President Harrison offered to the great chieftain of the Whig party the first place in his cabinet, which he declined, preferring his senatorial dignity and power.  Besides, he had been Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams and found the office irksome.  He knew full well that his true arena was the Senate Chamber,—­which also was most favorable to his presidential aspirations.  But Webster was induced to take the office declined by Clay, having for his associates in the cabinet such able men as Ewing, Badger, Bell, Crittenden, and Granger.

Mr. Clay had lost no time, when Congress assembled in December, 1840, in offering a resolution for the repeal of the sub-treasury act; but as the Democrats had still a majority in the Senate the resolution failed.  When the next Congress assembled, General Harrison having lived only one month after his inauguration and the Vice-president, John Tyler, having succeeded him, the sub-treasury act was repealed; but the President refused to give his signature to the bill for the re-charter of the United States Bank, to the dismay of the Whigs, and the deep disappointment of Clay, who at once severed his alliance with Tyler, and became his bitter opponent, carrying with him the cabinet, which resigned, with the exception of Webster, who was engaged in important negotiations in reference to the northeastern boundary.  The new cabinet was made up of Tyler’s personal friends, who had been Jackson Democrats, and the fruits of the great Whig victory were therefore in a measure lost.  The Democratic party gradually regained its ascendency, which it retained with a brief interval till the election of Abraham Lincoln.

A question greater than banks and tariffs, if moral questions are greater than material ones, now began again to be discussed in Congress, ending only in civil war.  This was the slavery question.  I have already spoken of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which Mr. Clay has the chief credit of effecting, but the time now came for him to meet the question on other grounds.  The abolitionists, through the constant growth of the antislavery sentiment throughout the North, had become a power, and demanded that slavery should be abolished in the District of Columbia.

And here again I feel it best to defer what I have to say on antislavery agitation to the next lecture, especially as Clay was mixed up in it only by his attempt to pour oil on the troubled waters.  He himself was a Southerner, and was not supposed to take a leading part in the conflict, although opposed to slavery on philanthropic grounds.  Without being an abolitionist, he dreaded the extension of the slave-power; yet as he wished to be President he was afraid of losing votes, and did not wish to alienate either the North or the South.  But for his inordinate desire for the presidential office he might have been a leader in the antislavery movement.  All his sympathies were with freedom.  He took the deepest interest in colonization, and was president of the Colonization Society, which had for its aim the sending of manumitted negroes to Liberia.