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17 1 Henry Clay, Part One American Hero The people create heroes, and, when Henry Clay looked and acted the part and led the way toward national greatness and away from civil war, the legend began. With a great hero, it helps if he has overcome adversity and suffered and experienced failures; reality is left behind anyway, and he becomes larger than life.1 It is an apotheosis in which the hero becomes superhuman, a myth, and a demigod. Clay was second only to George Washington in the American pantheon before the Civil War, and, when the Clay legend was made morally perfect like that of Washington, it was even more dramatic because there was more to overlook. Clay migrated to Lexington from Virginia in November 1797 at the age of twenty, and his buoyant spirit thrived on the atmosphere of frontier optimism and the garrulous nature of his neighbors and friends. He quickly became Lexington’s best defense attorney, and in Congress he became the leading representative of Kentucky in national politics. The status of Lexington as the leading manufacturing center in the West stimulated him to develop his American System; as a slave owner, he formulated the necessary-evil doctrine on slavery that dominated the slavery debate in Kentucky from 1800 to 1865. His dedication to the Union, coupled with his maintenance that a state had the exclusive right to legislate regarding slavery, was the lodestar that guided Kentucky through the Civil War.2 One of the most prominent myths about Clay was that he was born in poverty, became an orphan when his father died, had to plow the fields of his mother’s farm to support her, was denied formal schooling, and became successful on his own without any connections. In reality, he was born 18 KENTUCKY RISING on April 12, 1777, in Hanover County, Virginia, in an attractive two-story frame house to a respectable family more prosperous than many Virginia farmers. His father, John, was a Baptist pastor and tobacco farmer, and he and Clay’s mother, Elizabeth, lived on her father’s 464-acre farm, a plantation with twenty-one slaves. Henry’s father died when he was four years old, bequeathing two slaves to Henry in his will. When Elizabeth married Henry Watkins, she brought to the marriage her father’s farm, which she had inherited. Elizabeth and Henry Watkins were prosperous, and they sent Henry to school and may have tutored him. The couple and their young children moved to Kentucky when Henry was fourteen, having arranged that the boy would work in the drug store of Richard Denny in Richmond, Virginia, and then become a clerk for Peter Tinsley, clerk of the High Court of Chancery in Virginia. At fifteen, Henry started his training in law at the High Court, and there he met and impressed George Wythe, one of the best law teachers in Virginia, teacher of John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, and others. For four years, Henry worked as Wythe’s secretary and law student, all the while socializing at the top of Richmond society. He then studied under Robert Brooke for about a year, passed the bar exam, and moved to Kentucky at the age of twenty.3 In the pressure of campaigning for president in the time when claiming to have been born in a log cabin seemed almost essential, Clay once stated that he was left “poor, penniless” when his father died. The neighborhood where he was born had land that was swampy and overgrown, and it was called the slashes. Campaign writers and local Hanover County historians created the myth that he rode barefoot on his pony to the gristmill, and orators proclaimed him “Mill Boy of the Slashes.” It is true that Clay did not attend college preparatory school or college, that beginning at age fourteen he lacked the daily guidance and comfort of a parent, and that he never studied Latin or Greek. Yet, with all the advantages Clay had, and with his outstanding education in the law and friends in Richmond, it was quite a leap in mythmaking to present him as a poor, uneducated orphan. Abraham Lincoln could recognize campaign rhetoric as readily as anyone, but the myth was so pervasive that, in his eulogy of Clay, he stressed that poor boys should be encouraged that Clay rose to fame in spite of his “comparatively limited” education and his birth to “undistinguished parents” and “in an obscure district” of Virginia.4...

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