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37 2 Henry Clay, Part Two Champion of the Union Henry Clay had the attractive appearance and charisma of a national hero, but the depth of feeling for him derived from the realization that he restored calm and peace of mind in three dangerous crises that threatened the Union. This set him apart as the leader who met the deepest need of the people—he was their Moses who led them from the abyss of Civil War into continued peace and prosperity. When he died, Americans identified with him as the symbol of the American eagle, the Genius of Liberty, and the champion of Union-saving compromises. The identification was so complete that people could hardly accept his death. Over and over, throughout the nation, eulogies and tributes began with the same words—“Henry Clay is dead!”—as if the fact was too foreboding to accept.1 Kentucky played a role in the development of Clay’s approach to slavery and states’ rights, and his leadership was the greatest influence shaping the attitude of Kentuckians toward slavery, the Union, and the Civil War and its aftermath. Clay gave Kentucky its long heritage of firm support of the Union and compromise between the North and the South, and most Kentuckians agreed with him that legislation on slavery was strictly a state prerogative . However, Kentuckians followed Clay only halfway on slavery; they used his necessary-evil doctrine as practical justification to support their opposition to his plan of gradual emancipation with colonization. Kentuckians helped Clay find the middle ground of compromise between the sections, and most Kentuckians enthusiastically supported his long championship of the Union in that era of rising sectionalism. In one of the most courageous acts of his life, at the age of twenty-one, he 38 KENTUCKY RISING wrote a letter to the Kentucky Statesman proposing that Kentucky should free its slaves. He used the appropriate pen name of Scaevola, the legendary hero of ancient Rome who was captured by the enemy and sentenced to be burned. Scaevola held his hand over his execution fire until it burned off, and this self-sacrificing bravery led the invading king to make peace— the Romans were saved. “All America acknowledges the existence of slavery to be an evil,” Clay declared, “which while it deprives the slave of the best gift of heaven, in the end injures the master too, by laying waste his lands, enabling him to live indolently, and thus contracting all the vices generated by a state of idleness. If it be this enormous evil, the sooner we attempt its destruction the better.” Kentucky was creating a new constitution, and now was the time, he wrote, to destroy the evil institution.2 The letter created such a tempest among Bluegrass slave owners that Clay must have felt that he had placed his hand in the fire like Scaevola. The slave owners dominating Lexington society told him that Kentucky could not adopt immediate emancipation because it would lead to race war and anarchy. Realizing that he must moderate his plan, young Clay wrote a second Scaevola letter that recommended gradual emancipation with training for the freed slaves. At that point, he was moving toward the middle ground on the issue—slavery was evil but necessary to maintain public safety, including the safety of African Americans—unless freed slaves could be educated or transported outside the United States, where they would be safe and live in freedom with human dignity. Basic to the position that Clay adopted was the doctrine that each state had a right under the Constitution to legislate on slave property within the state; the federal government had no authority to abolish slavery.3 Thus, his position, formulated in Kentucky early in his life in an effort to free Kentucky’s slaves, placed Clay firmly in the middle, and there he consistently remained the rest of his life. Almost fifty years later, when delegates were being elected to the 1849 state constitutional convention, he wrote a published letter to Kentuckians in which he stated that slavery was evil and should be abolished under a plan of colonization. Slave owners in the Lower South agreed with the necessary-evil position until Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt, and then they changed to the positive-good theory that slavery was good for slaves as well as masters. Henry Clay led Kentucky in never making the change; Kentucky held firmly to the necessary-evil position, as historian...

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