Mr. BAYLY, of Virginia.—Mr. Speaker: Although I have been all my life a political opponent of Mr. Clay, yet from my boyhood I have been upon terms of personal friendship with him. More than twenty years ago, I was introduced to him by my father, who was his personal friend. From that time to this, there has existed between us as great personal intimacy as the disparity in our years and our political difference would justify. After I became a member of this house, and upon his return to the senate, subsequent to his resignation in 1842, the warm regard upon his part for the daughter of a devoted friend of forty years’ standing, made him a constant visitor at my house, and frequently a guest at my table. These circumstances make it proper that, upon this occasion, I should pay this last tribute to his memory. I not only knew him well as a statesman, but I knew him better in most unreserved social intercourse. The most happy circumstance, as I esteem it, of my political life has been, that I have thus known each of our great congressional triumvirate.
I, sir, never knew a man of higher qualities than Mr. Clay. His very faults originated in high qualities. With as great self-possession, with greater self-reliance than any man I ever knew, he possessed moral and physical courage to as high a degree as any man who ever lived. Confident in his own judgment, never doubting as to his own course, fearing no obstacle that might lie in his way, it was almost impossible that he should not have been imperious in his character. Never doubting himself as to what, in his opinion, duty and patriotism required at his hands, it was natural that he should sometimes have been impatient with those moredoubting and timid than himself. His were qualities to have made a great general, as they were qualities that did make him a great statesman, and these qualities were so obvious, that during the darkest period of our late war with Great Britain, Mr. Madison had determined, at one time, to make him general-in-chief of the American army.
Sir, it is but a short time since the American congress buried the first one that went to the grave of that great triumvirate. We are now called upon to bury another. The third, thank God! still lives, and long may he live to enlighten his countrymen by his wisdom, and set them the example of his exalted patriotism. Sir, in the lives and characters of these great men, there is much resembling those of the great triumvirate of the British Parliament. It differs principally in this: Burke preceded Fox and Pitt to the tomb. Webster survives Clay and Calhoun. When Fox and Pitt died, they left no peer behind them. Webster still lives, now that Calhoun and Clay are dead, the unrivalled statesman of his country. Like Fox and Pitt, Clay and Calhoun lived in troubled times. Like Fox and Pitt, they were each of them the leader of rival parties. Like Fox and Pitt they were idolized by their respective friends. Like Fox and Pitt, they died about the same time, and in the public service; and, as has been said of Fox and Pitt, Clay and Calhoun died with ‘their harness upon them.’ Like Fox and Pitt—
‘With more than mortal powers endow’d,
How high they soared above the crowd!
Theirs was no common party race,
Jostling by dark intrigue for place—
Like fabled gods their mighty war
Shook realms and nations in its jar.
Beneath each banner proud to stand