Mr. Clay was confessedly the best presiding officer that any deliberative body in America has ever known, and none was ever more severely tried. The intensity and bitterness of party feeling during the earlier portion of his Speakership cannot now be realized except by the few who remember those days. It was common at that time in New England town-meetings, for the rival parties to take opposite sides of the broad aisle in the meeting-house, and thus remain, hardly speaking across the line separation, from morning till night. Hon. Josiah Quincy, the Representative of Boston, was distinguished in Congress for the ferocity of his assaults on the policy of Jefferson and Madison; and between him and Mr. Clay there were frequent and sharp encounters, barely kept within the limits prescribed by parliamentary decorum. At a later period, the eccentric and distinguished John Randolph, the master of satire and invective; and who, though not avowedly a Federalist, opposed nearly every act of the Democrat Administrations of 1801-16, and was the unfailing antagonist of every measure proposed or supported by Mr. Clay, was a thorn in the side of the Speaker for years. Many were the passages between them in which blows were given and taken, whereof the gloves of parliamentary etiquette could not break the force: the War, the Tariff, the early recognition of Greek and South American Independence, the Missouri Compromise, &c. &c., being strenuously advocated by Mr. Clay and opposed by Mr. Randolph. But of these this is no place to speak. Innumerable appeals from Mr. Clay's decisions, as Speaker, were made by the orator of Roanoke, but no one of them was ever sustained by the House. At length, after Mr. Clay had left Congress, and Mr. Randolph been transferred to the Senate, a bloodless duel between them grew out of the Virginian's unmeasured abuse of the Kentuckian's agency in electing J.Q. Adams to the Presidency; a duel which seems to have had the effect of softening, if not dissipating Randolph's rancor against Mr. Clay. Though evermore a political antagonist, his personal antipathy was no longer manifested; and one of the last visits of Randolph to the Capitol, when dying of consumption, was made for the avowed purpose of hearing in the Senate the well-known voice of the eloquent Sage of Ashland.
On the floor of the House, Mr. Clay was often impetuous in discussion, and delighted to relieve the tedium of debate, and modify the sternness of antagonism by a sportive jest or lively repartee. On one occasion, Gen. Alexander Smythe of Virginia, who often afflicted the House by the verbosity of his harangues and the multiplicity of his dry citations, had paused in the middle of a speech which seemed likely to endure for ever, to send to the library for a book from which he wished to note a passage. Fixing his eye on Mr. Clay, who sat near him, he observed the Kentuckian writhing in his seat as if his patience had already been exhausted. "You, sir," remarked Smythe addressing the Speaker, "speak for the present generation; but I speak for posterity." "Yes," said Mr. Clay, "and you seem resolved to speak until the arrival of your auditory."
Revolutionary pensions were a source of frequent passages between eastern and western members; the greater portion of those pensions being payable to eastern survivors of the struggle. On one occasion when a Pension Bill was under discussion, Hon. Enoch Lincoln (afterwards Governor of Maine) was dilating on the services and sufferings of these veterans, and closed with the patriotic adjuration, "Soldiers of the Revolution! live for ever!" Mr. Clay followed, counselling moderation in the grant of pensions, that the country might not be overloaded and rendered restive by their burden, and turning to Mr. Lincoln with a smile, observed—"I hope my worthy friend will not insist on the very great duration of these pensions which he has suggested. Will he not consent, by way of a compromise, to a term of nine hundred and ninety-nine years instead of eternity?"
A few sentences culled from the remarks in Congress elicited by his death, will fitly close this hasty daguerreotype of the man Henry Clay.
Mr. Underwood (his colleague) observed in Senate that "his physical and mental organization eminently qualified him to become a great and impressive orator. His person was tall, slender and commanding. His temperament, ardent, fearless, and full of hope. His countenance, clear, expressive, and variable—indicating the emotion which predominated at the moment with exact similitude. His voice, cultivated and modulated in harmony with the sentiment he desired to express, fell upon the ear with the melody of enrapturing music. His eye beaming with intelligence and flashing with coruscations of genius. His gestures and attitudes graceful and natural. These personal advantages won the prepossessions of an audience even before his intellectual powers began to move his hearers; and when his strong common sense, his profound reasoning, his clear conceptions of his subject in all its bearings, and his striking and beautiful illustrations, united with such personal qualities, were brought to the discussion of any question, his audience was enraptured, convinced and led by the orator as if enchanted by the lyre of Orpheus.
"No man was ever blessed by his Creator with faculties of a higher order than Mr. Clay. In the quickness of his perceptions, and the rapidity with which his conclusions were formed, he had few equals and no superiors. He was eminently endowed with a nice discriminating taste for order, symmetry, and beauty. He detected in a moment every thing out of place or deficient in his room, upon his farm, in his own or the dress of others. He was a skilful judge of the form and qualities of his domestic animals, which he delighted to raise on his farm. I could give you instances of the quickness and minuteness of his keen faculty of observation, which never overlooked any thing. A want of neatness and order was offensive to him. He was particular and neat in his handwriting and his apparel. A slovenly blot or negligence of any sort met his condemnation; while he was so organized that he attended to, and arranged little things to please and gratify his natural love for neatness, order, and beauty, his great intellectual faculties grasped all the subjects of jurisprudence and politics with a facility amounting almost to intuition. As a lawyer, he stood at the head of his profession. As a statesman, his stand at the head of the Republican Whig party for nearly half a century, establishes his title to pre-eminence among his illustrious associates.
"Mr. Clay was deeply versed in all the springs of human action. He had read and studied biography and history. Shortly after I left college, I had occasion to call on him in Frankfort, where he was attending court, and well I remember to have found him with Plutarch's Lives in his hands. No one better than he knew how to avail himself of human motives, and all the circumstances which surrounded a subject, or could present themselves with more force and skill to accomplish the object of an argument.
"Bold and determined as Mr. Clay was in all his actions, he was, nevertheless, conciliating. He did not obstinately adhere to things impracticable. If he could not accomplish the best, he contented himself with the nighest approach to it. He has been the great compromiser of those political agitations and opposing opinions which have, in the belief of thousands, at different times, endangered the perpetuity of our Federal Government and Union.
"Mr. Clay was no less remarkable for his admirable social qualities, than for his intellectual abilities. As a companion, he was the delight of his friends; and no man ever had better or truer. No guest ever thence departed, without feeling happier for his visit."
Mr. Hunter of Virginia (a political antagonist) following, observed: "It may be truly said of Mr. Clay, that he was no exaggerator. He looked at events through neither end of the telescope, but surveyed them with the natural and the naked eye. He had the capacity of seeing things as the people saw them, and of feeling things as the people felt them. He had, sir, beyond any other man whom I have ever seen, the true mesmeric touch of the orator,—the rare art of transferring his impulses to others. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, came from the ready mould of his genius, radiant and glowing, and communicated their own warmth to every heart which received them. His, too, was the power of wielding the higher and intenser forms of passion, with a majesty and an ease, which none but the great masters of the human heart can ever employ."