For Honour's Sake (3 page)

For all these reasons, and despite a fervent desire by both the United States and Great Britain to bring this unpopular war to an end, their commissioners arrived in Ghent little expecting success. Yet the prospect of failure dismayed them and proved a source of great anxiety for both themselves and their respective governments. Should the negotiations fail, the war would surely drag on for years, its eventual outcome impossible to predict.

Castlereagh, in a letter given to the British commissioners close to their departure from London, urged them “to assure the American commissioners that the British Government, whatever sense it may entertain of the causes of the rupture, is sincerely desirous of a permanent adjustment of all differences, and that this desire is not abated by the successful termination of the war in Europe; and that, with this view, you are authorized to meet with frankness and conciliation whatever propositions the American negotiators may be prepared to offer, for terminating the war which has been declared by their Government.”
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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.”
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A
mong 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 inexplicably 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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Where many congressmen and senators were notoriously partisan, susceptible to influence and outright graft, Bayard was rigorously ethical and moral.