Great crowds had come from Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and elsewhere to hear the speech, which occupied two days. He said: "War and dissolution of the Union are identical; they are convertible terms; and such a war!... If the two portions of the confederacy should be involved in civil war, in which the effort on the one side would be to restrain the introduction of slavery into the new territories, and, on the other side, to force its introduction there, what a spectacle should we present to the contemplation of astonished mankind! An effort to propagate wrong! It would be a war in which we should have no sympathy, no good wishes, and in which all mankind would be against us, and in which our own history itself would be against us."
For six months the measure was debated. Clay came daily to the Senate chamber, so ill he could scarcely walk, but determined to save the Union. "Sir," said the grand old man, "I have heard something said about allegiance to the South. I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe any allegiance.... Let us go to the fountain of unadulterated patriotism, and, performing a solemn lustration, return divested of all selfish, sinister, and sordid impurities, and think alone of our God, our country, our conscience, and our glorious Union.... If Kentucky to-morrow unfurls the banner of resistance unjustly, I never will fight under that banner. I owe a paramount allegiance to the whole Union,—a subordinate one to my own State. When my State is right, when it has a cause for resistance, when tyranny and wrong and oppression insufferable arise, I will then share her fortunes; but if she summons me to the battlefield, or to support her in any cause which is unjust against the Union, never, never will I engage with her in such a cause!"
Finally the Compromise Bill of 1850 was substantially adopted. Among its several provisions were the admission of California as a free State, the abolition of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia, the organization of the Territories of New Mexico and Utah without conditions as to slavery, and increased stringency of the Fugitive Slave Laws.
Mr. Clay's hopes as to peace seemed for a few brief months to be realized. Then the North, exasperated by the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Bill, by which all good citizens were required to aid slave-holders in capturing their fugitive slaves, began to resist the bill by force. Clay could do no more. He must have foreseen the bitter end. Worn and tired, he went to Cuba to seek restoration of health.
In 1852 he was urged to allow his name to be used again for the presidency. It was too late now. He returned to Washington at the opening of the thirty-second Congress, but he entered the Senate chamber but once. During the spring, devoted friends and two of his sons watched by his bedside. He said: "As the world recedes from me, I feel my affections more than ever concentrated on my children and theirs."
The end came peacefully, June 29, 1852, when he was seventy-six. On July 1 the body lay in state in the Senate chamber, and was then carried to Lexington. In all the principal cities through which the cortege passed, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and others, thousands gathered to pay their homage to the illustrious dead, weeping, and often pressing their lips upon the shroud. On July 10, when the body, having reached Lexington, was ready for burial, nearly a hundred thousand persons were gathered. In front of the Ashland home, on a bier covered with flowers, stood the iron coffin. Senators and scholars, the rich and the poor, the white and the black, mourned together in their common sorrow. The great man had missed the presidency, but he had not missed the love of a whole nation. The "mill-boy of the Slashes," winsome, sincere, had, unaided, become the only and immortal Henry Clay.
