Great Britain and the United States stopped fighting.

Despite the slight British movement on the Indian buffer, the harsh tone of both notes indicated another impasse. In addition, the Canadian border and the question of the fisheries remained unresolved. The British made clear they would not budge on the fisheries. Then on October 21, they proposed uti possidetis for the territorial questions, meaning that each would retain the territory they possessed at the time of a treaty signing.⁸⁹ The Americans exploded. The October 21 note drove everyone, including Adams, to Clay’s angry side. Uti possidetis was completely unacceptable! And where, pray tell, was the promised projet? The British suggested that the Americans write a projet of their own, and in fact Clay and his colleagues were already at work on such a document; but it was not going well.⁹⁰

They quarreled over minor as well as significant questions. A trifling matter concerned how to send a message to Czar Alexander I at the Congress of Vienna. As the great powers were meeting in Austria to arrange post-Napoleonic Europe, Americans in Ghent hoped the czar could persuade the British to soften their terms. When Adams asked how he should send the message, Clay laughed that Adams should fuss over something so trivial. Clay said that dispatching William Shaler might be a logical course since Shaler was the mission’s official messenger. Gallatin, however, did not think Shaler’s manners were refined enough for an audience with the czar. Adams then proposed to send the letter in the regular mail. Clay erupted in disbelief. The mail! Adams was going to trust a letter to the Czar of all the Russias to the mail! His voiced dripped with sarcasm as he slowly asked if the head of the delegation could not make a simple decision about a messenger. Adams sulked for the remainder of the meeting.⁹¹

Gallatin worked away on the American projet, doing his best to mediate between Adams and Clay, trying his best to balance their demands that their respective regions receive special consideration. Having quashed the Indian buffer state, Clay did not want the British to have unrestricted access to the Mississippi River. The concession, he said, endangered the security of the western United States. Adams insisted that New England retain its fishing rights off the Canadian coast and wanted the islands in Passamaquoddy Bay returned. Gallatin’s solution was to let everything remain in place from the Treaty of 1783 and use this new agreement to reconfirm existing arrangements. That meant New England could retain fishing rights, and the British could continue to use the Mississippi. Clay would not have it: How could anyone, he roared, argue that securing the mighty Mississippi River was equal to catching and drying codfish? Gallatin, Bayard, and Adams supported the trade-off, but Clay made clear he would sign neither a note nor a treaty that contained such provisions. The other commissioners paused and considered the need for a united front. Finally Gallatin removed all mention of fish and rivers from the projet and instead called for a peace on the basis of the status quo ante bellum, the return of everything to its condition before the war.⁹²

Amazingly, circumstances made this particular tactic the most workable, for the British government was already considering a conciliatory stance. The Congress of Vienna stumbled toward dissolution as old prejudices and animosities resurfaced in the absence of the unifying enemy, Napoleon. Disputes over Poland and Saxony were only the latest evidence that Europe was a gaggle of antagonisms barely restrained. And then there was the military situation in America, which had seemed so promising for the British in the early fall but had quickly turned dismal with failures at Baltimore and Plattsburgh. (Clay sent Goulburn the newspapers.) In the wake of these setbacks, the Duke of Wellington, hero of the European war and commander of allied forces occupying France, all but refused to take command in America and advised his government to make peace with the United States. That was the evolving situation as the British commissioners read through the American draft treaty they had received on November 10.⁹³

With new instructions from London that addressed the changed circumstances, the British commissioners returned the American projet with only marginal notes rather than a counterproposal. With the exception of the Maine islands, they accepted the status quo ante bellum. They rejected the articles on impressment and British confiscations and insisted on an article granting British navigation of the Mississippi. These responses were not perfect, but they were obvious signs of a changed attitude. Yet the American meeting on November 28 to discuss the British remarks was a series of “angry disputes” in which “Clay lost his temper,” Adams noted, adding, “as he generally does whenever this right of the British to navigate the Mississippi is discussed.” Gallatin calmly pointed out that sacrificing the fisheries would encourage New England Federalists already flirting with disunion. Clay bitterly responded he would not appease disloyal Americans in New England at the expense of patriots in the West.⁹⁴

There matters stood when the Americans invited the British commissioners to meet on December 1, the first official gathering of the delegations since August. The course of this meeting soon reminded them why they had stopped holding them. It was long and unproductive. Clay, however, brought to this discussion his highly developed sense of men at games of chance, and he gradually discerned in the British negotiators what gamblers call a “tell,” a sign that reveals otherwise hidden intent and divulges otherwise disguised meanings. The tell in this case was the few British concessions, a sign that they wanted a treaty more than they were letting on. Convinced of this, he resisted his colleagues when they continued to push him to give in on Mississippi navigation rights. He told them he would fight the war for three more years rather than yield, but most of all he stated his conviction that the British “had been playing brag with us throughout the entire negotiation.” Clay “stalked to and fro across the chamber” and eventually won over his reluctant companions “by outbragging” them. Now that he knew the tell, it was time to play brag with the British. He did. They blinked.

On December 22, the Americans received a message essentially agreeing to a treaty that deferred the Canadian border to arbitration after the war, did not mention the fisheries or the Mississippi River, and abandoned uti possidetis for the principle of status quo ante bellum. Everyone assembled on Christmas Eve 1814 at the quarters of the British commission to sign multiple copies of the final document and send them on to London and Washington. The eight diplomats then sat down together for Christmas dinner, a celebration of the Prince of Peace, and raised glasses in civil if not altogether cordial regard. Clay enjoyed himself. He had gambled. And as Lucretia had said, he ’most always won.⁹⁵

ALTHOUGH CLAY WAS not completely pleased with the treaty, he knew it was the best agreement under the circumstances. True, it did not address a single issue pertinent to neutral trade or sailors’ rights, but at least Americans had lost “no territory,” and “I think no honor.” Gallatin reminded everyone that treaties were rarely popular, and Clay took comfort that he had done his best to protect the interests of both his country and his region by blocking needless concessions. As soon as spring promised a more pleasant crossing, he intended to go home to his family and return to Congress. While waiting for spring, he planned a holiday to see a bit of Europe, especially Paris.⁹⁶

It was probably unavoidable that Clay’s buoyant mood would have to weather one last fight before the American commissioners left Ghent. For weeks, annoying British antics had accomplished the impossible. They had not only united the Americans but had also constrained them to get along for long spells that all but banished hard words. Even Adams joined the repartee. “Clay remarked that Mr. Goulburn was a man of much irritation.” Adams responded, “irritability … is the word Mr. Clay, irritability; and then fixing him with an earnest look, and the tone of voice between seriousness and jest, I added ‘like somebody else that I know.’ Clay laughed, and said ‘Aye, that we do; all know him, and none better than yourself.’” Adams had at last realized that the friction between him and Clay stemmed from their having “the same dogmatical, overbearing manner, the same harshness of look and expression, and the same forgetfulness of the courtesies of society.”⁹⁷

Yet at the end of December the Americans fell to arguing about what should be done with the delegation’s official papers. Clay wanted them sent to the State Department and persuaded Bayard and Russell to agree with him. Adams believed that the head of the delegation—meaning himself—should keep the papers. He accused Clay of forming a cabal against him. Clay lost his temper and shouted, “You dare not, you cannot, you SHALL not insinuate that there has been a cabal.”⁹⁸ It was a silly, pointless argument: Clay calmed down, and Adams won the point. All said their farewells in more or less good humor, and Clay with Bayard left for Paris on January 7, 1815. When Adams later came to Paris, he and Clay went on sightseeing outings.

Clay enjoyed Paris. He had long visits with his friend William Crawford, went to plays, danced at balls, and charmed tablemates at sumptuous dinners. At a soiree in her home, the prominent writer and socialite Madame de Staël asked Clay if he knew that the British had considered sending the Duke of Wellington to fight in America. Clay said it would have been an honor to defeat Napoleon’s conqueror, a remark she later repeated to Wellington himself. The general was reported to have said it would have been a great achievement to defeat the brave American people. Upon the backs of such backhanded compliments the world moved on.⁹⁹

Though terribly homesick, Clay traveled to England to assist Albert Gallatin in negotiating a commercial treaty with the British. He delayed his trip to London as long as he could, dreading the prospect of British gloating over their military prowess and deriding American martial incompetence. But then he heard about New Orleans. On January 8, 1815, Andrew Jackson’s motley forces of cobbled-together militias and a few regulars had stood on the Rodriguez Canal south of the Crescent City. The seasoned British veterans of the European wars had scornfully called Jackson’s men “dirty shirts” before marching resolutely toward a line they knew would break, just as the militia had broken outside Washington. But as the British came across the frozen Chalmette Plain that January morning, the American line did not break. Instead, it hurled cannon shot and musket balls into the advancing Redcoats, winnowing their ranks like a scythe, cutting down their officers and killing their commanding general. In less than a half hour, every contemptible instance of American military failure was avenged, and in Andrew Jackson Americans had a new hero. He became for them the man who won the war that many had thought was lost.

Clay crossed the channel to England with his head high on the news of this heady victory. He held slight hope that the British would agree to a satisfactory commercial treaty, though, and he indulged his reflexive dislike of them. Shortly after arriving he heard that Napoleon had slipped off Elba to return to France and again proclaim himself emperor. Clay cheered, “Wonderful age! wonderful man! wonderful nation!”¹⁰⁰

Napoleon’s return distracted the British and left them little interested in opening commercial negotiations. Clay yearned all the more for home and began searching for an early passage. He attended meetings with British officials, but he was bored and showed it. Gallatin and Adams, who arrived in May as the new American minister to Great Britain, conducted most of the negotiations. In June, after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, Britain suddenly became serious about commercial arrangements, and Clay had no choice but to see the matter through, but not for a minute longer than was necessary. The day after a commercial treaty was signed on July 3, he left for Liverpool to book passage home, envying Crawford and Bayard, who had left for the United States from France two weeks earlier. Bayard had been ill for months, a cause for concern.¹⁰¹

Gallatin was not long in joining Clay in Liverpool, and they finally departed aboard the Lorenzo on July 23 for an uneventful voyage that ended in New York City on September 1, where sad news awaited them. Bayard was dead. Clay had grown fond of him during their months at Ghent and the jaunt to Paris. News that he had died soon after arriving back in the United States made for a somber homecoming.

And yet there were obligatory celebrations to attend. Prominent New York Republicans and Federalists came out on September 5 for a dinner honoring Clay and Gallatin at Tammany Hall. A multitude of tributes toasted the nation, Clay, Gallatin, and the country’s military heroes. Clay’s turn came. He rose from his seat, lifted his glass, and shouted, “The eighth of January 1815!” The crowd erupted into lusty cheers.¹⁰²

Clay’s toast was a small and expected gesture, no doubt sincere at the time, when the world so long at war was finally at peace and young America had stood its ground against powerful Britain, never more effectively than outside New Orleans behind a stern-faced Tennessean with cold blue eyes and the frontier nickname “Old Hickory,” the man, like the wood, who did not bend, did not break. Clay’s toast on that evening would be lost in the welter of events and numerous milestones that awaited both him and Andrew Jackson. Clay had returned from Belgium brimming with ambition after ending the war. Jackson, also brimming with ambition, had ended that war with a stunning triumph. On September 5, 1815, Henry Clay lifted his glass to the Hero of New Orleans and no doubt meant it, for the last time.