Clay never made it to Springfield in 1842. But in 1847 Lincoln went to Lexington, and there, at last, he heard the music live. The very day he and his family arrived in Lexington, newspapers announced that Henry Clay would deliver an address on the war in Mexico, at a meeting presided over by Robert S. Todd. Lincoln had obviously picked a fortuitous time to visit Clay’s hometown. What he didn’t yet know was that this speech, one of Clay’s greatest, would change the course of both men’s careers.
By the time the Lincolns reached Kentucky, the military occupation of Mexico’s capital had already dragged on for two months. While agitation to “conquer and occupy” the whole country was becoming more avid the longer Mexico stalled, many Whigs had begun to argue that the best solution was to withdraw U.S. troops from Mexico without taking any territory, bringing a swift and not entirely shameful end to a bloody war that had started with a lie. This was what the Massachusetts House of Representatives called for in April 1847: “the restoration of an honorable peace, without further attempt to dismember the territory of the enemy, and upon terms of mercy and magnanimity becoming a great and brave people toward a sister republic.”34
The war needed resolution, and the opposition Whig Party needed leadership and guidance. “Old Rough and Ready” Zachary Taylor was a growing favorite for the party’s nomination in 1848, but not even his most fervent supporters imagined that the plainspoken general could provide the rank and file with direction in this crucial period. The general likely could rally the troops at election time, but his command of soldiers was far greater than his command of policy.
So the Whigs did what came naturally; they turned to Henry Clay.
Leading Whigs had been prodding Clay for some sort of statement on the war almost from its beginning. Now, at last, the Sage of Ashland agreed to speak. Clay was not doing well. His health was on the decline, and his son’s death continued to haunt him. The loss of Henry Junior, he wrote a friend, was particularly “deep and so agonizing.” He had been baptized in the hopes that it would provide some solace, but five months later Clay admitted that he had “been nervous ever since” hearing of his son’s death, and still couldn’t bring himself to look at “the partner of my sorrows,” Lucretia, “without feeling deeper anguish.” He found it painful to walk the grounds of Ashland, for the very trees reminded him of his son.35
Clay determined to oppose the war that took young Colonel Clay’s life. Countless Americans had seen images of his son handing over his dueling pistols just moments before death, asking that the senior statesman learn that his son had “done all [he] could with them, and now return them.” His son had sent a final message: it was up to Henry Clay to soldier on. He would condemn the extension of slavery and offer a solution to the ongoing immoral conflict in Mexico. And perhaps he would find peace. Whether primarily out of bitterness at the loss of the best hope for the next generation of his family or anger at the war he would have prevented had he become president in 1844, Clay decided, at age seventy, to speak out with conviction. He would let the American people know exactly what he thought, even if it cost him the Whig nomination in 1848. And he would do it at home, in Lexington, where pro-war fervor still ran high, but he knew he would always find an audience that loved him. Some things were more important than becoming president.
Yet perhaps, at the same time, this new path would finally lead him to the presidency. It wasn’t impossible. He would have been the frontrunner for the party’s nomination, but in the last letter he ever received from his son, written just weeks before Buena Vista, Henry Clay Jr. confided that General Taylor would run for president in 1848. “He feels his power,” he told his father, and admitted that “except for yourself there are very few whom I would prefer to him.” Clay had lost the 1840 nomination to William Henry Harrison. That war hero’s death had delivered the nation into the hands of John Tyler and his disastrous presidency. Could Henry Clay allow another general to become president? Could he prevent it?36
From the day Clay’s address was announced in the papers, excitement ran high, and not just in Lexington. News that Clay would speak out “created a sensation in the political circles seldom experienced,” reported one New York newspaper. “ ‘What will he say?’—‘What course will he pursue?’ were the questions universally asked.” A Milwaukee paper gushed that voters there were anxious to learn what “one of the first men of the nation, with no station or commitments to bias the soundness of his judgment” would say about “the topic which of all others now lies nearest the heart of the whole people.”37
Papers across the nation picked up the news, and a series of notable figures announced their intention to be there for the event, including the governor and senators from Kentucky. Some audience members traveled hundreds of miles just to hear Clay’s speech. Abraham Lincoln may possibly have visited Ashland earlier that week with his wife or father-in-law and met with Clay personally. If so, he might have had some sense of what Clay would say on November 13. But Clay held his cards tight. He knew the importance of surprise to a dramatic address. No one expected Clay to praise the war, but just what he would say was a mystery.
The address was originally scheduled for Lexington’s courthouse, but as visitors and reporters from throughout the region poured into the city, it became apparent that the crowd would number in the thousands. The venue was changed to the new Market House, a cavernous brick building on Water Street.
On a dark and rainy Saturday morning, the crowd began to assemble outside. An immense assembly of men and women thronged the hall, “all ages participated, the father as well as the son—all classes and conditions of society.” Many in that Lexington audience still supported the war. Some, no doubt, imagined that the dismemberment of Mexico by the United States was just and right. The vast majority unquestionably supported slavery. They were all ready to hear something remarkable.
Clay was not an original thinker, but he could energize and inspire an audience like few other men in politics. He knew the speech he was about to deliver was among the most important of his career, a speech that could save lives, perhaps change history. The American people still looked to him for guidance. After all, no other politician had proven as skillful as Henry Clay at delivering his nation from a crisis. And almost half of all voters had chosen him over Polk in 1844. Clay knew that many of them felt the loss nearly as acutely as he did. Much was at stake, both for him and for the nation.
At exactly eleven o’clock Clay mounted the podium with the supreme confidence that always accompanied the orator when he was in his element and an erect bearing that belied his seventy years. “The shouts of the assembled thousands” filled the room as General Leslie Combs called the meeting to order and a series of officers was elected, including Robert Todd as vice president. General Combs requested that the audience observe a “perfect silence” during the following address, “as it was probably the last time that” Clay “would ever address a populous assembly.” Henry Clay had come before them, Combs said, out of his duty to the country. The “momentous question” of the resolution of the war now presented itself to the American people, and no man who loved his country could remain silent. Clay would not “allow any selfish consideration to palsy his tongue.” Clay was there, Combs reminded his audience, because he would “rather be right than be President.” The audience roared its approval.38
As Clay rose and faced the assembly, a silence descended over the room. Clay began his address on a subdued note. Speaking in measured tones, he noted how the dark and gloomy weather outside the lecture hall perfectly reflected the condition of the country. Anxiety, agitation, and apprehension were the rule, given the unsettled state of the “unnatural” war with Mexico. Clay’s voice rose as he bluntly described the manner in which Polk had provoked an “unnecessary” war of “offensive aggression,” laying blame on the president and detailing his many lies and deceptions.
Clay excoriated the president, but he reserved some of his wrath for the congressional Whigs who had
capitulated in 1846 and voted in favor of the war. The United States never should have annexed Texas in the first place, since everyone had understood at the time that annexation would result in war. Yet the majority of congressional Whigs had voted in favor of a war declaration with “a palpable falsehood stamped on its face” that Mexico was to blame. “Almost idolizing truth,” Clay intoned, “I would never have voted for that bill.” And the audience could see that the great man meant what he said. Voting for a bill with a lie at its heart was exactly the kind of thing that the old, opportunistic Clay might have done, had he been in Congress. But not the man who faced them today. His sincere disgust at that vote, if not completely fair, was for the witnesses assembled in the Lexington Market House too evident for doubt.
With increasing intensity, Clay detailed the terrible results of that vote and the “frightful struggle” that ensued. Clay lingered over the mad “sacrifice of human life … waste of human treasure … mangled bodies … death, and … desolation.” Thousands of Americans had already died, and many more soldiers had been disqualified by a “wild spirit of adventure” from returning to civil society. And whose fault was this? It was Mexico, not the United States, that was “defending her firesides, her castles, and her altars.”
Nor was Clay done. Congressional Whigs had agreed to the war because they were afraid of appearing unpatriotic. But “whose hearts,” Clay emotionally asked, “have bled more freely than those of the Whigs?” His voice nearly cracking, Clay asked an audience intimately familiar with his own grief, “Who have more occasion to mourn the loss of sons, husbands, brothers, fathers than Whig parents, Whig wives, and Whig brothers, in this deadly and unprofitable strife?” Clay held back his tears, but many in the audience did not. All knew he had lost his son. And it had been widely reported that Colonel John Hardin was Clay’s nephew: two dead young men of promise in one family. Clay’s losses, and the nation’s losses, were nearly unthinkable.
But this address was not primarily about Henry Clay. It was about the country to whose service Clay had devoted his entire long career. And more than the youth of that nation had been lost in the past two years. With a deep and burning indignation, Clay told his audience that the United States had lost its “unsullied character” internationally. Other nations “look upon us, in the prosecution of the present War, as being actuated by a spirit of rapacity, and an inordinate desire for territorial aggrandizement.” Even God himself must wonder at America’s actions. His deep bass voice thundering, Clay leaned into the podium, warning his audience about the dangers of annexing Mexico and citing historical examples to prove that imperialism inevitably led to ruin for the conquering nation. He dwelt at great length on the “direful and fatal” consequences of emulating the Roman Empire, the ill effects on the character of the nation of becoming a “warlike and conquering” power, and the incredible expense of annexing Mexico.
Clay also expressed his reservations about the racial implications of inviting Mexicans to join the Union. “Does any considerate man believe it possible that two such immense countries, with territories of nearly equal extent, with populations so incongruous, so different in race, in language, in religion and in laws could be blended together in one harmonious mass, and happily governed by one common authority?… [T]he warning voice of all history … teaches the difficulty of combining and consolidating together, conquering and conquered nations.” The Moors had failed to hold Spain, and England was struggling to hold Ireland. “Every Irishman hates, with a mortal hatred, his Saxon oppressor,” and “both the Irish and the Mexicans are probably of the same Celtic race. Both the English and the Americans are of the same Saxon origin.”39 Appealing to the racist views of his audience, Clay proclaimed that annexing Mexico would doom the United States.
But he had a solution. Because war powers resided with Congress, Congress could end the war. It was up to them to quickly and honorably settle the Mexican boundary issue and then to demand the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Mexico, ending a disgraceful and immoral war without annexing a single acre of Mexico’s land beyond the Nueces Strip. And Clay demanded that Polk comply. His audience, swept up in the moment, exploded in applause and implied agreement that Polk would be forced to comply, that they would see to it.
Not everything in this address was as universally pleasing as Clay’s demand that Polk be held to account. Clay also addressed the issue of slavery. Although he was speaking in a slave state, to an audience full of slave owners, Clay clearly and sharply disavowed “any desire, on our part, to acquire any foreign territory whatever, for the purpose of introducing slavery into it.” Heads turned when he said that, although no voices were raised in dissent. If anyone doubted his position on this subject, Clay added, in a voice of utter seriousness, that he had “ever regarded slavery as a great evil.” The fifty enslaved men, women, and children back at Ashland might reasonably have argued otherwise, but no one in the audience that day would have dared. Slavery was a great evil. In the past, Clay had often stated his belief that slavery was wicked. But now he offered no concessions to slave-holding Whigs, and no hope that Henry Clay, if he had anything to do with it, would allow new slave states to be created out of Mexican land. It was a radical stand, a brave stand. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the only man in attendance that day who must have marveled at Clay’s courage.
In a series of resolutions at the close of a speech that “carried conviction to every mind,” Henry Clay challenged the incoming Thirtieth Congress to investigate and determine the purpose of the war, to loudly oppose the president if he attempted to annex or dismember Mexico, to prevent the extension of slavery into any foreign territory, and to redeem the honor of the nation in the process. His final resolution invited the people of the United States who were “anxious to produce contentment and satisfaction at home, and to elevate the character of the nation abroad,” to hold meetings of their own in order to make their opposition to the war dramatically clear. The citizens of America must take upon themselves responsibility for ending the war. They must make their voices heard. Clay’s resolutions, including those opposing the extension of slavery, were submitted and unanimously adopted.40
The thousands of people in the Market House exploded in applause, rising to their feet and filling the hall with their shouts and roars. Henry Clay had spoken for two and a half hours, but the crowd was energized rather than exhausted, called to action by “the great mass of truths” that Clay so powerfully presented. The speech they had heard was “rich, earnest, and true,” and not one they were likely to forget. Certainly, Abraham Lincoln did not. As he and the thousands of others left the hall that afternoon, they filled the streets and homes of Lexington with their praise of the Sage of Ashland, their approval of his resolutions, and their amazement that the seventy-year-old Clay was still at the height of his powers.41
Thanks to the wonders of the telegraph, plus a reporter who immediately after the speech rode eighty miles (in a record five hours) to the nearest telegraph office in Cincinnati, Clay’s speech and resolutions were in print across the country within days. The speech won immediate acclaim among northern Whigs, many of whom were both delighted and surprised by Clay’s clearly stated principles. “He is not afraid to speak out,” approved the Boston Daily Atlas, while another paper noted, “It is a high exercise of moral courage for Mr. Clay, living in a slave-holding State and addressing an audience composed mostly of the owners of slaves—to bear his testimony against any extension of this institution.” Several papers reported that Clay had demanded Polk’s impeachment if he didn’t comply with Congress’s wishes.42
Nothing about Clay’s Lexington speech was radical, even if it was radical for Henry Clay. Almost all of it had been formulated by other Whig politicians in other contexts. But as so often was the case with Henry Clay, it was the way he said something that proved so inspiring. The “free simplicity, sound logic, and manly directness” of Clay’s words “attest their truth and crown their excellence,” noted one rep
orter. “The right thinking men of the country of all classes and parties will thank Mr. Clay for thus embodying in words that will not lie, the feeling of their hearts and the convictions of their judgments.”43
Reactions to the speech in other quarters were less positive. A few abolitionist papers—but only a few—–contrasted Clay’s Lexington address with his boast in New Orleans a year earlier that he might “capture or slay a Mexican.” This was nothing more than a typical Clay flip-flop. “Mould the clay which way you will, ’tis a very clay-god still,” punned the Liberator.44
But Democrats and many western Whigs labeled the speech treasonous. The administration’s paper, the Washington Union, condemned “the spirit of treason promulgated” by Clay, particularly his assertion that “the war has been brought upon us by our own act; and that we and not our enemies, are responsible for its evils and its guilt.” It also quoted an army officer who claimed to see “no difference between the men who in ’76 succored the British, and those who in ’47 give arguments and sympathy to the Mexicans.” Democrats in Nashville met to condemn Clay’s resolutions as “incompatible with national honor” and “having the direct tendency to encourage the opponents of peace in Mexico to protract the war.” The New York Courier and Enquirer, a conservative Whig paper, warned that adopting Clay’s unpatriotic resolutions would be “suicidal” for the Whigs. Soldiers in Mexico wondered if Clay’s stand signified advancing senility, whether “he has arrived at an age for the follies and errors of which he is no longer responsible.”45
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