to which his talents were applied during the first years of his practice at the bar was in defending murderers.  He seems to have shared the feeling which then prevailed in the Western country, that to defend a prisoner at the bar is a nobler thing than to assist in defending the public against his further depredations; and he threw all his force into the defence of some men who would have been “none the worse for a hanging.”  One day, in the streets of Lexington, a drunken fellow whom he had rescued from the murderer’s doom cried out, “Here comes Mr. Clay, who saved my life.”  “Ah! my poor fellow,” replied the advocate, “I fear I have saved too many like you, who ought to be hanged.”  The anecdotes printed of his exploits in cheating the gallows of its due are of a quality which shows that the power of this man over a jury lay much in his manner.  His delivery, which “bears absolute sway in oratory,” was bewitching and irresistible, and gave to quite commonplace wit and very questionable sentiment an amazing power to please and subdue.

We are far from thinking that he was not a very able lawyer.  Judge Story, we remember, before whom he argued a cause later in life, was of opinion that he would have won a high position at the bar of the Supreme Court, if he had not been early drawn away to public life.  In Kentucky he was a brilliant, successful practitioner, such as Kentucky wanted and could appreciate.  In a very few years he was the possessor of a fine estate near Lexington, and to the single slave who came to him as his share of his father’s property were added several others.  His wife being a skilful and vigorous manager, he was in independent circumstances, and ready to serve the public, if the public wished him, when he had been but ten years in his Western home.  Thus he had a basis for a public career, without which few men can long serve the public with honor and success.  And this was a principal reason of the former supremacy of Southern men in Washington; nearly all of them being men who owned land, which slaves tilled for them, whether they were present or absent.

The young lawyer took to politics very naturally.  Posterity, which will judge the public men of that period chiefly by their course with regard to slavery, will note with pleasure that Clay’s first public act was an attempt to deliver the infant State of Kentucky from that curse.  The State Constitution was to be remodelled in 1799.  Fresh from the society of Chancellor Wythe, an abolitionist who had set free his own slaves,—­fresh from Richmond, where every man of note, from Jefferson and Patrick Henry downwards, was an abolitionist,—­Henry Clay began in 1798, being then twenty-one years of age, to write a series of articles for a newspaper, advocating the gradual abolition of slavery in Kentucky.  He afterwards spoke on that side at public meetings.  Young as he was, he took the lead of the public-spirited young men who strove to purge the State from this iniquity; but in the Convention the proposition was voted down by a majority so decisive as to banish the subject from politics for fifty years.  Still more honorable was it in Mr. Clay, that, in 1829, when Calhoun was maturing nullification, he could publicly say that among the acts of his life which he reflected upon with most satisfaction was his youthful effort to secure emancipation in Kentucky.