AND
THE FUNERAL SERMON,
PREACHED IN THE CAPITOL, JULY 1, 1852,
BY THE REV. C. M. BUTLER, CHAPLAIN OF THE SENATE.
SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 1852.
AFTER the reading of the Journal, Mr. Underwood rose, and addressed the senate as follows:
MR. PRESIDENT: I rise to announce the death of my colleague, Mr. Clay. He died at his lodgings, in the National Hotel of this city, at seventeen minutes past eleven o’clock yesterday morning, in the seventy-sixth year of his age. He expired with perfect composure, and without a groan or struggle.
By his death our country has lost one of its most eminent citizens and statesmen; and, I think, its greatest genius. I shall not detain the Senate by narrating the transactions of his long and useful life. His distinguished services as a statesman are inseparably connected with the history of his country. As Representative and Speaker in the other House of Congress, as Senator in this body, as Secretary of State, and as Envoy abroad, he has, in all these positions, exhibited a wisdom and patriotism which have made a deep and lasting impression upon the grateful hearts of his countrymen. His thoughts and his actions have already been published to the world in written biography; in Congressional debates and reports; in the Journals of the two Houses; and in the pages of American history. They have been commemorated by monuments erected on the wayside. They have been engraven on medals of gold. Their memory will survive the monuments of marble and the medals of gold; for these are effaced and decay by the friction of ages. But the thoughts and actions of my late colleague have become identified with the immortality of the human mind, and will pass down from generation togeneration, as a portion of our national inheritance, incapable of annihilation, so long as genius has an admirer or liberty a friend.
Mr. President: The character of Henry Clay was formed and developed by the influence of our free institutions. His physical, mental, and moral faculties were the gift of God. That they were greatly superior to the faculties allotted to most men, cannot be questioned. They were not cultivated, improved, and directed by a liberal or collegiate education. His respectable parents were not wealthy, and had not the means of maintaining their children at college. Moreover, his father died when he was a boy. At an early period, Mr. Clay was thrown upon his own resources, without patrimony. He grew up in a clerk’s office in Richmond, Virginia. He there studied law. He emigrated from his native state, and settled in Lexington, Kentucky, where he commenced the practice of his profession before he was of full age.