Part 25

Previously to this period, however, Mr. King had been recalled to public life. At the commencement of the war of 1812 with Great Britain, Mr. King, though disapproving both of the time of declaring, and of the inefficiency in conducting, the war, and reposing little confidence either in the motives or the abilities of the administration, did nevertheless feel it his duty, the sword being drawn, to sustain, as best he might, the cause of his country. Among the first, and for a time most discouraging results of the war, was the stoppage of specie payments by all the banks south of New England. The panic in New-York unavoidably was very great; and very much depended upon the course to be taken by its banks and its citizens, as to the effect to be produced upon the national cause and the national arm, by the suspension of payments. In this emergency, appealed to by his former fellow-citizens, Mr. King went to the city, and at the Tontine Coffee House, at a general meeting called to deliberate on the course to be taken by the community in regard to the banks, and in general in regard to the rights and duties alike, of creditors and debtors under the circumstances, he made a speech to the assembled multitude, in which, after deploring the circumstances which had forced upon the banks the necessity of suspension, he went on to show that it was a common cause, in which all had a part, and where all had duties. That the extreme right of the bill-holder, if enforced to the uttermost against the banks, would aggravate the evil to the public, although possibly it might benefit a few individuals; while, on the other hand, good to all, and strength and confidence to the general cause, would result from a generous forbearance, and mutual understanding that, if the banks on their part would restrict themselves within the limits as to issues and credits recognized as safe previous to the suspension, the community at large on their part, might, and possibly would continue to receive and pass the bills of the banks as before, and as though redeemable in coin. He urged with great power and earnestness the duty of fellow-citizens to stand shoulder to shoulder in such an emergency,--when a foreign enemy was pressing upon them, and when, without entering into the motives or causes which led to the war, about which men differ,--all Americans should feel it as their first and foremost obligation to stand by their country. The particular province of those he addressed was not so much to enlist in the armed service of the country, as to uphold its credit, and thus cherish the resources which would raise and reward armies; and if New-York should on this occasion be true to her duty--which also he plainly showed to be her highest interest--the clouds of the present would pass away, and her honor and her prosperity, with those of the nation of which she formed part and parcel, would be maintained and advanced. The effect of this address was decisive, and to an extent quite unprecedented in any commercial community under such circumstances; confidence was restored, and the course of business went on almost unruffled and undisturbed.

In 1813, Mr. King, after a lapse of seventeen years from his former service as a Senator of the United States, was again chosen by the Legislature of the State of New-York, as one of its Senators in Congress; and from the moment he resumed his seat in the Senate, he took leave, for the remainder of his life, of the undisturbed enjoyments of his rural abode; for a large portion of his time was necessarily spent at Washington, it being part of his notion of duty, never to be remiss in attendance upon, or in the discharge of, any trust committed to him. Still, his heart was among his plantations and his gardens, and even when absent, he kept up a constant correspondence with his son and his gardener, and always returned with fond zest to this quiet home.

In 1819, Mrs. King, whose health had been long declining, died, and was buried with all simplicity in the yard of the village church; where together they long had worshipped, and which stood on ground originally forming part of Mr. King's property. At the time of her death, all the children had left the paternal roof, and settled in life with their own families around them; and solitude, therefore, embittered the loss to Mr. King of such a companion. And she was eminently fitted by similarity of tastes and acquirements, to share with her husband the cares and the pleasures of life, as well as its weightier duties. She was in an especial manner a lover of the country, and had cultivated the knowledge which lends additional charms to the beauties and the wonders of the vegetable creation. Over all these beauties, her death cast a pall; and although he repined not, it was easy to see how deep a sorrow overshadowed his remaining years. Yet he nerved himself to the discharge of his public duties with unabated zeal and fidelity; and when re-elected in 1820 to the Senate, was punctual as always at his post, and earnest as ever in fulfilling all its requirements. His own health, however, before so unshaken, began to fail; and at the closing session of 1825, Mr. King, in taking leave of the Senate, announced his purpose of retiring from public life; having then reached the age of seventy years, of which more than one half had been spent in the service of his country, from the period when he entered the Continental Congress in 1784, to that in which he left the Senate of the United States in 1825. But John Q. Adams, who had become President, pressed upon Mr. King the embassy to England. His enfeebled health and advanced age induced him at once to decline, but Mr. Adams urged him to refrain from any immediate decision, and to take the subject into consideration after he should return home, and then determine. Recalling with lively and pleasant recollection the years of his former embassy to England, and hoping assuredly to be able--if finding there the same fair and friendly reception before extended to him--to benefit his country by the adjustment of some outstanding and long-standing points of controversy between the two nations; influenced too, in a great degree, by the opinion, of eminent physicians, that for maladies partaking of weakness, such as he was laboring under, a sea-voyage could hardly fail to be beneficial, Mr. King, rather in opposition to the wishes of his family, determined to accept the mission,--first stipulating, however, that his eldest son, John A. King, should accompany him as Secretary of Legation. It is proof of the strong desire of the then administration to avail of Mr. King's talents and character, and of the hope of good from his employment in this mission, that an immediate compliance with this request was made; and the gentleman who had been previously nominated to, and confirmed by, the Senate, as Secretary of Legation, having been commissioned elsewhere, Mr. John A. King was appointed Secretary of Legation to his father.

The voyage, unhappily, aggravated rather than relieved the malady of Mr. King; his health, after he reached England, continued to decline, and he therefore, after a few months' residence in London, asked leave to resign his post and come home. He returned accordingly, but only to die. He languished for some weeks, and finally, having been removed from Jamaica to the city for greater convenience of attendance and care, he died in New-York, on the 29th of April, 1827.

As with Mrs. King, so with him--in conformity with the unaffected simplicity of their whole lives--were the funeral rites at his death. Borne to Jamaica, which for more than twenty years had been his home, the body was carried to the grave by the neighbors among whom he had so long lived,--laid in the earth by the side of her who had gone before him, to be no more separated for ever; and a simple stone at the head of his grave, records--and the loftiest monument of art could do no more--that a great and a good man, having finished his course in faith, there awaits the great Judgment. Children, and grandchildren, have since been gathered in death around these graves, which lie almost beneath the shadow of trees planted by Mr. King, and within sight of the house in which he lived.

It was desired, if possible, to introduce a glimpse of the pretty village church into the engraving, but the space was wanting.

Mr. John A. King, the eldest son of Rufus King, now occupies the residence of his father, and keeps up, with filial reverence and inherited taste, its fine library, and its fine plantations. The engraving presents very accurately the appearance of the house; the closely shaven lawn in its front, and the noble trees which surround it, could find no adequate representation in any picture.

=Clay.=

CLAY.

The Dryads are plainly no American divinities. A reverence for trees and groves, for woods and forests, is not an American passion. As our fathers and many of ourselves have spent the best of our strength in wrestling with, prostrating, using up the leaf-crowned monarchs, gray with the moss of age ere Columbus set foot on Cat Island, to expect us to love and honor their quiet majesty, their stately grace, were like asking Natty Bumpo or Leather-stocking to bow down to and worship Pontiac or Brandt, as the highest ideal of Manhood. An uncouth backwoodsman lately stated our difficulty with immediate reference to another case, but the principle is identical: "When I was a boy," said he, plaintively, "it was the rule to love rum, and hate niggers; now they want us to hate rum, and love niggers: For my part, I stick to the old discipline." And so it were unreasonable to expect the mass of Americans now living, to go into heroics over the prospect of a comely and comfortable mansion, surrounded by a spacious lawn or "opening" of luxuriant grass, embracing the roots and lightly shaded by the foliage of thrifty and shapely trees.

Why is it, then, that the American's pulse beats quicker, and his heart throbs more proudly as, walking slowly and thoughtfully up a noble avenue that leads easterly from Lexington,--once the capital and still the most important inland town in Kentucky,--he finds the road terminating abruptly in front of a modest, spacious, agreeable mansion, only two stories in height, and of no great architectural pretensions, and remembers who caused its erection, and was for many years its owner and master?

That house, that lawn, with the ample and fertile farm stretching a mile or more in the distance behind them, are hallowed to the hearts of his countrymen by the fact, that here lived and loved, enjoyed and suffered, aspired and endured, the Orator, the Patriot, the Statesman, the illustrious, the gifted, the fiercely slandered, the fondly idolized Henry Clay.

A friend who visited Ashland as a stranger in May, 1845, thus writes of the place and its master:

"I have at last realized one of my dearest wishes, that of seeing Mr. Clay at Ashland. I called on him with a friend this morning, but he was absent on his farm, and Charles, his freed slave, told us he would not be at home till afternoon; so we returned to Lexington, and, at five P.M., we retraced our steps to Ashland. Mr. Clay had returned; and meeting us at the door, took hold of our hands before I could even present a letter of introduction, and made us welcome to his home. His manners completely overcame all the ceremonies of speech I had prepared. We were soon perfectly at home, as every one must be with Henry Clay, and in half an hour's time we had talked about the various sections of the country I had visited the past year, Mr. Clay occasionally giving us incidents and recollections of his own life; and I felt as though I had known him personally for years.

"Mr. Clay has lived at Ashland forty years. The place bore the name when he came to it, as he says, probably on account of the ash timber, with which it abounds; and he has made it the most delightful retreat in all the West. The estate is about six hundred acres large, all under the highest cultivation, except some two hundred acres of park, which is entirely cleared of underbrush and small trees, and is, to use the words of Lord Morpeth, who staid at Ashland nearly a week, the nearest approach to an English park of any in this country. It serves for a noble pasture, and here I saw some of Mr. Clay's fine horses and Durham cattle. He is said to have some of the finest in America; and if I am able to judge I confirm that report. The larger part of his farm is devoted to wheat, rye, hemp, &c., and his crops look most splendidly. He has also paid great attention to ornamenting his land with beautiful shade trees, shrubs, flowers, and fruit orchards. From the road which passes his place on the northwest side, a carriage-road leads up to the house, lined with locust, cypress, cedar, and other rare trees, and the rose, jasmine, and ivy, were clambering about them, and peeping through the grass and the boughs, like so many twinkling fairies, as we drove up. Mr Clay's mansion is nearly hidden from the road by the trees surrounding it, and is as quiet and secluded, save to the throng of pilgrims continually pouring up there to greet its more than royal possessor, as though it were in the wilderness."

Here let the house, the lawn, the wood, the farm, pass, if they will, from the mind. They are all well in their way, and were doubtless well adapted in his time to smooth the care-worn brow, and soothe the care-fraught breast of the lofty, gallant, frank, winning statesman, who gave and still gives them all their interest. Be our thoughts concentrated on him who still lives, and speaks, and sways, though the clay which enrobed him has been hid from our sight for ever, rather than on the physical accessories which, but for him, though living to the corporal sense, are dead to the informing soul.

For it was not here, in this comfortable mansion, beneath those graceful, hospitable, swaying trees, that THE GREAT COMMONER was born and reared; but in a rude, homely farm-house,[19] which had any man given five hundred dollars for, he would have been enormously swindled, unless he paid in Continental money,--in a primitive, rural, thinly peopled section of Hanover County (near Richmond), Virginia; where his father, Rev. John Clay, a poor Baptist preacher, lived, and struggled, and finally died, leaving a widow and seven young children, with no reliance but the mother's energies and the benignant care of the widow's and orphan's God. This was in 1782, near the close of the Revolutionary War, when so much of the country as had not been ravaged by the enemy's forces, had been nearly exhausted by our own, and by the incessant exactions of a protracted, harassing, desolating, industry-paralyzing civil war. The fifth of these seven children was Henry, born on the 12th of April, 1777, who remained in that humble home until fourteen years of age, when his mother, who had married a second time, being about to remove to Kentucky, placed him in a store at Richmond, under the eye of his oldest brother, then nearly or quite of age, but who died very soon afterwards, leaving Henry an orphan indeed. He was thus thrown completely on his own exertions, when still but a child, and without having enjoyed any other educational advantages than such as were fitfully afforded by occasional private schools, in operation perhaps two or three months in a year, and kept by teachers somewhat ruder than the log tenement which circumscribed their labors. Such was all the "schooling" ever enjoyed by the ragged urchin, whose bright summer days were necessarily given to ploughing and hoeing in the corn-fields, barefoot, bareheaded, and clad in coarse trowsers and shirt, and whose daily tasks were diversified by frequent rides of two or three miles to the nearest grist-mill, on a sorry cob, bestrode with no other saddle than the grain-bag; whence many of his childhood's neighbors, contrasting, long afterward, the figure he cut in Congress, at Ghent, in Paris or London, with that which they had seen so often pass in scanty garb, but jocund spirits, on these family errands, recalled him to mind in his primitive occupation as _The Mill-Boy of the Slashes_, by which _sobriquet_ he was fondly hailed by thousands in the pride of his ripened renown.

Forty-five years after his childish farewell to it, Henry Clay stood once more (in 1840), and for the last time, in the humble home of his fathers, and was rejoiced to find the house where he was born and reared, still essentially unchanged. Venerable grandames, who were blooming matrons in his infancy, had long since indicated to their sons and daughters the room wherein he was born; and the spring whence the family had drawn their supplies of water wore a familiar aspect, though the hickory which formerly shaded it, and was noted for the excellence of its nuts, had passed away. Over the graves of his father and grandparents the plough had passed and repassed for years, and he only fixed their position by the decaying stump of a pear-tree, which had flourished in his childhood, and often ministered to his gratification. Beyond these, nothing answered to the picture in his memory, and he would not have recognized the spot, had he awoke there unconscious of the preceding journey. Familiar groves and orchards had passed away, while pines which he left shrubs, just dotting with perennial green the surface of the exhausted "old fields," unhappily too common throughout the Southern States, had grown up into dense and towering forests, which waved him a stately adieu, as he turned back refreshed and calmed, to the heated and dusty highway of public life.

The boy Henry, spent five years in Richmond,--only the first in the store where his mother had placed him; three of the others in the office of Mr. Clerk-in-Chancery Peter Tinsley; the last in that of Attorney-General Brooke. From Mr. Tinsley, he learned to write a remarkably plain, neat, and elegant hand,--more like a schoolmistress's best, than a great lawyer and politician, and this characteristic it retained to the last. From Mr. Tinsley, Mr. Brooke, and perhaps still more from the illustrious Chancellor Wythe, who employed him as his amanuensis, and repaid him with his friendship and counsel, young Clay derived his knowledge of the principles of Common Law, whereof he was, all his life, a devoted champion. At length, in November, 1797, when still lacking some months of his legal majority, he left Richmond and Virginia, for the location he had chosen--namely, the thriving village of Lexington, in the then rapidly growing Territory of Kentucky--the home of his eventful adult life of more than half a century. How he here was early recognized and honored as a Man of the People, and rapidly chosen (1803) member of the Legislature, once (1806) appointed to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate, and soon after (1809) elected out of, and by the legislature, to fill another and longer vacancy in that same dignified body; chosen in 1811 a Member of the more popular branch of Congress, and, immediately on his appearance on its floor, elected its Speaker--probably the highest compliment ever paid to a public man in this country--appointed thence (1814) a Plenipotentiary to Göttingen (afterwards changed to Ghent), to negotiate a Treaty of Peace with Great Britain, which was signed near the close of that year; re-elected, immediately on his return, to a seat in the House, and to the Speakership, which he retained thenceforth (except during a temporary retirement from public life, rendered necessary by heavy pecuniary losses as an indorser), down to March 3d, 1825, when he finally retired from the House on being appointed Secretary of State by President John Q. Adams; quitting this station for private life on the Inauguration of President Jackson in 1829, returning to the Senate in 1831, and continuing one of its most eminent and influential members till 1842, when he retired, as he supposed for ever; but was returned, by an unanimous vote of the Legislature, in 1849, and dying a Senator in Washington on the 29th of June, 1852, aged more than seventy-five years, of which more than half had been spent in the public service, and nearly all, since his majority, in active, ardent, anxious familiarity with public men and public measures,--this is no place to set forth in detail. The merest glance is all we can give to the public, official career of Henry Clay.

For our business is not here with Tariffs, Banks, Vetoes, and Presidential contests or aspirations. Our theme is the _man_ Henry Clay,--what he was intrinsically, and in his daily dealings with, and deportment toward, his fellow-beings. If there be a better mode of developing his character than Plutarch's, we have not now time to ascertain and employ it, so we must e'en be content with that.

A tall, plain, poor, friendless youth, was young Henry, when he set up his Ebenezer in Lexington, and, after a few months' preliminary study, announced himself a candidate for practice as an attorney. He had not even the means of paying his weekly board. "I remember," he observed in his Lexington speech of 1842, "how comfortable I thought I should be, if I could make £100 Virginia money, per year; and with what delight I received my first fifteen shilling fee. My hopes were more than realized. I immediately rushed into a lucrative practice."

Local tradition affirms that the Bar of Lexington, being unusually strong when Mr. Clay first appeared thereat, an understanding had grown up among the seniors, that they would systematically discountenance the advent of any new aspirants, so as to keep the business remunerating, and preserve each other from the peril of being starved out. It was some time, therefore, before young Clay obtained a case to manage in Court; and when he did appear there, the old heads greeted the outset of his argument with winks, and nods, and meaning smiles, and titters, intended to disconcert and embarrass him. So they did for a few minutes; but they soon exasperated and roused him. His eyes flashed, and sentence after sentence came pouring rapidly out, replete with the fire of eloquence and genius. At length, one of the old heads leaned across the table and whispered to another, "_I think we must let this young man pass._" Of course they must!--the case was as plain as the portliest of noses on the most rubicund of faces. Henry Clay passed, _nem. con._, and his position and success at that Bar were never more disputed nor doubted.

General Cass, in his remarks in the Senate on the occasion of Mr. Clay's death, has the following interesting reminiscence:

"It is almost half a century since he passed through Chilicothe, then the seat of government of Ohio, where I was a member of the Legislature, on his way to take his place in this very body, which is now listening to this reminiscence, and to a feeble tribute of regard from one who then saw him for the first time, but who can never forget the impression he produced by the charms of his conversation, the frankness of his manner, and the high qualities with which he was endowed."

That an untaught, portionless rustic, reared not only in one of the rudest localities, but in the most troublous and critical era of our country, when the general poverty and insecurity rendered any attention to personal culture difficult, almost impossible, and graduating from a log school-house, should have been celebrated for the union in his manners, of grace with frankness, ease with fascination, is not unworthy of remark. Of the fact, those who never knew Mr. Clay personally, may have abundant attestations, which none others will need.