CHAPTER SEVEN

A Thousand Cuts

HENRY CLAY’S NOMINATION to head the State Department prompted a humiliating challenge in the Senate, the work not only of Jacksonians embittered by the election but also of those who feared Clay would be the dominant force in the new administration. That anxiety at least proved the ignorance of Adams’s opponents, for the new president was indomitable, but the combination of anger and unease produced an embarrassing opposition to Clay. In the end, the Senate confirmed him by a comfortable margin, but getting to that end had put him through the wringer, an unpromising way to begin.¹

The confirmation debates in the Senate were just the beginning of his ordeal. Clay remained physically ill, more or less, for the next four years, and barely a day passed that the cry of “corruption” and “bargain” did not appear in the Jackson press. Jackson’s supporters interjected the charge in ordinary conversation, referred to it in every stump speech, and made it a feature of campaigns for constables, commissioners, and congressmen. They ridiculed the president as “Johnny Q.” and mocked Clay as a bungling diplomat and despicable conspirator. The treatment wounded Adams, to be sure, but he resolved to ignore it, shielding himself with New England pluck. Henry Clay could not. Western traditions of honor and southern rituals of pride ruled Clay’s passions, and he would not ignore assaults on his character. As they were bound to, the Kremer charges resurfaced after the inauguration, and Clay took off his coat and spat on his palms.²

Initially he explained himself to Kentuckians through their newspapers, knowing the press throughout the country would reprint his words. He had not betrayed the West by supporting Adams, he said, because he had made no secret of his nationalism before the election. He sincerely believed that after himself, Adams would be the best president. In any case, he could not have endorsed a man he judged manifestly unqualified for the post. Turning to the accusations that he had acted dishonorably, Clay all but said that George Kremer had not written the letter that had sparked the controversy. Instead, he was certain that Jackson’s supporters had duped Kremer into claiming the letter as his creation. Someone close to Jackson had written it, most likely Tennessee senator John Eaton, who had been seen visiting Kremer at the time. Concluding with the observation that Jackson and his followers were being petulant in defeat, Clay insisted that the country as well as the new administration had to move on.³

Clay possibly believed his response would “triumph over all the villaney [sic],” yet it only riled John Eaton, who immediately fired off a letter to Clay demanding he retract the accusation about the Kremer letter. Clay said that he would gladly do so if Eaton plainly stated that his “nocturnal interview” with Kremer had not helped to produce Kremer’s accusations. Eaton adopted indignation as a defense. He did not have to explain anything to Henry Clay, he huffed, remarking for good measure that Clay had taken a rather long time to answer his demand for an apology. Clay angrily responded the next day. His official duties did not allow him to “mark the hours with the same precision as a gentleman of your presumed leisure,” he snapped. Eaton could, Clay observed, avoid the issue all he liked, but all could then draw reasonable conclusions about his role in producing the Kremer letter. Eaton published these exchanges, an act Clay thought “silly” because he believed that Eaton had gotten the worst of it. Clay’s temper blinded him to the disagreeable appearance of the new secretary of state, in office barely three weeks, engaging in a petty feud.⁴

Eaton was tireless and Jackson was popular, a bad combination in enemies. Reports soon told of mobs burning Clay in effigy throughout the West. Determined, faceless men, moving like shadows, were poking about in his private affairs, trying to acquire letters proving he had sold his support to Adams. In Washington, angry Jackson partisans snubbed him at parties and whispered slanders behind his back. Clay’s friends gently soothed him with kind words. He had acted honorably to prevent a disastrous Jackson presidency, they said, and they assured him that the controversy would fade. But they also began to reckon with great unease the resolve of Clay’s enemies. The capacity of those enemies for unrestrained abuse surprised them. It shook Clay.⁵

To make matters worse, much of his work at the State Department was worse than tedious. Deskwork had always bored him, and most of his duties required him to spend twelve hours a day at it, signing patents and answering mail. Routine and interminable meetings with foreign diplomats were taxing enough, but office seekers pushed his patience beyond its limits. The only redeeming feature of his job was the unexpected but pleasant discovery that Adams proved easy to work with. Because of the president’s special interest in foreign relations, a natural result of his extensive service abroad, he and Clay had lengthy discussions in which they mostly agreed and usually could compromise when they did not.⁶

Unlike congressional service with its recesses and adjournments, Clay’s duties at State would be ongoing and uninterrupted. Trips home would be catch-as-catch-can affairs. Years before, when he had expected to become Monroe’s secretary of state, Clay had planned to have Lucretia and the children move to Washington, and now he revived the idea. Shortly after the inauguration, he returned to Kentucky to bring everyone who could come to the capital. He had not seen Lucretia and the children for six months, and he hoped that Susan and Anne would come up from New Orleans to Ashland, bringing their husbands, Martin and James, and Susan’s little boys, Martin and Henry Clay Duralde, for a grand reunion. Clay worried how Lucretia would adjust to the responsibilities of a cabinet wife, let alone the demands of Washington’s social whirl. It would be nice, he thought, if Anne and James could come along, if only for a while. Lucretia had been “cheerfully” preparing for the trip, a good sign, and Anne smiled in a reassuring letter to her father that Mama was “of that disposition to make friends & sincere ones too wherever she goes.”⁷

The prospect of seeing them all took the edge off the stories about his new unpopularity in the West. He crossed the mountains at the end of May without once seeing his effigy ablaze and was pleasantly surprised when Kentuckians greeted his arrival with celebrations and dinners in his honor. Everybody was already in a celebratory mood because Lafayette’s American journey had just weeks before brought him through the Bluegrass. Kentucky had received Lafayette with lavish balls and treated him to glowing tributes, a glory that shone on Clay, for the old Frenchman had visited Lucretia at Ashland and stopped at Versailles to deliver an address from the balcony of Watkins Tavern, the inn founded by Clay’s mother and stepfather. The reminders of Clay’s friendship with this enormously popular hero could not have come at a better time.⁸

It was also fortunate for him that Kentucky politics had tumbled into chaos. The central issue remained how to resolve the respective situations of debtors and creditors. The latter had considerable influence, but the former were more numerous, and for the moment, demographics had the upper hand, making the Relief Party temporarily ascendant. Several of Clay’s political friends jumped on the Relief bandwagon, including Amos Kendall, Francis Blair, William T. Barry, and recently elected governor Joseph Desha. The Relief majority in the legislature passed a slew of measures friendly to debtors, and Desha quickly signed them into law. The state court of appeals, however, ruled that much of this legislation was unconstitutional. When the Relief Party settled the confrontation by simply establishing a new court, the old court refused to relinquish its authority, and Kentucky suddenly had two judiciaries, each insisting that the other was illegitimate.

The commotion became all-consuming, extending to matters that seemed quite unrelated. At the end of 1824, Governor Desha’s son Isaac had robbed and murdered a traveler, leaving a trail of evidence that assured his conviction and a death sentence. Governor Desha’s New Court Party accused the Old Court Party of framing Isaac to ruin his father. Public outcry eventually got Isaac a new trial, but people who had nothing to do with politics could testify to seeing him shortly after the murder in bloodstained clothes, riding the victim’s horse, his pocket containing the victim’s wallet with a considerable amount of money. Again sentenced to hang, Isaac slit his throat, but the suicide attempt only ruined his trachea, and the gallows still waited. Governor Desha could stand it no longer. He threw caution, not to mention duty, to the wind and pardoned his son.⁹

These lurid doings could not distract Kentucky forever, and Clay gradually noticed a disturbing trend as the storm over the presidential election refused to subside. Instead, it eventually spread and became linked to every other imaginable disagreement. In Kentucky, many Relief Party members were outright Jacksonians or inclined toward him (incongruously, because down at the Hermitage Jackson occasionally took a break from denouncing Henry Clay to denounce debtors), and their agreement over credit and bankruptcy issues had organized them at the head of a numerous voter base. In time, they would turn critical eyes to Clay’s support of Adams.¹⁰

CLAY LEFT KENTUCKY for Washington that summer uncertain about when he would return, at least permanently. He hoped that a two-term Clay administration would follow two for the Adams presidency, an accumulation of years that would see him retiring in 1841. Then he could return to Kentucky forever and live out his days, as Thomas Jefferson had at Monticello, to become the Sage of Ashland. It was all a dream in 1825, of course, but one worth planning. Because buying new furniture and other household necessities would be cheaper than shipping what the family owned, Clay had arranged to sell those items he would not place in storage. Consequently, the procession that lumbered out of Kentucky toward Washington was light on baggage. The Clays in it were numerous, however, if nothing else was. The three oldest boys remained behind, but Henry and Lucretia had young James and John as well as twelve-year-old Eliza, excited by the prospect of adventures waiting in the capital, an infectious enthusiasm that lightened everyone’s mood. Anne and James Erwin were also on the journey. Susan and Martin Duralde had not made the trip from New Orleans to Kentucky that summer, but Susan wrote her mother a bright letter full of cheerful optimism. She especially wanted Lucretia to put aside her diffidence and enjoy the sparkling social setting Washington offered.¹¹

They traveled slowly, their short baggage train of wagons rumbling along behind them. After the journey up the Ohio River, their slow progress came to an abrupt halt about thirty miles outside Cincinnati near the small town of Lebanon, Ohio, because Eliza was ill and feverish. The little girl had always been the picture of health, so although Henry and Lucretia were worried, they assumed Eliza’s excitement had simply gotten the better of her. As they lingered at Lebanon, though, she became no better, even worsening in her frowning parents’ estimation. Clay summoned a local physician, but his treatments did little good and possibly some harm. Everyone watched in despair and terror as Eliza slowly sank. Then in early August she rallied, and by August 9, the doctor was certain she was on her way to a full recovery. With laughing relief over this miracle, Henry and Lucretia listened as the doctor reckoned that Eliza was not yet out of the woods. It was best, he told Clay, that she stay put in Lebanon until her recuperation was further along.

Clay was already weeks overdue in the capital and gave in to a compulsive urge to rush to his duties. The family would follow when Eliza was stronger. For ten days, Clay jounced east over rutted roads in a stagecoach. Twenty miles from Washington, the coach stopped at a roadside tavern for breakfast, and Clay spied a copy of the National Intelligencer. He glanced at the date on the masthead: August 21, the current issue. He would be up on the latest political and diplomatic news. Then he saw the small item as though it alone remained in focus as the rest of the newspaper dissolved into a blur. Eliza Clay was dead, had been dead since August 11, just two days after he left Lebanon.¹²

The singularly cruel blow was made doubly worse by his guilt, by the impersonal way he discovered the news, by contemplating that for more than a week he had been going farther and farther away from Lucretia. Later that day, as he slid limply out of the stagecoach in Washington, he was physically and mentally shattered. Two days passed before he could write to comfort Lucretia and pour out his grief. He arranged to meet her and the children outside Washington to bring them into town the following weekend. The sad procession was a cortege as it made its way to rented rooms, and Lucretia climbed the stairs of the boardinghouse like an old woman. Her dreams and hopes for her young daughter had become a leaden weight. Eliza would never attend the excellent girls’ school in the capital. She would never laugh with her mother in this cheerless, lonely city.¹³

Clay threw himself into his work with such abandon that friends worried about his health, but at least he had something to distract him from unrelenting grief. Misery shadowed Lucretia’s days. Social engagements were out of the question. Other than tending to two rambunctious little boys, she whiled away empty hours, her dim world the cramped rooms of the boardinghouse. In early October, Clay moved the family into a large rented house with the hope that changed surroundings could abate some measure of their grief.¹⁴

In New Orleans, Susan Clay Duralde received the news about Eliza after she had sent her cheerful letter to her parents. Her little sister’s death devastated her, and she physically wilted in the days that followed. Weak and listless, she mildly alarmed Martin Duralde, but everyone knew that grief could injure the body as well as the spirit. Though concerned, the family in New Orleans was confident that time would heal the wound. In fact, after a few days, Susan appeared to be recovering. Then a high fever seized her, an all too common malady in southern Louisiana, but a disquieting one that could be serious. It soon became obvious that Susan was not just sad but gravely ill. Doctors came and went while Martin helplessly looked on. The doctors, whispering and grim, were increasingly helpless too. Martin simply ceased functioning, withdrawing in the face of the unfolding and unthinkable horror. Someone, possibly Martin’s sister Julie, took the two sons to Susan’s bedside for farewells, more for their mother than for them. Little Martin, the older boy, could barely understand what was happening, and his younger brother, Henry Clay Duralde, was still teething. At the end, Susan could hardly speak, but she whispered a final regret: she would never see her parents again. She died on September 18, just five weeks after her sister. Susan was twenty-two.¹⁵

Martin was inconsolable, irrational, and unable to care for the children. His sisters Louise and Julie Duralde Clay temporarily took them in. Receiving the news in Washington, Henry and Lucretia came near complete collapse. For Lucretia, prayer provided some comfort, but her faith seemed hard put to sustain her. She retreated into a quiet sadness in the months that followed. First losing the infant Laura and then Eliza indelibly associated Washington with dying children. Because of Susan, she now had to bear the death of a child in a far removed place. In France, Nancy ripped open letters from Clay and worried that her sister would “never regain her happiness,” that Susan’s death had “given the finishing stroke to it.” The burden of grief made Clay so ill that he considered resigning as secretary of state. “Out of six daughters,” he finally cried, “to be deprived of all but one!”¹⁶

CLAY DID NOT quit his post. Instead, he hoped that work could distract his mind while time healed his heart. The Jacksonian drumbeat about the Clay-Adams bargain spurred him to work all the harder at the State Department and to help Adams frame a popular domestic program. The new administration had a hard row to hoe. Jackson’s supporters wanted four years of mounting administration failures to assure Old Hickory’s election in 1828. For that reason, they tried to thwart all of its proposals, but others had reason to challenge administration policies as well. Suspicious of expanding federal power, they jealously guarded states’ rights and individual liberty. These two groups were not always mutually exclusive. Support for Jackson often coincided with the exaltation of states’ rights. But Jacksonians had the motive of political expediency, aside from any philosophical differences with Henry Clay. For all its rough-and-tumble complexities, the election of 1824 had at least set the stage to clarify a fundamental disagreement. A sharp distinction emerged between those who saw the federal government as the prime mover in domestic affairs and those who believed that localism was best.¹⁷

When Congress convened in December, Andrew Jackson was not in it. He had resigned from the Senate in October. Almost immediately, the Tennessee legislature nominated him for the presidency in 1828, by design starting the next campaign before people could forget the disappointment of the last one. Almost everything about the business of government quickly focused on electing Jackson in four years. His supporters in Congress pounced at their first opportunity, which was their response to Adams’s first annual message.¹⁸

Clay saw it coming. He knew the perils of crossing an angry legislature, and Adams wisely listened to Clay’s advice to tone down or eliminate items sure to provoke such great opposition that they had no chance of success. Jacksonians and states’ rights proponents nevertheless condemned even the modified version of the annual message. John Randolph, recently elected to the Senate, was characteristically vocal and caustic. In fact, the volume of personal attacks and pure fabrications hurled at the administration surprised Clay as much as they troubled him. Nothing was beyond the imagination of detractors. Jacksonians even accused Adams and Clay of sending Lafayette home in a ship so leaky it was in constant danger of sinking, revealing their contemptible indifference, their unseemly parsimony.¹⁹

In the face of such unreasonable attacks, there was little one could do except work hard, hoping success would blunt criticism and win the public’s support. Clay intended to help with his foreign policy initiatives. He came to detest the mundane parts of his job, but few secretaries of state have matched Clay’s resolve to do every part of the job thoroughly and well. Unfortunately for him as well as the country, resolve would not be enough. The State Department did not allow him to use his talents, which were uniquely suited to the legislature, where few could equal Clay’s ability to form majorities, construct compromises, and persuade with dazzling oratory. Instead, he was deskbound, writing reams of instructions to men of varying ability in distant capitals, both he and they frustrated by delay and hemmed in by elaborate protocols.²⁰

The administration inherited perennial problems with Great Britain and France, although the problems with Britain were less menacing than usual in that they mainly concerned commerce. Adams and Clay thought the British might be willing to open their West Indies colonies to unrestricted American trade. London had already partially opened the door, though with a consequential limitation. All trade with British colonies had to be direct, meaning American shippers could not carry anything but American goods to those colonies or take from them goods for sale anywhere but the United States. This limited colonial trade was an encouraging breakthrough, though, and Clay hoped it was a sign that the British could be persuaded to lift all restrictions. For that task he needed just the right man, and he entreated veteran diplomat and fellow Ghent commissioner Albert Gallatin to replace the elderly Rufus King, the U.S. minister in London.

Gallatin had doubts about British flexibility, and he resisted Clay for as long as he could before reluctantly accepting the post. He left for London in July 1826, and after arriving there either found his doubts confirmed or was disinclined to exert himself to overcome what he regarded as insurmountable obstacles. Gallatin not only failed to budge the British on the West Indian trade, he could not settle the Canadian boundary or secure American navigation rights on the St. Lawrence River either. Clay began to doubt Gallatin’s commitment to his mission, and Gallatin grew increasingly touchy over Clay’s constant urging to redouble his efforts. Gallatin’s failure in London was a serious blow to Clay’s tenure at State, dashing all his initiatives to improve Anglo-American relations.²¹

Franco-American affairs posed a more delicate problem. For years, the United States had insisted that the French should pay damages for attacks on U.S. shipping during the Napoleonic Wars. The matter had gone to arbitration, which confirmed many American claims, but the French government repeatedly delayed payment. Clay believed these postponements amounted to bad faith and justified expropriating French shipping as compensation, an extreme response that Adams overruled. Clay was at least fortunate in that Monroe’s minister to Paris continued under Adams, providing both continuity to the American position and perceptive reports about events on the ground there. James Brown, of course, was also Clay’s brother-in-law, but that was immaterial to the French, who remained obstinate, just as Brown predicted they would. The matter remained unresolved when Adams and Clay left office, another diplomatic failure. The French finally paid the debt during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, making Clay’s disappointment even more galling. Jackson would rattle a saber to get the money.²²

Yet Clay was ready to rattle a saber of his own if the situation merited it. He and Adams suspected that the French planned to test the strength of the Monroe Doctrine by reviving their colonial ventures in Latin America. Spanish Cuba seemed ripe for the taking, for rumors described cash-strapped Spain as unable to protect the Jewel of the Antilles. Contemplating the alarming possibility that Madrid might cede Cuba to France, Clay maintained contact with a confidential agent on the island and closely monitored activity in the Caribbean. When Clay learned that a French fleet of twenty-seven ships had left Martinique for Cuba, his instructions to James Brown amounted to a Clay Codicil to the Monroe Doctrine: just as the United States would not abide the establishment of new colonies in the hemisphere, it would not tolerate the transfer of a colony from one European nation to another. The French perceived that Clay was serious and backed off. They denied having any interest in Cuba.²³

During his service in the House, Clay’s support of Latin American independence had earned him the enduring goodwill of struggling revolutionaries. That relationship and his continued interest in promoting strong hemispheric ties across Latin America boded well for excellent relations between the United States and the new republics to the south. He negotiated commercial treaties with several Latin American governments, but the real opportunity for American leadership came early during Clay’s tenure at the State Department. Venezuelan Simon Bolívar, celebrated as the liberator of South America and president of Gran Colombia as well as Peru and Bolivia, called a congress of interested states to meet in Panama in the spring of 1826. Even though the United States was not originally on the invitation list, Mexico and Colombia soon rectified the oversight.²⁴

Clay was thrilled. The congress promised an opportunity to promote better trade relations throughout the Americas. Using subtle diplomatic pressure and citing the success of its own example, the United States could encourage greater democracy in the infant republics to the south. President Adams, however, was less excited by these prospects. In fact, he was quite wary of weak Latin American nations ensnaring the United States into military alliances that could plunge the nation into wars unrelated to American interests. Clay convinced Adams that enthusiasm had not blinded him to these realities. He assured the president that U.S. commissioners would have carefully worded instructions preventing them from committing to anything other than commercial compacts. Clay also argued that establishing commercial ties could only increase a salutary exposure to U.S. influence and institutions, leading to solid frameworks of government and the avoidance of risky projects such as trying to seize Cuba from enfeebled Spain. Finally agreeing that the advantages outweighed the hazards, Adams consented to sending delegates to the Panama Congress. Clay began searching for apt candidates.²⁵

Hoping to head off criticism, Adams asked the Senate to confirm the diplomats and the House to appropriate funds for their mission, but the gesture proved a mistake. When Clay nominated Kentuckian Richard Anderson, Jr., currently U.S. minister to Colombia, and former Pennsylvania congressman John Sergeant as commissioners, anti-administration senators used the confirmation hearings to attack the entire Panama initiative.²⁶ They spent several weeks scrutinizing Anderson and Sergeant as though they were under arraignment. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a report criticizing the idea of sending a mission at all, and for weeks afterward, whenever the topic appeared on the Senate’s calendar, critics leaped to lodge a variety of arguments against it. Isolationists darkly warned that the mission could entangle the United States in dangerous alliances and surrender the country’s autonomy to some sort of Pan-American commission. Southerners nodded, frowned, and raised additional objections, including the fact that Latin American nations that recognized the Haitian government of former slaves would incite similar slave rebellions throughout the South. While Jacksonians in Congress kept pounding the idea, Vice President John C. Calhoun lurked around the edges of the argument in exasperating ways. The caprice of American electoral procedures in 1824 had made Calhoun the vice president despite his disdain for John Quincy Adams and his allegiance to Andrew Jackson. Working behind the scenes, Calhoun accordingly played spoiler to block Clay-Adams initiatives, including participation in the Panama Congress. Clay wanted this badly, though, and spent the political capital necessary to obtain it. He used his influence in Congress to counter the partisan bickering over confirmations in the Senate and funding in the House. In the end, he got both the delegates and the money.²⁷

Yet it took him a precious long time to do so, and ultimately time became Clay’s biggest enemy. When the American commissioners finally started out for Central America, the Panama Congress was already in session. They had detailed instructions from Clay, but his labors were wasted, for neither Anderson nor Sergeant had a chance to act on them. Traveling from Colombia, Anderson fell ill and died en route. In the meantime, the congress adjourned to reconvene in Tacubaya, Mexico, making Sergeant’s trip to Panama pointless. Adams and Clay hastily replaced Anderson with Joel Poinsett, U.S. minister to Mexico, but by the time he and Sergeant arrived at Tacubaya, the meeting had adjourned again. All the administration’s efforts came to nothing. Worse, British envoys to the Latin American congress were able to point smugly to the conspicuous absence of U.S. participants as evidence of U.S. indifference, tarnishing Clay’s otherwise sterling relationships with the new republics. Clay had handed the president another failure, and the administration’s critics crowed like roosters.²⁸

The lack of U.S. participation at the Panama Congress meant problems for the country in the long term as many Latin American countries began to jettison their republican governments, falling prey to barracks rebellions and into the clutches of military strongmen. Clay even became suspicious that Simon Bolívar’s fame had turned the Great Liberator’s head. Clay used unofficial channels to dissuade the shift to authoritarianism, and he instructed diplomats like Poinsett to use their influence to encourage democratic rule, but he could do little to reverse these disturbing trends. In Mexico, Poinsett exemplified the problem while exacerbating it. Ineffectual on almost every level, he could not diminish British influence in Mexico City, and he obnoxiously injected himself into Mexico’s domestic affairs, making him useless in fulfilling Clay’s hope of purchasing portions of northern Mexico, most important Texas. In the end, Poinsett could not even conclude a simple trade agreement with Mexico. Under Clay’s guidance, the State Department actually established more trade treaties than his predecessors had, but Poinsett’s failure in Mexico was a blot that many unfairly recalled as emblematic of Clay’s commercial diplomacy, consequently perceiving all his efforts as disappointing.²⁹

JOHN RANDOLPH WAS having the time of his life assailing John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. Week after week of vicious attacks finally led even John Eaton to complain that the Senate did nothing other than listen to Randolph brand the administration a gaggle of “money changers” and use every debate “to torture” the president and secretary of state.³⁰ Randolph’s behavior was no less exasperating because it was in character, and Clay could bear only so much of it. On March 30, 1826, Randolph’s invective finally crossed the line. It was a long and meandering speech even for Randolph, but it contained a clever literary reference to characters in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones that set the capital to buzzing and Clay to fuming. Randolph spoke of “the coalition of Blifil and Black George—by the combination unheard of till then, of the puritan with the black-leg.”³¹ Fielding’s Blifil was an outwardly pious man consumed with greed, and Black George was a lovable though inherently dishonest servant. Randolph clearly meant these two fictional characters to represent Adams and Clay, but he also cast subtlety aside to make sure everyone understood the insult. Adams was the puritan and Clay the blackleg, slang for a card cheat. Clay intended to kill John Randolph for that remark.

The day after Randolph’s speech, Clay summoned his friend the U.S. Army Quartermaster General Thomas S. Jesup to his office with a note for Randolph that cited his “unprovoked attack on my character, in the Senate of the United States, on yesterday.” Clay insisted that he had “no other alternative than that of demanding personal satisfaction.” Jesup was dismayed. He tried to talk Clay out of sending this challenge, but Clay responded that “no public station, no, not even life, is worth holding, if coupled with dishonor.” He insisted that Jesup deliver the note and asked him to serve as his second in the duel.³²

When it came to threatening violence, Randolph had few equals, but unlike Clay, who almost never threatened violence, Randolph’s public life had not featured a single instance of gunplay. In 1807, he had refused a challenge from General James Wilkinson with the contemptuous response, “I cannot descend to your level.” Now he had a note from the secretary of state calling him out, and to his credit, he was greatly troubled by it. Randolph went to Thomas Hart Benton’s room at Brown’s Hotel and asked about his family connection to Lucretia Clay. Benton said he was a blood relative. The news saddened Randolph; he had wanted his friend to be his second. He told Benton that he would ask Congressman Edward F. Tattnall of Georgia to be his second, but he also swore Benton to secrecy. Randolph felt he had no choice but to accept Clay’s challenge, to preserve both his honor and the inviolability of Senate debates. And yet Randolph paused; he then looked levelly at Thomas Hart Benton and told him not to worry.³³

Jesup and Tattnall unhappily made the final arrangements, neither wanting to see the duel happen but neither able to stop it. Nevertheless, they and Benton spent much of the next week trying to work out an agreement that could allow Randolph to say that everyone had misconstrued him and allow Clay to cancel the meeting honorably. Randolph, however, stood firm on the principle he had declared to Benton. No one had the right to demand an explanation for remarks in the Senate, least of all a member of the executive branch.³⁴

Randolph had the choice of weapons. It was to be pistols. The seconds outlined additional terms. Ten paces, a distance of about thirty feet, would separate Clay and Randolph. They were to point their pistols toward the ground until hearing the command “Fire!” A measured count of “one—two—three” would frame the time when each could discharge his weapon before hearing the word “Stop!” The seconds selected a spot in Virginia across the Potomac from Georgetown and set the afternoon of April 8 as the date.

On the evening of April 7, Benton called on Clay and found other visitors at the house. His eyes lingered on his cousin. Lucretia sat in the parlor, silent and sad. Since the deaths of Eliza and Susan, Benton had not seen her display the slightest trace of happiness. Five-year-old John slumbered on the sofa, and Benton had the distinct impression that Lucretia, shut away from the world, knew nothing about the duel planned for the following day, but he could have been wrong. Suky Price had supposed the same thing about her calm sister during the Humphrey Marshall duel seventeen years earlier. Benton stayed put when Clay’s company left and Lucretia took John up to bed. He wanted to stop this madness, but he could tell it was no use. Instead, he told Clay that their political differences were of no consequence under the shadow of the morrow. He wished him the best. Clay thanked him. They walked to the door, and Benton paused to look at Clay before leaving. It was almost midnight.³⁵

First thing the next morning, Benton rushed to Randolph’s rooms to implore him to stop this madness. Randolph listened impassively as Benton described the Clay family as he had found them the night before, Lucretia already stricken by grief over losing her daughters, the child curled on the sofa. Randolph again quietly said that Benton should not worry. Randolph sadly told Benton that fighting a duel on his native soil of Virginia was a hard choice aside from breaking Virginia’s law prohibiting it, but Randolph also said, strangely, that he would not dishonor the state by doing so. Then he made a promise: at the end of the day, Lucretia Clay would not be a widow or her children orphans. Benton now fully understood their first conversation about this affair. Randolph had never intended to shoot Henry Clay. Nobody would ever be able to revile him for wounding that frail, kind woman, or accuse him of hurting her innocent children. He would not violate Virginia’s law or disgrace its ground, because he would not fight back, and if Clay killed him, Randolph could think of no better place to die.³⁶

That afternoon, both parties set out for the rendezvous. The day was strange for the second week of April, spitting snow in the morning and turning to a dreary rain as the hours passed. In addition to Jesup, Clay’s close friend Senator Josiah Johnston of Louisiana accompanied him. Randolph crossed the Potomac with Tattnall and Congressman James Hamilton of South Carolina. Benton came too, trailing the Randolph party in the hope of saving his friend’s life. He found Randolph still in his carriage, exhibiting a disturbing turn of mind, cryptically explaining that circumstances had altered his earlier resolution. Benton could not account for it. He did not know that Randolph had learned that Clay was complaining that the short count for taking aim was insufficient. Clay was not a very good shot, and Randolph interpreted his adversary’s concern as a sign he meant to kill him. Randolph simply told Benton that he now planned to shoot Clay in the leg. He swept out of his carriage, strangely attired in a flowing white dressing gown. Benton’s eyes followed him. It was madness.³⁷

Everyone gathered on the open field. The seconds handed the antagonists their weapons and were reciting the rules a final time when Randolph absentmindedly pulled the hair trigger on his pistol. It discharged into the ground, the report startling everyone and causing confusion over the broken protocol. The seconds retreated to mull over the matter. Should they count this inadvertent shot to give Clay free aim at Randolph? Clay finally shouted at them from a distance, “It was an accident—I saw it—the shot is near his foot.”³⁸

The two men took their positions and prepared to exchange fire. At the signal, Randolph’s ball sent wood chips flying out of a stump behind Clay, an indication that he was deliberately firing low. Clay’s shot tore through Randolph’s trouser leg, missing flesh. Benton spoke up. Surely this was enough. There was no need for a second shot. Both men waved him off. With pistols reloaded, they stood ready for the second round. At the command to fire, Clay carefully raised his pistol and pulled the trigger. The ball hurtled toward Randolph, pierced his billowing clothing, and miraculously passed harmlessly on. Randolph pointed his pistol up and shouted, “I do not fire at you, Mr. Clay.” He pulled the trigger to send a sharp, harmless report skyward before striding forward with his hand outstretched. Clay met him halfway and exclaimed, “I trust in God, my dear sir, you are untouched: after what has occurred I would not have harmed you for a thousand worlds.”

Randolph said solemnly, “You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay.”

Clay replied, “I am glad the debt is not greater.”³⁹

Despite this happy conclusion, the spectacle of the American secretary of state and a United States senator shooting at each other in an open field struck many as inexcusably barbaric and became “the subject of very general animadversion in the publick prints.” One editorial asked, “Will not the President dismiss the duelling Secretary?”⁴⁰ In addition to the indignity of the event, Clay and Randolph in its aftermath did not even become friendly opponents. Instead, they soon reverted to their old antagonisms, mainly because Randolph could not control his combative reflexes. He resumed his attacks on Clay and Adams, refusing to stop even after he left Congress in 1828. By then, he was a complete Jacksonian.

THE 1828 PRESIDENTIAL campaign commenced the moment Adams won the vote in the House of Representatives. Ordinarily the Clay-Randolph duel would have given the opposition additional grenades to lob at the administration, but Andrew Jackson’s adherents reviewed their man’s record and wisely concluded that the less said about shooting people the better. They had plenty of other charges to level at Messrs. Adams and Clay. For their part, in only months, Adams and Clay had heard quite enough about their moral shortcomings.⁴¹

The result was arguably the most vicious presidential election in the history of American politics. Both sides played the political theater, clucking over their opponent’s mild peccadillo here, gasping in outrage over his inexcusable moral delinquency there. Some minor transgressions were true (Adams was aloof, Clay drank and gambled, Jackson had a bad temper), but the astonishing stories were apt to be complete fabrications. For the Jacksonians, the “Corrupt Bargain” took center stage in their campaign.

Jackson maintained a dignified silence for the public, but he was actually working behind the scenes with angry resolve to spoil administration policies. Most of all, though, he wanted to gather proof he hoped to “wield to [Clay’s] political, & perhaps, to his actual destruction.” For Andrew Jackson, the events of early 1825 were as personal as political, perhaps more so, because Jackson possessed a startling capacity for self-absorption and a feral instinct for survival. He plotted Clay’s destruction because he was certain that Clay, the “meanest, [sic] scoundrel, that ever disgraced the image of his god,” was plotting just as assiduously against him. Because Jackson was certain that Clay would use any means to his end—there was, Jackson thought, “nothing too mean or low for him to condescend to”—Jackson felt justified in doing the same.⁴²

Actually, Clay was too often ill and always too busy at the State Department to engage in anything nefarious. When rumors surfaced in Washington that Jackson finally had proof of the “Corrupt Bargain,” Clay was troubled that the issue was being given new life, but he was also confident that the facts could only vindicate him. This first serious attempt to produce proof of the Adams-Clay bargain involved assertions that a congressman had approached Jackson in the weeks before the House vote to tell Old Hickory that Henry Clay would support him, for a price. If Jackson would promise not to appoint Adams secretary of state, Clay would make Jackson president. The implication, of course, was that Clay was angling for the post. The conclusion of this tale not only tarnished Clay as a schemer but also burnished Jackson’s reputation for integrity and plain dealing. It described him as indignantly snapping that he would make no pledges to buy the presidency. The unspoken but clear message was that Adams had.⁴³

The story was not altogether a lie, which was the problem with it. The congressman was an unnamed mystery man in the earliest versions of the story, but Pennsylvanian James Buchanan had in fact approached Andrew Jackson. He had done so on his own, however, not at Clay’s request. The facts of this episode therefore provided no proof of Clay’s treachery, and that was why the story did not surface for more than a year. After Jackson left Washington in the spring of 1825, he exchanged friendly letters with Buchanan that contained no mention of their interview and certainly no mention of Clay’s having instigated it. Not until the summer and fall of 1826 did this tale appear, and by then it included the missing ingredient of Clay as the mastermind. Missourian Duff Green, a Calhoun partisan, had come to Washington in 1825 to buy and edit the United States Telegraph, a pro-Jackson paper partly financed by Old Hickory. In mid-1826, Green began claiming that a certain congressman had acted as Clay’s intermediary to Jackson in January 1825. Clay supporters branded Green a liar and demanded to know the identity of this congressman, left nameless in Green’s accounts. When the editor asked Buchanan to substantiate the story, the Pennsylvanian to his horror found himself thrust to the center of a very ugly controversy. Buchanan, of course, knew that he had acted on his own in approaching Jackson. It had been nothing more than a foolish attempt by a young congressman to become a Washington power broker with a ploy as brazen as it was immature. Now Jackson and his lieutenants wanted him to lie about it, to make it into something much more, something to destroy Henry Clay.⁴⁴

At first Buchanan stalled while he weighed the risks of flatly denying Green’s story, for he did not want to offend Jackson. Buchanan bought time by asking Green for more information, but he hoped that logic alone would show him to be a useless witness. After all, he had never been close to Clay and would have been an unlikely messenger for Clay to trust with a delicate mission. Buchanan for a time resorted to a plea of ignorance, but in the end he explicitly denied that he had acted as Clay’s agent in the meeting with Jackson. When the matter seemed to disappear at the end of 1826 with his name still left out of it, Buchanan breathed a sigh of relief. The Jacksonians, though, were only taking a breather.⁴⁵

In the spring of 1827, Jackson told Virginian Carter Beverley about the Buchanan interview, but now Jackson himself said he had believed at the time that Buchanan was doing Clay’s bidding. This was an extraordinary claim for several reasons. Aside from its coming more than two years after the event, a time during which he had never breathed a whisper about Clay’s using Buchanan, Jackson had to know that Buchanan flatly contradicted this version. But instead of the story’s collapsing under the weight of Buchanan’s denial, Jackson’s earnest recitation of it persuaded Beverley that it had to be true. He started spreading it around, in part to provoke a reaction from Clay, who at first dismissed the mounting clamor as just more mudslinging. Clay did not believe that Jackson would tell an outright lie.⁴⁶

By late June 1827, though, Clay knew that Jackson had done exactly that, this time by writing a letter to Beverley repeating the charge against Clay. Beverley was only waiting for Clay to deny the story before making public the name of the mysterious congressman who had approached Jackson for Clay in 1825. By now, Clay was more than eager to know the identity of this intermediary himself. He published in the Lexington Kentucky Reporter a letter not only denying a connection to any such person but demanding that his accusers produce him.⁴⁷

James Buchanan watched this controversy reemerge with growing dread. He had understood all too well Duff Green’s disconcerting invitation to lie, and now he anxiously waited for Jackson’s response to Clay’s public demand. The mail soon brought to Buchanan his worst nightmare, a letter from Andrew Jackson insisting that he corroborate Jackson’s version of the event. Jackson even had helpful suggestions to avoid the squeamish discomfort of telling an utter lie. Buchanan, Jackson said, did not have to say that he came directly from Clay. Instead, he could simply name one of Clay’s friends as having recruited him. Close upon the dispatch of this letter, Jackson unveiled Buchanan as Clay’s agent. Pressed to the wall by this audacious and preemptive tactic, Buchanan found his spine, after a fashion, by publicly and privately denying that he had been an intermediary for Clay or anyone else in 1825. Buchanan also strongly reasserted his unalloyed loyalty to Jackson, even though he had in the same breath essentially branded Andrew Jackson a liar.⁴⁸

Jackson’s brazen habit of claiming the moral high ground while stooping very, very low continued to surprise Clay, however, and sure enough, Old Hickory and his followers were soon boldly rebounding from the setback to insist that despite Buchanan’s clear declaration, their lie about his actions was true. Meanwhile, Clay had another of the alarming signs that there were plenty of scoundrels practicing the political art and more than enough fools to believe them. Rather than turning out his detractors, the 1826 elections for the Twentieth Congress had increased their number, giving Jacksonians a majority for the session that convened in December 1826. Especially mortifying for Clay, Jacksonians formed the bulk of the Kentucky delegation. It was on this solid political foundation that audacious men heedless of contradiction and dismissive of evidence constructed the attack on him. By 1827, it was a towering edifice of lies so rapidly built that Clay could not take the measure of it. The most he could fathom was how hurtful and disheartening baseless charges could be when coming from the mouths of former friends.⁴⁹

In addition to occasionally checking on Ashland, Clay visited Kentucky during the summers to shore up political support. Kentucky also had a restorative effect on his fragile health. Old friends boosted his sagging confidence, family gatherings at his mother’s home placed him among loved ones, and breathing Kentucky’s air lifted his spirits, all giving him strength to withstand the dispiriting quarrels in the capital. When he returned to Washington from his summer 1827 visit, however, Kentucky rather than the capital became the source of a barrage of attacks against him. They first hurt and then infuriated him.

Clay knew that some of his friends preferred Jackson and disapproved of his support for Adams. Many had joined the Kentucky Relief faction, but he had tried to keep these differences from disaffecting anyone. Francis Preston Blair and Amos Kendall were among this group. Both men saw rising fervor for Jackson as shaping the future of American politics, and eventually they led efforts in Kentucky to elect Jackson in 1828. As secretary of state, Clay awarded printers in each state lucrative contracts to publish federal documents and legislation, and Kendall counted on that plum in Kentucky. By 1826, however, Kendall was using his Argus of Western America to attack the Adams administration as well as to campaign for Andrew Jackson. Clay canceled the contracts.⁵⁰

This act merely completed a break long in the making, for Clay had outlived his usefulness for Amos Kendall. When he had asked Clay for a federal job at the end of 1825, pegging his salary needs at $1,500 annually, Clay could only offer a post that paid $1,000. Kendall refused it with an ominous grumble. In addition, Kendall owed Clay $1,500, an act of generosity on Clay’s part that became a fertile seedbed for resentment for Kendall, especially when he could not pay back the loan. Meanwhile, Jacksonians throughout the West saw Kendall’s newspaper as a valuable medium to disseminate pro-Jackson propaganda and anti-Adams attacks in the region. Kendall’s Kentucky friends arranged to repay Clay with a loan obtained from Martin Van Buren, who had also jumped on the Jackson bandwagon. Many of Clay’s friends had never liked Kendall, and almost none of them trusted him, one describing him as “a famished wolf,” and he now validated their worst suspicions. He mounted a merciless attack on Clay in the Argus, its central charge being that Clay had supported Adams only because Jackson refused to bargain.⁵¹

A lie repeated long enough becomes the truth, and Kendall’s accusation coming on the heels of Buchanan’s embarrassing denials was no coincidence. He asserted that he knew of letters written by Clay in early 1825 outlining his plans to make a deal with Adams, a clever claim that placed an impossible burden of proof on the accused. Clay, after all, could not definitively show that no such letters existed. Kendall demanded that every Clay correspondent release for publication all his letters. A political enemy even recruited neighborhood children to steal Clay’s letters from John J. Crittenden’s home. Kendall in the meantime thought he had stumbled on a much more promising lead. In the fall of 1827, he began focusing on the correspondence between Clay and Francis Preston Blair. At the time of the 1824 election, Clay and Blair had been close and regularly exchanged candid, often lighthearted letters on a variety of subjects. In the wake of the election, political differences had pushed them apart, though they remained cordial. Kendall wanted to see those letters.⁵²

Clay wrote one of his letters to Blair on January 8, 1825, just one day before his meeting with Adams. Clay had said nothing that even hinted at a deal between him and Adams, but he had made embarrassing remarks in jest, such as describing his decision to support Adams instead of Jackson as “a choice of evils,” a reference likely to strain his relationship with the president, possibly so far as to require his resignation.⁵³ To Clay’s relief, Blair refused to release the letter, citing the sanctity of private correspondence. Keeping the letter private, though, only fueled speculation that Clay had something harmful to hide. As the controversy became death by a thousand cuts, Clay concluded that the only way to stop the bleeding was to publish a massive body of irrefutable evidence. He began assembling it during the summer of 1827, and by the end of the year had numerous affidavits attesting to his determination to support Adams long before their January 9, 1825, meeting. He also had testimony that he had used no undue influence on any fellow congressmen and had insisted that every man vote his conscience. He released this Address to the Public in December 1827.⁵⁴

Friends assured Clay that the Address was a masterful creation certain to end all accusations of a “corrupt bargain,” but that thinking was beyond wishful. It was deluded. Clay’s publication did nothing to stop the attacks, and his exasperated friends in Kentucky took a step that actually made matters worse. Without his knowledge, Clay’s allies in the state legislature introduced a resolution declaring him innocent of all charges that he had entered a “corrupt bargain.” Rather than helping Clay, the resolution gave his enemies an opening to insist that the resolution required a thorough investigation of those charges. Clay later referred to it as his “trial” before the Kentucky legislature. It certainly resembled a criminal proceeding as witness after witness gave testimony, none of it pointing to anything shady but much of it crafted to achieve the most embarrassing effect. The legislature ultimately cleared Clay, but the hearings thoroughly aired all the unfounded accusations of wrongdoing, and their appearance in newspapers throughout the country gave them credibility. Proving guilt by omission is a legal impossibility in a court of law, but for public opinion it is the line of least resistance. Clay tried to make light of “the extraordinary proceeding,” quipping that “if I am to be hung,” he hoped he would “be duly notified of the time and place that I may present myself, in due form, to my executioner.”⁵⁵

Clay fought back best he could, publishing a supplement to his pamphlet in the summer of 1828, but as the presidential election neared, the sheer quantity and rising volume of accusations became overwhelming. Kendall was unyielding in his insistence that Blair and Clay publish the January 8 letter, and Clay’s friends began to suspect that Blair’s resistance had nothing to do with scruples but was instead a way to keep the issue before the public. Clay suggested that trustworthy individuals read the letter and attest to its contents, but Kendall twisted that plan by at last discovering what the letter said and blatantly misquoting it to support his accusations. Kendall even turned his request for a high-paying government job against Clay, saying that it had been an attempt by Clay to buy his silence. It did not matter that Clay could prove Kendall had importuned him for the job and had refused it not on principle but from greed. The only people who believed Clay were the ones he did not need to convince.⁵⁶

IN THE SPRING of 1827, Clay moved the family to the large and comfortable Decatur House on the northwest corner of President’s Park (now Lafayette Square). He leased the dwelling from Susan Decatur, the widow of the naval hero Stephen Decatur. In making the move, Clay started a brief tradition. Until 1833, Decatur House would be the unofficial residence of the secretary of state, chiefly for the same reason Clay had moved into it. The house’s spacious, cheerful rooms made entertaining easier. When Congress was in session, the administration held a Wednesday levee, and the Clays at Decatur House alternated weeks with John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams at the White House. Clay also wanted roomier accommodations for visiting family. Henry and Lucretia had endured much suffering, and they were never happier than when surrounded by their extended family. He often urged his son-in-law James Erwin to bring Anne to Washington for extended visits. Anne always cheered him up.⁵⁷

Clay needed cheering up. He organized Adams’s reelection effort for 1828, an election that one perceptive observer remarked would result in “great personal heart burnings.” Although he was convinced that presenting the American System to the people in a positive way would render Jackson’s invective irrelevant, the constant attacks on his and the president’s character kept the administration on the defensive. The campaign quickly descended to the lowest of political practices. Character assassination and fabricated smears became common coin in the newspapers and on speakers’ platforms.⁵⁸

Because the accusations against Adams had virtually no basis in fact, they were oddly more difficult to answer. Jacksonians snarled that Adams had raided the treasury to transform the Executive Mansion into a sumptuous palace, even purchasing a billiard table to indulge his hypocritical craving for low amusements like gambling. The part about the billiard table at least was accurate, for Adams did purchase one. He fastidiously reimbursed the government out of his own pocket, though, and he certainly did not turn the White House into a den of pool sharks. The fabrications against this impeccably moral man reached their nadir when New Hampshire journalist Isaac Hill spread the story that while U.S. minister to Russia, Adams had procured an American virgin for the carnal pleasure of Czar Alexander I.⁵⁹

When Jacksonians were not derogating Adams’s and Clay’s characters, they found fault with the administration’s failures, cloaking the fact that their obstructionism had foreordained those failures. Their stance nonetheless had the appearance of a program, even if only dimly ascertained as something other than the program of John Quincy Adams. By 1828, most voters were convinced that the Jacksonian program would be better, whatever it was.

Throughout his long career in politics and despite his considerable skill at framing issues, Clay never understood how this evolving dynamic worked. In 1828, he still believed a man’s qualifications for office were a supremely important issue, making Jackson’s fitness for the presidency a perfectly legitimate question; but Clay labored under the mistaken belief that telling the truth about Jackson would suffice. He encouraged his supporters to remind the country that Jackson was a “military chieftain,” code words for a man inclined to Caesarism. Jackson himself had made the claim plausible by overstepping his authority in New Orleans and during the Seminole War, but the heat of the campaign caused his opponents to do some overstepping themselves. The most controversial instance of that was the “Coffin Handbill,” a widely circulated broadsheet that excoriated Jackson for executing militiamen during the War of 1812 and killing Arbuthnot and Ambrister in Florida. Black coffins representing each of Jackson’s victims bordered the handbill.⁶⁰

Denouncing him for murderous rampages was not the worst of it, though. The nastiest charges against Jackson were salacious and regrettably involved his wife. The claim that he had married Rachel Donelson Robards before her divorce from her first husband had set tongues to wagging for years. Those foolish enough to snigger that he was an adulterer and she a bigamist took a very great risk indeed, for if Jackson could find them, he ruined them. One he had killed. In the campaign of 1828, however, the talk gained such wide currency that killing the gossips was impractical and trying to suppress the gossip impossible. The Adams press shamefully gloried in the story’s shabbiest features, neglecting to mention any extenuating circumstances such as Jackson’s mistaken belief that the divorce was final or that Rachel’s first husband was abusive. Instead, coarse newspapermen with ink-stained fingers and cluttered offices put the elderly Rachel Jackson into the middle of a fight she little understood. Devout to the point of extreme piety, she shrank in shock as her name repeatedly appeared in public print, a violation of the rule about a proper lady being mentioned only at her birth, her marriage, and her death.

No evidence links Clay to these attacks. In fact, he apparently disapproved of them, but that hardly pardoned his silence when they appeared. His friend Charles Hammond, a Cincinnati newspaper editor, was one of Rachel Jackson’s most vocal critics, and Clay did not try to stop Hammond nor did he condemn his columns. It was unfair that Jackson held Clay solely responsible for the defamation of his wife and family, and it is unlikely that Clay could have reined in heated partisans, but his inaction made him passively complicit in their actions. His silence was hardly golden.⁶¹

Jackson never shed his anger over this disreputable aspect of the 1828 campaign, and he never forgave Henry Clay for his supposed role in it. At the time, the potential for Jackson to lose his temper and convince the nation he was unqualified by temperament to be president greatly alarmed his friends. They strained to keep him calm while persuading him that reacting to the attacks would only encourage more, inviting the opposite of his desired result. They kept Jackson under wraps at the Hermitage and portrayed him as a virtuous patriot above the political fray. Henry Clay and his partner in crime John Quincy Adams were the sleazy wheeler-dealers willing to do or say anything to retain their ill-gotten power.⁶²

Controlling Jackson was just one sign of a highly efficient political organization that had already shown its shrewdness in 1824. Jacksonians were better organized, controlled more newspapers, and had a keener understanding of what worked and what failed in rough-and-tumble campaigns. Everyone still called himself a Republican in these years, but the Adams wing began to distinguish itself from Jacksonians by adopting the label National Republicans. Many of these nationalists thought themselves clever in branding Jacksonians “democrats,” but it indicated their blinkered vision. For them the word was a pejorative summoning the specter of unruly mobs, but in light of the country’s rising egalitarianism, it eventually became a badge of honor, and Jacksonians eventually called themselves “the Democracy” or “Democrats,” with a capital D.

Delaware and South Carolina were the only remaining states in which the legislature chose presidential electors, and Jacksonian state organizations were ready for the electoral revolution that portended. The new politics required reaching down to the local level and mobilizing one-gallused farmers, prosperous merchants, and local bankers, all wanting easy credit (not a big central bank curbing it) and upward mobility. Jackson clubs sprang up in this fertile ground of localism to throw barbecues, sponsor stump speeches, and promote politicians the voters knew and trusted.⁶³

New York senator Martin Van Buren joined the Jacksonian movement, a sure sign of its vitality and appeal. Van Buren was an organizational genius, a “Little Magician” when it came to putting together invincible coalitions. He had strong political ties in the North, where he ran New York’s powerful Albany Regency, and in the South, where many were still grateful for his supporting Georgian William H. Crawford, for whom Van Buren had tried to fashion a national organization in 1824. Four years later, his ability to forge an alliance between North and South made him invaluable to the Jacksonian movement. For his part, Van Buren saw in Andrew Jackson a man whose colossal popularity could transcend sectional concerns and regional differences, popularity that had politics’ fabled coattails, making election victories inevitable and ensuring majorities that could endure for years. Van Buren’s dream was to establish a muscular national political party that would be dominant for decades, possibly forever—or at least until the next election, the closest thing to forever in politics.⁶⁴

The Adams campaign was a pathetic, withered creature in comparison, not just bloodied but bowed by the relentless accusations of swaggering Jacksonians. Rather than cultivating its own grass roots, Adams and Clay conducted themselves according to the quiet rituals of the past. The administration’s friends wrote many letters, but mainly to one another, swapping information and cheering on political elites in states essential for victory—what are now called battleground states. Virginia, Clay’s birthplace, was one of those states, and he tried to energize his extensive network there to counter Jackson’s almost irresistible allure. Yet Clay aimed at a select group of prominent Adams supporters rather than at common voters. A plan to persuade former presidents James Madison and James Monroe to appear on the Virginia ballot as Adams electors, in essence securing their endorsements, fell through. Neither believed Andrew Jackson was fit for the presidency, but both also believed their obligations to that office prohibited them from demeaning it with ordinary politicking. Clay’s disappointment was palpable, but he most certainly understood and later, upon reflection, he would applaud their reserve.⁶⁵

For Jacksonians, the dignity of the presidency was something to employ rather than to preserve. They claimed to have the support of another former president from Virginia, more easily secured because he was dead. Thomas Jefferson had passed away on July 4, 1826, but his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph published an account of Jefferson’s last days claiming that on his deathbed the Sage of Monticello had admitted to never trusting Henry Clay because of his bad character. Furthermore, Randolph said that Jefferson had declared his admiration for Andrew Jackson, who he said should be the next president. Over the course of twenty years, Randolph had become increasingly irrational, often to the point of derangement, making life at Monticello grim and edgy, especially for his wife, Jefferson’s beloved daughter Martha. Randolph flew into a rage when Clay expressed doubt that Jefferson had disapproved of him as a person. Randolph set out for Washington to kill Clay, madly racing partway before he cooled down.

In short, he was a demented special pleader whose story about Jefferson’s sentiments was dubious on its face. Anyone who knew the family was aware that Jefferson could hardly bring himself to exchange “good mornings” with his son-in-law, let alone open his mind to him on significant political issues. By the time Jackson’s people in Virginia had taken up this wretched man’s story to brandish it as the Jeffersonian gospel on the election of 1828, Randolph too had died. His widow, Martha, their eldest son, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and friends of the family knew the tale to be a lie. Jeff Randolph privately told Clay that he was certain his grandfather had neither denounced Clay nor endorsed Jackson. Yet he also implored Clay to spare the family the shame of publically repudiating the deceased Randolph. Clay agreed and braced for the devastating blow this Jacksonian tactic dealt the administration in Virginia. More important than politics, after all, was protecting Thomas Jefferson’s heirs, good people impoverished by their patriarch’s spendthrift ways, left only with their pride. Clay’s choice to leave that pride intact required his silence. This time, it was golden.⁶⁶

THE LAST PIECE of the campaign puzzle for Jacksonians was to deal the administration a devastating legislative blow. During the 1827–28 session of the Twentieth Congress, they launched a plan to dismantle the one advantage the administration had in important manufacturing states: its adherence to a protective tariff. In July 1827, a pro-tariff convention had met at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, essentially a gathering of Clay supporters that some suspected the administration had instigated to show support for higher duties. When manufacturers clamored for Congress to shield American goods from foreign competition with a more robust protective tariff, the House Committee on Manufactures accordingly reported a bill in March 1828. Designed to placate factory owners in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, the bill was mostly the work of Jacksonians marshaled by Van Buren, who had devised a way for them to have their legislative cake and eat it too. The bill deliberately ignored the interests of New England, where Jackson expected to receive few votes. The Jacksonian plan called for southerners to block all efforts to appease New England, aware that southern opposition to tariffs in general would join with Yankee anger over this one in particular to kill it in a final vote. Jacksonians would nevertheless be able to point to their attempt to help Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York while basking in the approval of the South and pointing to Adams’s stronghold of New England as the principal culprit in defeating the bill.⁶⁷

The plan played out perfectly in the House of Representatives, where all amendments were rejected and the bill passed in a narrow vote. It then went to the Senate, but there the unexpected happened. The plan’s architect, Martin Van Buren, shifted course, threw southerners overboard, and allowed amendments that secured New England’s support. The combination of Mid-Atlantic manufacturing states, the West, and New England easily passed the amended tariff in both the Senate and the House, and Adams signed it on May 19.

Regarding it as grievously injurious to their regional economy, southerners called the Tariff of 1828 the “Tariff of Abominations,” a warning about weighty repercussions in the future. At the time, though, the Little Magician had never been more adroit in pulling off this legislative sleight of hand. Van Buren hoped to diminish the administration’s appeal in the West by showing that Jacksonians would literally protect the region’s interests. As for the South, Van Buren knew that just as New England would vote againstJackson as much as for Adams, the South would vote against Adams as much as for Jackson. Southerners, in short, had no other place to go, and Van Buren was not above selling them out while whispering assurances that the Jackson administration would set matters right. That they believed him bore out the masterful strategy of having Jackson be all things to all people.⁶⁸

Henry Clay watched Van Buren’s magic with ambivalence. Before Congress convened, he had heard rumors that the Jacksonians planned to hatch this scheme, but he was at a loss about how to counter it. Instructing administration supporters to oppose the measure would undermine the basic principle of protectionism, a significant element of the American System. That left him little choice but to support the Tariff of 1828, but he did so quietly and tepidly, as though swept up in an irresistible tide. Van Buren had never been more agile.⁶⁹

And Henry Clay had seldom been sicker. Every winter he suffered from colds or influenza, sometimes both, and his chronic digestive problems sometimes laid him low. Grief had apparently begun to afflict Lucretia with a fragile stomach as well. Clay frequently visited mineral springs in Virginia and Kentucky to take the waters as well as dose himself with something stronger. (A resort’s 1827–28 register at Virginia’s White Sulphur Springs still listed in 1911 Clay’s unpaid charge of twelve cents for a mint julep.) He went home during summers, hoping to restore his strength, but he never really rested on these trips, for he had become desperate over the election. He used his travels to meet with groups, however small, to make speeches, however repetitive, and to dispatch letters, however futile, to every corner of the country. By the spring of 1828, unrelenting toil and his usual physical ailments convinced Clay that he was dying.⁷⁰

His changed appearance shocked a friend who had not recently seen him. He was “miserable; care-worn, wrinkled, haggard, and wearing out.”⁷¹ A numbness in his left leg gradually moved toward his hip, baffling physicians as to its cause. Disregarding their warnings, Clay continued his grueling pace, a stooped figure whose noticeable limp made him seem decades older than his fifty years. Meeting with his secretary of state now always made Adams sad, for Clay’s ashen face and sunken body were scarred monuments to the remorseless “obloquy, slander, and persecution” of the previous three years.⁷² In April, Clay finally surrendered to his declining health. Announcing that “he must go home and die or get better,” he tried to resign, but Adams urged him to consult other physicians. Clay traveled to Philadelphia to see the renowned doctors Philip Physick and Nathaniel Chapman. They tapped, prodded, stared, and finally concluded what was wrong with him.

He was not dying, they said. Instead, as Adams had suspected, Clay was suffering from nervous exhaustion. He listened with lighthearted relief to the diagnosis and its cure: a better diet, prescribed medicines, regular exercise, and above all, rest.⁷³ His friends had been more than concerned, and when Clay returned to Washington, Josiah Johnston was typical in laughing aloud when he heard the news. If Jackson “should be elected,” he chuckled to Clay, “he will unintentionally do for you what your friends Can not advise—He will save your life by relieving you from the Cares of State.”⁷⁴

As much as he could in the home stretch of the campaign, Clay followed his doctors’ orders. He went to Kentucky, campaigning along the way, but then vacationed at the Virginia Springs. He continued his remarkable level of correspondence, sending Adams a steady stream of advice in letters made urgent by Clay’s discovery of treachery within the administration. The situation was the result of Adams’s quaint attitude about federal patronage. Jacksonians repeatedly charged that Adams regularly fired qualified officeholders to replace them with political hacks, yet Adams had actually been more than scrupulous about appointments. Though swamped by supporters wanting jobs, Adams never weighed political loyalty when making appointments. Correspondingly, he felt it was inappropriate to remove someone from his post simply because he differed with the administration.

Clay had always thought Adams’s scruples about this matter were ill judged. The overarching tolerance of dissent within the administration weakened its policies and made it vulnerable in elections. Postmaster General John McLean was a steadfast partisan of John C. Calhoun, who was running for reelection to the vice presidency on Jackson’s ticket. McLean had been openly using the Post Office’s extensive patronage to place Jacksonians in positions of influence throughout the country, and Clay’s travels uncovered for him that many federal officials not only differed with the administration but were actively working to defeat it. Clay urged Adams to fire McLean, but Adams refused.⁷⁵

Clay would have dreaded returning to Washington, except for the anticipation of rejoining his family. Decatur House was full of family. Anne and James had come to Washington that spring with their two children. Julia Duralde Erwin, named for John Clay’s wife, was two and a half, a Christmas Eve baby. Little Henry Clay Erwin, born the previous June, met his grandparents for the first time. Anne had always claimed a special place in Clay’s heart, and now that she was his only daughter, he particularly doted on her. Something about Anne, the tilt of her head, the arch of an eyebrow, her laughter, her turn of phrase, all made her a grand companion. She was much like him in her unshakable optimism and ready wit, but nothing narcissistic tinged his regard for her, because in truth he regarded her as a better version of himself. Anne had his humor, but she also had her mother’s gentleness and her aunt Nancy’s sparkle, an appropriate gift from her namesake. Not only Clay noticed that rooms brightened when Anne entered them, and one could always find Anne at parties by following the laughter. As Clay traveled for his health, she wrote him letters full of funny stories and clever anecdotes.⁷⁶

Clay was still at White Sulphur Springs when he received the troubling news that Anne’s little girl, Julia, was sick with a fever. Other members of the family, including Lucretia and James, also became ill, but as they recovered, Julia faded away. Always a frail child, she did not have enough fight in her and died that August. Clay tried to console Anne and James, but he knew words were of little use. He diverged from his travel plans to meet them along the road when they started for their home in Tennessee early that fall, a somber reunion and sad farewell. Clay returned to a Decatur House still subdued by Julia’s death, a sharp contrast to Washington’s jittery excitement over the looming election.⁷⁷

Clay had worked tirelessly for more than three years to reelect John Quincy Adams, but his efforts had fallen short of what successful campaigning now required. He had persisted in the misguided conviction that if Adams used the patronage properly (Adams had ignored the advice) or chose the right running mate (Clay volunteered), the people would elect the aloof Puritan over the popular general. When Clay returned to Washington from his summer trip, his optimism had waned under the obvious signs of Jackson’s inevitability. Adams had accepted his fate months before. At last, Clay was resigned to it.⁷⁸

Kentucky elected Adams supporter Thomas Metcalfe governor, but it gave both houses of the legislature to Jacksonian majorities and went for Jackson in the presidential contest, a result worse than anyone could have imagined and especially mortifying to Clay. Nationally, Jackson won almost 56 percent of the popular vote and amassed an Electoral College margin of 178 to 83 over Adams.⁷⁹

Clay firmly believed that the Jacksonian smears had been the deciding factor in the election, but it was understandable that he would exaggerate that aspect of the campaign.⁸⁰ The relentless program of defamation had obviously hurt Adams and Clay, but much of the country simply balked at the prospect of the economic nationalism that Clay and Adams espoused, and Clay found it hard to fathom that reluctance. He always would. On the other hand, Jackson’s victory filled Clay with a smoldering dread. He believed that the worst said about this man was all too true. Jackson had not only lied but had been caught in that lie, and the great majority of voters had not cared. “No greater calamity [than Jackson’s election] has fallen to our lot since we were a free people,” he said with great sadness. Something beyond politics, beyond elections, beyond speeches and policies, was terribly wrong with the country. Clay trembled for it.⁸¹

He allowed himself a brief interlude of self-pity and anger before resolving to banish both. He set himself to jollying dejected friends out of their dark moods as well, for Clay likened sadness to sickness, and the only effective treatment was a smart joke and a bright outlook. He told Frank Brooke not to be discouraged, that they all should embrace “hope and fortitude,” that the country would survive.⁸² When Hezekiah Niles, the editor of the influential Niles’ Weekly Register, named his newborn son Henry Clay Niles, Clay said with mock solemnity that the name was not a good indication “of your discretion at this time.”⁸³ He assured friends that he would continue to fight for those principles to which he had “dedicated my public life,” just not right away. The prospect of going home for an extended stay was more than appealing. Lucretia would be there with him as always, and his Ashland would become an oasis. In the weeks after the election, as his friends had laughingly predicted, Clay’s health improved.⁸⁴

Over the next three months, he wrapped up business in the State Department and prepared to go home, while Adams did the same in the White House. Adams offered Clay a seat on the Supreme Court, but he had no taste for the bench, and it was likely fortunate that he declined in any case. At Clay’s suggestion, Adams nominated Clay’s protégé John J. Crittenden, but the Senate mulishly refused to consider confirmation until the new Congress convened. The Senate then let the nomination die.⁸⁵

The final session of the Twentieth Congress at least meant parties would liven up the capital, and the administration gamely resumed the Wednesday levees at Decatur House and Executive Mansion on alternating weeks. The Clays also hosted lively dinners, giving him a chance to gauge people’s views about the incoming administration. He was already contemplating the best way to oppose the radical changes that Jackson and his compliant congressional majorities were sure to enact. His friends assumed that Clay would lead the opposition to the administration, even if he had to do so from Kentucky.⁸⁶

The impending arrival of the president-elect from Tennessee filled Washington with considerable anticipation that only increased when news arrived that Rachel Jackson was dead, a victim, it was said, of her being dragged through the newspapers during the campaign, rough treatment that had broken her heart at the time and had finally stopped it. Jackson now had even more reason to wade into his political enemies, smiting them with biblical vengeance for killing his wife. On less conspicuous levels, many government workers nervously looked for other employment.⁸⁷

Biblical retribution, in fact, seemed the order of the day in Washington, a Babylon of corruption according to Jacksonians. Adams and his cabinet took violently ill. Some secretaries could not leave their houses for days, and the Clays became shut-ins, Lucretia falling sick as well. Margaret Bayard Smith came calling one evening to judge their recuperation and found Lucretia sitting quietly in a chair watching over her sleeping husband on the sofa. When Clay blinked awake, he found both women sitting quietly, gazing at him. Margaret thought he looked very ill and very sad. This close friend suddenly realized she had been allowed to see something extraordinary, something only the Clay family, and possibly only Lucretia, knew as the truth. Like people of a later time who discovered that the laughing Abraham Lincoln was actually a man of deep melancholy, Margaret Bayard Smith had a revelation. When Henry Clay turned his face to the world, he wore a “mask of smiles.”⁸⁸

The last administration levee occurred at the Clays’, and he donned an especially cheerful mask for the occasion. Jackson had already arrived in town, and as office seekers crowded his rooms at the National Hotel, rumors flew around town about his cabinet selections. The attendees at the Clays’ party, all Adams and Clay supporters, gossiped the night away about the abysmal choices Old Hickory was sure to make.⁸⁹ As usual, Clay enlivened the gathering, moving from group to group, laughing as if lighthearted. Always “free and easy in his conversation,” Clay could put even strangers at ease to “discuss topics with as much freedom as if he were an old acquaintance.”⁹⁰ Lucretia stood smiling, graciously receiving her guests, though still so ailing “she could scarcely stand.”⁹¹ She had reason to smile, though, for the prospect of going home made her so cheerful that she had stopped wearing mourning clothes and instead wore the fashionable Parisian gowns that Nancy had insisted on sending in the darkest days of her sister’s grief.⁹²

Margaret Smith attended this last official gathering with regret. She dreaded the prospect of her two dear friends leaving the capital, and she pondered the possibility that she would never see them again. During their friendship of more than twenty years, she had developed an enduring admiration for Henry Clay, and his fate seemed terribly unfair. She studied him as he mingled smiling among his guests, “so courteous and gracious, and agreeable, that every one remarked it and remarked he was determined we should regret him” (that is, miss him). Her eyes blurred with tears, and she moved to a quiet corner to compose herself. Clay was suddenly at her side asking what was wrong. She was just sad to see them go, she said. With her hand “pressed in his without speaking, his eyes filled with tears and with an effort he said, ‘We must not think of this, or talk of such things now.’” He put his handkerchief to his eyes before turning back to the crowd of people. As he walked away from Margaret, he was again wearing his mask of smiles.⁹³

THE CABINET DECIDED not to attend Jackson’s inauguration, a choice that suited Adams and Clay just fine. They saw no reason to give their symbolic imprimatur to a man who had called them corrupt political schemers. With the exception of Clay’s replacement, Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s cabinet choices were a singularly undistinguished group of political cronies with few qualifications for office. They all had contempt for Henry Clay, though, and that raised them in Jackson’s estimation. Jackson named Clay’s former protégé William T. Barry as postmaster general, an appointment that was particularly insulting. A political ally described Barry as “not fit for any station which require[d] great intellectual force or moral firmness,” but he had lost against Metcalfe in the Kentucky governor’s race and was made postmaster general as a reward for supporting Jackson in Kentucky.⁹⁴

Jackson’s selection of his close friend John H. Eaton as secretary of war caused the most gossip. Eaton’s qualifications were suspect, but his recent marriage to Margaret O’Neal Timberlake was the real cause of the parlor chatter that gripped the capital. The former Mrs. Timberlake had married Eaton on New Year’s Day 1829, only a few months after the suicide of her husband. Many believed that she had been Eaton’s mistress before Timberlake’s death, and ribald as well as scatological jokes at the Eatons’ expense were soon making the rounds. Marrying the Timberlake widow, said one, was like using a chamber pot and then putting it on one’s head. The ladies of Washington, however, found the marriage no laughing matter. When Floride Calhoun and cabinet members’ wives refused to socialize with Mrs. Eaton, they clashed with Andrew Jackson, who so vociferously defended Margaret Eaton that he allowed “the Eaton malaria” to become “the Peggy Eaton Affair” and disrupt the first two years of his administration. Jackson reflexively blamed Clay for all the trouble, even though the women doing the snubbing were married to Clay’s political enemies. After Clay left town, Jackson cast around for someone else to blame, finally settling his wrath on his vice president, Floride Calhoun’s husband. Clay’s supporters found it all highly amusing.⁹⁵

Clay would have found it amusing as well, but another family crisis had him and Lucretia racked with worry: Thomas Hart Clay was in a Philadelphia jail because of his bad debts in the city. The situation humiliated them while branding Thomas as completely dissolute, possibly beyond redemption. He was almost twenty-six, but neither the study of law nor the opening of his practice had steadied him. He drank heavily, squandered money gambling, and now had seemingly hit bottom. Clay tried to handle the situation from Washington, but neither he nor Lucretia could sleep as they churned with worry over their wretched son and cringed over the shame he was bringing on the family. After some difficulty in tracking down all the debts and fines his son had incurred, Clay paid them and arranged to have Thomas conveyed to Lexington. The prospect of having to deal with him at Ashland made the idea of their homecoming less cheery.⁹⁶

Clay and Adams said their farewells the day before Jackson’s inauguration, Clay observing the formality of tendering his resignation during the courtesy call. Considering their rocky start in Ghent fifteen years earlier, they had worked well together, and Clay expressed his hope that they could stay in touch in retirement.⁹⁷

Neither of them was present the next day when Washington saw an unparalleled spectacle as Andrew Jackson became the seventh president of the United States. Thousands upon thousands of Old Hickoryites, those one-gallused farmers, prosperous merchants, and shade tree bankers among them, had flooded the town to celebrate the inauguration, and they descended on the presidential “Palace” to sample the delicacies prepared for the elite of Washington society. The “majesty of the people” in all its rambunctious and boisterous enthusiasm shocked an official Washington accustomed to the staid dignity of Madison and Monroe and the taciturn reserve of John Quincy Adams. While official Washington frowned, the crowds roared, and Henry Clay could whisper, Told you so.⁹⁸

Instead of attending the inauguration, Clay was busy with yet another family crisis. As with Thomas’s ordeal, this one was embarrassing. When they moved their household in 1825, the Clays had brought the house slaves Aaron and Charlotte Dupuy to Washington. Aaron was slightly younger than Clay and had been with him from the time of his youth in the Slashes of Hanover County. Elizabeth and Hal Watkins took Aaron Dupuy with them to Kentucky, and subsequently Clay made Aaron his manservant. The two usually traveled together. Lottie, as everyone called her, had been born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where one James Condon, a tailor by trade, had purchased her in Cambridge, Maryland, while she was still a child. Condon took her to Kentucky, where she eventually met and married Aaron, who enlisted Lucretia to persuade Clay to buy her. Clay did so in 1806, even though Condon apparently took advantage of the situation to demand a high price. Lucretia brought Lottie into the house at Ashland to help with the children. She and Aaron along the way had two children of their own, Charles and Mary Anne.⁹⁹

While they were in Washington, Clay twice allowed Lottie to visit her family on the Eastern Shore, and he later suspected that these trips were the root of all the subsequent trouble. As the family prepared to return to Kentucky after the election of 1828, Lottie announced that she would not go. Insisting that she was free, she filed a petition on February 19, 1829, in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia. The deed shocked and angered Clay. Though he had remained active in the American Colonization Society, Lottie’s stance called into question his sincerity about gradual emancipation. Clay actually had worked to obtain the freedom of a number of slaves and had been instrumental in freeing and repatriating the African prince Abd Rahman Ibrahima, sold into slavery after his capture in battle. Now he was convinced that Lottie had become the pawn of his political enemies, who even in victory were leaving no stone unturned in their quest to discredit him. True enough, Lottie Dupuy’s suit obviously had not been filed in a vacuum, and it did damage to Clay’s reputation as a benevolent master.¹⁰⁰

Nevertheless, Clay decided to fight the court battle. Lottie and the people supporting her suit had made him angry, and he was concerned that the suit would encourage other political opponents to adopt the same tactics in order to embarrass their adversaries. Whether his enemies were in fact behind Lottie’s legal action never became known, but if embarrassing him was their aim, they succeeded. He appeared petty and vindictive as he retained lawyers on the Eastern Shore and in Washington to gather depositions and refute Lottie’s claims.

Clay believed those claims were groundless. Lottie’s suit cited two reasons for granting her freedom. She stated that her mother in Maryland had been free, thus making her free as well. Clay easily proved that Lottie’s mother had not been freed until years after Lottie’s birth. The other reason stemmed from a promise by James Condon to free her after she had put in years of faithful service, a pledge that Lottie said should now be honored because she had fulfilled her part of the bargain. The court ultimately dismissed that claim as well, ruling that Condon had canceled his pledge by selling Lottie without any conditions.

Adjudicating these questions took time, and under instructions from the court, Clay left Lottie at Decatur House when the family left Washington for Ashland. His attorneys handled the case to its conclusion while Lottie worked as a domestic servant for the new secretary of state, who was also the new tenant of Decatur House, Martin Van Buren. After Lottie lost her bid for freedom, Clay placed her in Anne Erwin’s home in New Orleans to help with her children before bringing her back to Ashland. She seems to have borne him no ill will and instead resumed her role in the Clay family without complaint, suggesting that his suspicions about the real authors of this controversy were true. He bore her no ill will either. In 1840, Clay freed Lottie and her daughter Mary Anne in gratitude for her devoted care of his children and grandchildren. She apparently remained at Ashland with Aaron, who had by then turned over his duties as Clay’s servant to their son, Charles Dupuy.¹⁰¹

In addition to the embarrassing complications posed by Thomas and Lottie, parting from friends in Washington saddened Clay and Lucretia as much as the prospect of returning home gladdened them. The possible consequences of the election also continued to worry Clay. At a farewell dinner at the Mansion Hotel, Clay warned the assembled crowd about the potential for tyranny arising in this new administration. He cited the example of Latin American republics succumbing to military dictatorship as a somber warning of what could happen under Andrew Jackson. He also praised the five hundred thousand citizens who had voted for Adams, evidence “of virtue, of intelligence, of religion, and of genuine patriotism … unsurpassed … in this or any other country.”¹⁰² It sounded like a campaign speech.

It was.