A Biography of Henry Clay, the Senator from Kentucky / Containing Also, a Complete Report of All His Speeches; Selections From His Private Correspondence; Eulogies in the Senate and House; and a Poem, by George D. Prentice, Esq.

by Unknown

On the sixteenth of January, Mr. Clay discussed the question of expunging from the records of the senate, for 1834, his resolution censuring general Jackson for removing the deposits unconstitutionally; Mr. Benton having introduced a resolution requiring its erasure. In his speech, Mr. Clay so blended indignant invective, sarcasm, scorn, humor, and argument, as to make it one of the most withering rebukes ever administered. ‘What patriotic purpose,’ said he, ‘is to be accomplished by this expunging resolution? Can you make that not to be, which has been? Can you eradicate from memory, and from history, the fact, that in March, 1834, a majority of the senate of the United States passed the resolution which excites your enmity? Is it your vain and wicked object to arrogate to yourself that power of annihilating the past, which has been denied to omnipotence itself? Do you intend to thrust your hands into our hearts, and to pluck out the deeply rooted convictions which are there? Or is it your design merely to stigmatize us? You cannot stigmatize us.

‘Ne’er yet did base dishonor blur our name.’

‘Standing securely upon our conscious rectitude, and bearing aloft the shield of the constitution of our country, your puny efforts are impotent, and we defy all your power. Put the majority of 1834 in one scale, and that by which this expunging resolution is to be carried in the other, and let truth and justice in heaven above and on earth below, and liberty and patriotism, decide the preponderance.

‘What patriotic purpose is to be accomplished by this expunging resolution? Is it to appease the wrath, and heal the wounded pride, of the chief magistrate? If he be really the hero that his friends represent him, he must despise all mean condescension, all grovelling sycophancy, all self-degradation and self-abasement. He would reject with scorn and contempt, as unworthy of his fame, your black scratches and your baby lines, in the fair records of his country.’

The expunging resolution, however, passed, and thus the just resolution of Mr. Clay was stricken from the national records, but not from the record of memory; there will it live until her functions cease, the memento of a patriotic purpose to place the signet of a nation’s displeasure upon as unprincipled an act as any ruler of that nation ever perpetrated.

In the autumn of 1836, the presidential election took place, which resulted in elevating Mr. Van Buren to the chair of the chief magistracy, by one hundred and seventy of the two hundred and ninety-four electoral votes. At the time he entered upon the discharge of his official duties, the situation of the country was deplorable in the extreme. She was reaping the bitter fruits, which Mr. Clay had again and again predicted general Jackson would bring back from his experimental crusade and thrust down her throat. From Maine to Florida, her population were eating them, and gnashing their teeth with rage, when they contrasted their present lamentable condition, with what it was during the halcyon and equitable administration of Mr. Adams. Then, there was every thing to admire, and nothing to deprecate; now, there was nothing to admire and every thing to deprecate; then, the most devoted patriot, as he cast his eyes over his country, discovered abundant evidence of health, and the existence of few evils, and those medicable, or, if not, easily patible; now, wounds and bruises and putrescence, disfiguring it, he beheld at every stage of his survey, and ills of untold magnitude and enormity, for which no remedy could be devised. But there is no necessity for specification; it is sufficient to say, that when general Jackson took up the reins of government, he found the country prosperous and happy, and that when he laid them down, its condition was just the reverse. For every good which he found, its opposite evil had been substituted; for solvency, insolvency; for confidence, suspicion; for credit, discredit; for a sound and safe currency, one, if possible, worse than unsound and unsafe; for honesty, dishonesty; for purity, corruption; for justice, injustice; for frankness and candor, intrigue and duplicity; for order, disorder; for quiet, turmoil; for fidelity, infidelity; for enterprise, indolence; for wealth, poverty; for patient industry, wild speculation; for republican simplicity, haughty aristocracy; for wisdom, folly; for health, disease; for happiness, misery; for hope, despair; and for life, death. This substitution, Mr. Clay clearly foresaw would be made; he predicted it, and forewarned the country of it. Such was the condition of the country, when Mr. Van Buren attempted to ‘walk in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor.’ Soon after his inauguration, he issued his proclamation, ordering an extra session of congress, to commence the first Monday in September. Pursuant to this, congress met to prescribe some mode of relief. In his message, the president recommended the sub-treasury system for the deposit,transfer, and disbursement of the public revenue. This was the engrossing topic of the session, and which Mr. Clay combated and denounced unsparingly. He detected in it, and lucidly exposed, that which was calculated, not only to perpetuate the excesses and abuses under which the land was then groaning, but to superinduce fresh ones. He saw in it the grand link of that chain, destined to bind the resources and patronage of the government to the car of party, which for eight long years Mr. Van Buren’s predecessor had been so busily engaged in forging. Mr. Clay’s speech on this occasion is an inimitable specimen of close argumentative reasoning. After exposing the defects, absurdities, and danger of the sub-treasury scheme, he declared his decided conviction, that the only practicable measure for restoring a sound, safe, and uniform currency to the United States, was a properly organized United States bank, but that it would be unwise to propose such an institution, until the conviction of its necessity should become permanently impressed upon the minds of the people. The sub-treasury bill passed the senate by a vote of twenty-five to twenty, but in the house was laid on the table by a vote of one hundred and twenty to one hundred and seven.

Petitions for the erection of a national bank poured into congress incessantly, quite too fast to please the administration, which began to tremble for the safety of its darling projects. Mr. Wright, from the committee on finance, moved that the prayer of the memorialists ought not to be granted. Mr. Clay said, if the honorable senator persisted in his opposition, he should feel constrained to move to strike out all after resolved, and substitute ‘that it will be expedient to establish a bank of the United States, whenever it shall be manifest, that a clear majority of the people of the United States desire such an institution.’

On the nineteenth of February, 1838, Mr. Clay once more addressed the senate in opposition to the sub-treasury plan, in one of the longest speeches he ever delivered, and made a complete exposé of the ulterior intentions of the present and previous administrations, which were, to subvert the whole banking system, and build upon its ruins a mighty government, treasury bank, to be mainly organized and controlled by the executive department.

During the session, Mr. Clay, in presenting a petition for the establishment of a national bank, communicated some of his own views in relation to such an institution. He desired, first, that its capital should not be enormously large—about fifty millions of dollars—and its stock divided between the general government, the states, and individual subscribers; secondly, that in its organization, reference should be had to public and private control, public and private interests, and to the exclusion of foreign influence; thirdly, that a portion of its capital should be set apart, and placed in permanent security, adequate to meet any contingencythat might arise in connection with the issues of the bank; fourthly, perfect publicity in relation to all its affairs; fifthly, that its dividends should be limited to a certain per centum; sixthly, a prospective reduction in the rate of interest to six, and, if practicable, to five per centum; seventhly, that there should be a restriction upon the premium demanded upon post notes and checks used for remittance, to about one and a half per centum as the maximum between the most remote points of the union, thereby regulating domestic exchanges; eighthly, that effective provisions should be made against executive interference with the bank, and of it with the elections of the country. Such a public banking institution Mr. Clay advocated, from the conviction that it would perform every thing requisite in furnishing a good currency. The question of its constitutionality, he considered as satisfactorily settled by the fact, that the people during forty years had cherished the bank, that it had been approved by Washington, the father of his country, by Madison, the father of the constitution, and by Marshall, the father of the judiciary.

The subject of abolition was introduced into the senate, which Mr. Clay approached, and freely discussed, although urged to avoid it by his friends. He considered it, as it might be expected he would, in the true spirit of philanthropy, benevolence, and patriotism. His sentiments were conceived and uttered in such a noble, liberal, and magnanimous manner, as to elicit expressions of approbation and of commendation even from both anti and pro slavery men. Mr. Calhoun admitted the correctness of his sentiments, and the entire security which their adoption would promise to the union. As a matter in course, the enemies of Mr. Clay strove to cause the impression to be received, that, in his thus advocating the right of petition, he was actuated by motives of a personal nature, by a desire to render himself popular with abolitionists. His advocacy of this right did render him popular, not only with that class of individuals, but with all who revere and love the immutable and eternal principles of truth and justice, and rejoice to see the outpourings of sympathy towards a worthy object.