Having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am unwilling to close without referring more particularly to Mr. Clay’s views and conduct in regard to it. He ever was on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery. The very earliest, and one of the latest public efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were both made in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky. He did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race. And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves. Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1852

Junius Brutus Booth is not the only luminary to die in 1852. The Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, lawyer to Aaron Burr, and fierce critic of Andrew Jackson, a man whose shadow stretched from the presidency of Thomas Jefferson to that of Millard Fillmore, also dies. Lincoln, who has been out of office now for three years, is given the honor of eulogizing him at the Illinois state capitol. Henry Clay is Lincoln’s ideal politician, a person who seeks common ground, a person who brokers peace.

To that end, Henry Clay was the architect of multiple compromises that both limited and sustained slavery, most recently the Compromise of 1850, a complicated legal elaboration triggered by California’s desire to join the Union as a free state and dealing with the territories annexed from Mexico by Polk’s war. Four years later, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, also authored by Stephen Douglas, will bring Lincoln roaring back to politics. Until then, he is riding the judicial circuit, making a name for himself as a stump speechifier, and retiring in the evenings to read his beloved Burns, his Byron, his Emerson.

Meanwhile, at home:

One morning, the neighbors are treated to the sight of Mary chasing him, half-dressed, from the house with a broom. A housemaid whispers over the back fence that Mary once hit him over the head with a wooden board as he was reading the paper, blackening an eye and swelling his nose. That she both strikes and underpays the servants so that the only ones they can keep are the ones Lincoln secretly bribes to stay. That she cries continuously.

In spite of this, he misses her when he travels. He can see how unhappy she is and that’s a condition with which he has considerable experience and endless sympathy.

BOOK THREE

For such as we are made of, such we be.

—W. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night