For Honour's Sake Read online

  The American government was less inclined to have its commissioners extend olive branches. Meeting with President Madison in his office in early August, Secretary of State James Monroe insisted that the British must accept certain conditions or there would be no peace. The room was like an oven, both men sweating heavily in the humid Washington heat. Were it not for the direness of the war and the urgent need for a negotiated peace, neither man would have still been in the capital. Instead they would have sought the refuge of their respective Virginian country estates, and the business of government would have languished until the cooler fall temperatures rendered the city again habitable. Monroe’s desire to end the war almost matched that of his master, but he counselled a firm stance. Ultimately, no matter the just causes that had driven them to the declaration, the war was of America’s making. To come away at the end with nothing gained would spell political ruin for both men, be disastrous for the Republican Party, and dishonour the nation. There was no reason, Monroe insisted, that although America could not prevail on the battlefield it could not win an honourable peace through negotiation. The dream of annexing British North America might even still be achieved if the British could be persuaded that it was in their ultimate interest to be rid of this costly-to-maintain colony. Madison thought Monroe’s optimism misplaced, but he recognized how an honourable peace—one that yielded America a secure base for future westward expansion—was essential. The five men in Ghent must win this.

  Accordingly, on August 11, Monroe penned detailed instructions to the negotiators. “If Great Britain, does not terminate the war on the conditions you are authorized to adopt,” the war must continue. “The conflict may be severe, but it will be borne with firmness, and as we confidently believe, be attended with success.” After setting out several minor compromises that he was willing to offer the British, Monroe declared: “This government can go no farther, because it will make no sacrifice of the rights or honour of the nation.”2

  Part One

  CLAY’S WAR

  ONE

  A Republican of the First Fire

  NOVEMBER 1811

  Among the commissioners gathered in Ghent that August of 1814 was a man who, more than any other, could claim responsibility for leading America into war. Had Henry Clay not been elected to the Twelfth Congress of the House of Representatives, there were many who believed that its 142 members would have failed to muster the collective resolve to pass the war bill. And had Clay not been there to privately stiffen the president’s backbone, Madison might not have affixed his signature to it.

  On the day America went to war, Clay was just thirty-five, yet he was undeniably the nation’s most powerful congressman. When the House went into session on November 4, 1811, the young Kentuckian was immediately elected as its Speaker in a two-to-one first-ballot vote. Selection of a speaker on the first day was unprecedented.1 It was not unusual for a month or more to pass between various factions advancing their preferred candidates and the election. The interim was a time of long speeches by supporters who extolled a candidate’s virtues and talents while detractors responded with equally lengthy bouts of rhetoric, redolent of politely veiled criticism, that chipped blocks out from under the candidate’s feet. In stuffy, overheated rooms powerful men gathered for dinners, drinks, cigars, and hands of cards. It was here that negotiations were conducted, deals made. Outstanding debts were called in, new credits extended.

  This time there had been none of that, which was surprising on the surface, for the Twelfth Congress marked Clay’s House debut. But Clay was no political neophyte. At the age of twenty-six, just six years after arriving in Kentucky from Virginia to practise law, he had thrown himself onto that state’s brawling political stage. In 1803, after demonstrating both masterful oration and, on at least one occasion, keen marksmanship with a long Kentucky rifle, he was elected to the state legislature.2

  Although the son of a Baptist minister, he was neither conservative nor outwardly religious. He loved cards, drinking, and women equally, and the latter usually considered him both attractive and blessed with a fine wit. The fifth of nine children, Clay was only four when his father died. Young Henry’s formal education consisted of three years in Hanover’s one-room school, which stood near the courthouse in front of which local orators gathered on the green to hold forth on local and national politics. Early on the boy developed a passion for what was commonly referred to as declamation. At best an indifferent student, he proved a keen reader, eagerly reciting the text aloud to hone his public-speaking skills.

  That Clay might have a future in the law and even politics was recognized early by his stepfather, who introduced the lad to Hanover’s Virginia Assembly delegate, Col. Thomas Tinsley. Suitably impressed, the politician persuaded his brother, Peter Tinsley, the clerk of the Virginia High Court of the Chancery, in Richmond, to accept Clay as an assistant. Clay was now fourteen, and his parents, infected by western fever, had sold up and headed for Kentucky.

  The adolescent Clay demonstrated a shrewd aptitude for gaining the patronage of powerful men. Besides Thomas and Peter Tinsley, Chancellor George Wythe and Virginia’s attorney general, Robert Brooke, both took him under wing and advanced the lad along a course that concluded with his being called to the Virginia bar at age twenty.

  But Clay never practised in that state. Instead, he saddled up and rode to the new frontier in Kentucky. As a boy, Clay had been lean and gangly, with overly long arms. Now, he was roughly handsome, with tousled hair so blond it was almost white and blue eyes that could, by turns of light, appear either pale and grey or as vividly blue as a robin’s egg. He stood six feet tall, and across his wide, craggy face emotions were always writ large. Some described his face as “a compromise put together by a committee,” particularly because of the width of his mouth, which others claimed gave him unfair advantage in that he could “completely … rest one side of it while the other was on active duty.”3

  A dandy, Clay took great care about his appearance and dress. His linen cravat was always carefully knotted, cloth breeches fashionably cut, yellow-top boots polished to a shine, high-collared, eagle-buttoned blue cutaway coat freshly brushed.4 On March 20, 1798, he was appointed to Lexington’s bar and within a few months established his social position by marrying Lucretia Hart, daughter of a wealthy Lexington businessman. While the marriage was opportune, he was by all accounts devoted.

  Clay pursued a legal career out of financial necessity, but politics was his passion. The local press soon acclaimed his Lexington Green speeches. He declaimed for abolition of slavery and carved out his ground as a Radical Republican. Clay criticized President John Adams for treading on state and individual rights, for pandering to Britain, and for seeking to build a standing army when everyone knew militias were all the defence America needed. He praised revolutionary France and, when Napoleon gained power, lauded him as well for taking on the tyrant King George III and the aristocratic hegemony of Britain’s government.

  In 1803 he was elected to the state legislature, and three years later the Kentucky legislature sent him to serve out the remaining year of the term of a federal senator who had resigned. Despite being four months younger than the thirty years required by the Constitution for holding such a seat, Clay was sworn in on December 29.5 Although most of the other thirty-three statesmen representing the Union’s seventeen states were so-called Fathers of the Revolution, Clay showed them no deference. He quickly shifted focus from the parochial matters of Kentucky to those of national interest, even as he was disenchanted to find that the Senate was a forum where “solemn stillness” rather than energetic debate reigned.6

  Outwardly the Senate itself was a rather grand place, with a semicircular chamber elegantly appointed with lush carpeted floors, scarlet leather-cushioned chairs for the senator.’ backsides, various wall maps to help them locate places that arose in debates, and a small portrait of George Washington dwarfed by the full-length portraits of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI that inex
plicably dominated the room. However, the Senate roof leaked, so the place had about it a lingering cellar-like dampness. With a high, rotting ceiling overhead and equally deteriorating walls directly behind the senators, some displayed a “state of fear & uneasiness, least the wall, which is thick & high, should fall on them & either maim or kill them.”7

  Clay waded into what passed for debate with a vigour quickly noted by his fellow senators. Most of the older members were nonplussed that this youth, “in the plenitude of puppyism,” as Connecticut’s venerable Uriah Tracy mockingly depicted him during one of many debates where the two men crossed swords, dared show such temerity in their august midst. A few were quietly impressed.

  Clay, the upstart young Republican, was soon debating in a more congenial manner than in his duels with Tracy with James Asheton Bayard, the distinguished Federalist senator from Delaware who would eventually become the Kentuckian’s fellow negotiator in Ghent. Politically the two men were diametrically opposed, particularly with regard to relations between America and Great Britain. Whereas Clay proposed war at the first offence, the Delaware senator preferred to turn the other cheek while simultaneously seeking a negotiated accommodation. But for all their political differences, Clay and Bayard had similar backgrounds. Both had lost their fathers at the age of four, both were lawyers by training and fiercely political by inclination, both were tall and handsome. Had it not been for their divergent political views, they might have been friends. Instead, they treated each other with respect.

  Born on July 28, 1767, and raised in the privileged family of an uncle, Bayard had graduated from Princeton in 1784. Four years later he was admitted to the bar, briefly practising in Philadelphia before establishing a practice in Wilmington, Delaware. On February 11, 1795, Bayard married Ann Basset, the daughter of the state’s chief justice. Two years later he was elected to the House of Representatives and held a seat there until March 1803. In January 1805 he took a seat in the U.S. Senate.8

  By the time of his Senate appointment Bayard was undisputed leader of the southern Federalists, who trod a more conservative path than their New England counterparts. Bayard was a moderate, always willing to work toward compromise to ensure a stable federal government. One observer described his attitude as that “of a man who, believing his own party to be possessed of superior political wisdom, is nevertheless willing to do whatever lies in his power for the country as a whole, even though it must be done through the opposing party.”9 Where many congressmen and senators were notoriously partisan, susceptible to influence and outright graft, Bayard was rigorously ethical and moral.

  Not that Bayard was a man of pure reason and little passion. On May 5, 1800, a heated debate on the Senate floor erupted between Bayard and Christopher Champlin, the representative for Rhode Island, when the latter moved to redraft a bill setting commissions paid to port collectors so that the percentages allowed collectors in Wilmington and New London could be reduced. Bayard saw the move as a personal swipe at those particular port collectors—the one in Wilmington was a friend. Two days after the exchange, the two senators met in Philadelphia to settle the matter with pistols. It was a grim day, raining heavily, so the duel occurred in an abandoned shed next to a stone bridge. Champlin and Bayard paced off the agreed distance, turned and fired. Bayard’s ball ripped open Champlin’s cheek while his opponent’s struck his thigh.

  Duelling being illegal in Pennsylvania, both men and their seconds were forced to flee the state’s jurisdiction or face charges. Bayard wrote his cousin, Andrew Bayard, a couple of weeks later to say that the “escape I made from the city was quite lucky, but I do not like the idea of perpetual banishment which the affair is likely to occasion.” He asked the cousin to enquire of the state governor whether it would be possible for him to grant everyone involved clemency from prosecution.10

  Perhaps this incident served even more to incline Bayard toward caution, for by the time Clay took his seat in the Senate his debating style was noted as the exact opposite of the young senator’s. New Hampshire Federalist William Plumer considered Clay more emotional and enthusiastic while Bayard’s style was that of the “precise reasoner.”11

  Clay’s first foray into Washington politics was short; the senatorial term he filled expired after just one session.

  Back in Kentucky, Clay was re-elected to its legislature and appointed Speaker. Rather than adhering to tradition by confining himself to maintaining order and ensuring that legislative procedure was upheld, Clay never hesitated to step down from the chair in order to wade into the midst of debates—a practice he would continue as Speaker of the House of Representatives. During one such foray, an observer wrote that “every muscle of [Clay’s] face was in motion; his whole body seemed agitated, as if every part were instinct with a separate life; and his small, white hand, with its blue veins apparently distended, almost to bursting, moved gracefully, but with all the energy of rapid and vehement gesture. The appearance of the speaker seemed that of a pure intellect, wrought up to its mightiest energies, and brightly glowing through the thin and transparent veil of flesh that enrobed it.”12

  In December 1808, Clay brought before the legislature a series of resolutions intended to support President Thomas Jefferson’s responses to maritime measures taken by Great Britain to bar America and other neutral nations from conducting trade with France. Under these measures the Royal Navy had been authorized by House of Commons orders-in-council to seize neutral merchant ships apprehended while attempting to enter any French Empire port. Increasingly outraged by Britain’s apparent disregard for America’s sovereignty, Clay sought legislative approval of Jefferson’s embargo, whereby the United States would voluntarily cease conducting any trade with either Britain or France. He also called upon it to condemn Britain’s orders-in-council and to pledge that Kentucky would back the U.S. government in any measure considered necessary to uphold its rights.

  Humphrey Marshall was the only legislator to oppose the resolutions. On January 4, 1809, the two locked in a heated verbal joust that ended with Marshall calling Clay a liar. A fistfight would have ensued had others not intervened to restrain the two. When Clay calmed down, he apologized to the House and then poured more coals on the fire by stating he would never have resorted to blows if Marshall had been a man of honour. Marshall snapped back that Clay’s apology was that of “a poltroon!” He then issued a challenge, accepted by Clay in a formal note that same evening.13

  On the early morning of January 19, the two men, their seconds, and appointed surgeons gathered on a meadow covered in frost-hardened Kentucky bluegrass next to the Ohio River near Louisville. Clay and Marshall faced each other from a distance of ten paces with pistols hanging down by their sides. One of the seconds called out, “Attention! Fire!” Two pistols cracked, and Marshall was staggered when Clay’s ball grazed his stomach. Both took aim again, but Clay’s pistol failed to fire and Marshall missed again. Marshall reloaded more quickly and snapped off a slug that tore a gash out of Clay’s thigh. Unbalanced as he was by the ball’s impact, Clay’s third round went wild. Although Clay demanded that the duel continue, the seconds hastily announced that his wound meant that the men now fought an unequal contest and that honour had been served.14

  The duel only furthered Clay’s reputation throughout Kentucky, so it was hardly a surprise when he was once again selected to serve out the term of a federal senator upon completion of his sixth term in the state’s legislature. Clay rode toward Washington in January 1810 preoccupied with one overriding concern. The time had come, he believed, when the United States must make war on Great Britain.

  When Clay’s tired mount plodded up the muddy streets, past the many half-built houses that had stood abandoned since the collapse of Washington’s building boom three years previous, there was little about the capital to inspire a man into believing this was the seat of power of a nation capable of challenging one or both of the world’s most powerful empires. Although still growing rapidly, Washington’s populati
on was just 5,650. Large stretches of farmland and small woods separated tiny clusters of buildings. The capital of the United States was no more akin to London, the world’s most populous and powerful commercial centre, or Paris in all its elegant opulence than was America’s economy a challenge to that of Britain and France. Except in its slightly larger size and the presence of a handful of modest government buildings, Washington more closely resembled Clay’s Lexington than the great European cities.

  This was true for all of America’s burgeoning cities. Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia were older and larger than Washington and presented a more orderly form, with cobblestone streets running between rows of stone and brick buildings. But Boston and Philadelphia were suffering decline brought on by harbours clogged with silt and a resultant loss of commerce to the new shipping capital of New York City. With its deep harbour surrounding three sides of Manhattan Island, this was the new boomtown where the real estate speculators, shipping magnates, trading houses, and financial firms concentrated.

  But in 1810 even New York City was only just beginning a process of growth that would in the near future transform it from village to large city. Together, the four most populous American cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—claimed no more than a combined population of 175,000 out of a national population of 5.3 million. Two million white males in the land were enfranchised, and 85 percent of these were farmers. The United States was an agrarian nation. Its economy was almost entirely dependent on, in the words of President Jefferson, what its “yeoman farmers” produced. These farmers, Jefferson had declared, were the backbone of the nation, and it was to them that the Republican Party pandered.15