HENRY CLAY.
Upon the slab beneath the sarcophagus is this simple inscription:—
"I can, with unbroken confidence, appeal to the Divine Arbiter for the truth of the declaration, that I have been influenced by no impure purpose, no personal motive,—have sought no personal aggrandizement, but that in all my public acts I have had a sole and single eye, and a warm devoted heart, directed and dedicated to what in my best judgment I believed to be the true interests of my country."
It is not a declaration which goes home to the heart as that simple recognition of the Christian religion which his compeer, Daniel Webster, directed should be placed above his grave in the secluded churchyard at Marshfield, but Mr. Clay was a remarkable man. Of all Americans who have lived, he could hold completest sway of popular assemblies. Hating slavery in his early life, he at last became tolerant of its existence. He cast the whole trouble of the nation upon the Abolitionists. In some things he was far-sighted; in others, obtuse. In 1843 he addressed a letter to a friend who was about to write a pamphlet against the Abolitionists, giving him an outline of the argument to be used. Thus he wrote:—
"The great aim and object of your tract should be to arouse the laboring classes in the Free States against abolition. Depict the consequences to them of immediate abolition. The slaves being free, would be dispersed throughout the Union; they would enter into competition with the free laborer, with the American, the Irish, the German; reduce his wages; be confounded with him, and affect his moral and social standing. And as the ultras go for both abolition and amalgamation, show that their object is to unite in marriage the laboring white man and the laboring black man, and to reduce the white laboring man to the despised and degraded condition of the black man.
"I would show their opposition to colonization. Show its humane, religious, and patriotic aims, that they are to separate those whom God has separated. Why do the Abolitionists oppose colonization? To keep and amalgamate together the two races in violation of God's will, and to keep the blacks here, that they may interfere with, degrade, and debase the laboring whites. Show that the British nation is co-operating with the Abolitionists, for the purpose of dissolving the Union."[5]
This was written by a reputed statesman, who was supposed to understand the principles of political economy. The slaves being made free would enter in competition with the free laborer. But has not the free American laborer been forced to compete through all the years of the past with unrequited slave labor? Without inquiring into the aims and purposes of the Abolitionists,—what they intended to do, and how they were to do it,—Mr. Clay accepted the current talk of the day, and shaped his course accordingly. That letter will read strangely fifty years hence. It reads strangely now, and goes far to lower our estimate of the real greatness of one who for half a century was the idol of a great political party,—whose words were taken as the utterances of an oracle. But ideas and principles have advanced since 1843. We stand upon a higher plane, and are moving on to one still higher.
Returning to the hotel, I fell into conversation with a Presbyterian minister, who began to deplore the war.
"We should conduct it," said he, "not as savages or barbarians, but as Christians, as civilized beings, on human principles."
"In what way would you have our generals act to carry out what you conceive to be such principles?"