The Family Legacy of Henry Clay: In the Shadow of a Kentucky Patriarch by Lindsey Apple (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 98 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY The Family Legacy of Henry Clay: In the Shadow of a Kentucky Patriarch Lindsey Apple If families tend to be interesting to outsiders in proportion to their dysfunction, the descendants of Henry Clay ought to be appealing fodder indeed for the historian. Alcoholism, melancholy, thwarted ambition, disease—the Clays exhibited all these qualities, and more, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Given that, it is surprising that Lindsey Apple’s Family Legacy of Henry Clay is not more interesting. This is partly because Apple seems to have made it his mission to rehabilitate the Clays, and the “patriarch ” in particular, from their critics. Robert Remini takes a beating here. But it also turns out that the Clays themselves were a less interesting bunchthantheyappearatfirstglance.Inpart,that seems to be because family members, with an eye to the clan’s reputation, took care to destroy letters and other documents that discussed embarrassing —and revealing—incidents. Much of the evidence we have about alcoholism, gambling, and mental instability must be inferred, and Apple does not flinch in presenting these facts. Even so, the Clays simply do not capture the imagination as did, say, the Percys in the book to which The Family Legacy of Henry Clay is most easily compared , Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family (1994). Not only did no one in subsequent generations match the greatness of Henry Clay, but none of them even came close. They did not lack ambition, but they lacked the imagination and demonstrates that while labor on steamboats brought mobility and status to blacks, it also increased slavery and racism. The final essay of the middle portion discusses the connection of riverboats to urban black life in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville. Like Buchanan, Joe Trotter notes that riverboats were significant employers of African Americans. But Trotter spends most of his essay discussing the conditions in the cities rather than life for blacks on riverboats. While the essay contains valuable information, not much of it relates directly to steamboats. The book ends with a group of heterogeneous essays. Sandra Custer’s cultural history of steamboat music ranges widely from whistles, bells, calliopes, roustabout songs, showboats, dixieland music, and songs about steamboats. The breadth of Custer’s article perhaps accounts for a certain choppiness in the writing, as she probably tries to cover too much ground in a fairly short space. Gerald Sutphin’s essay methodically tracks the changes in the Ohio River’s tributaries. In what is essentially a history of river improvements, Sutphin’s article is probably best appreciated by hardcore river enthusiasts. The book’s final essay extends the theme of river improvements to the Ohio River. Like Sutphin’s piece, Robert Willis’s article is less about steamboats and more about humanity’s attempts to control nature and render waterways safe and predictable. As is the case of any collection of essays, readers will find some more valuable than others . The collection includes no footnotes, which limits its value for scholars, but a good appendix lists relevant materials in the Hanover College library and each essay includes a bibliography. Robert Gudmestad Colorado State University BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2012 99 talent necessary to realize it. A few of the family ’s men, and more than a few of its women, enjoyed success in business, society, the military , or in the lower rungs of political office. But, intellectually, they were not a very compelling group. Fortunately, Apple spends roughly a third of the book on Henry Clay and his immediate descendants, the most talented, interesting, and messed up generations of the family. Apple devotes much of the ink in these pages to rehabilitating Henry Clay as a father. He takes sharp exception to Robert Remini’s harsh judgment of Clay’s parenting skills in Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (1991). Remini maintained that Clay, focused on public life, simply was not present for most of his children’s youth (Lucretia Hart Clay gave birth to eleven children, seven of whom survived to adulthood). Apple does not deny that charge. Instead, he focuses on Clay’s correspondence with...