“Clay, from Kentucky, spoke against the Bank.  He is one of the finest fellows I have seen here, and one of the finest orators in the Senate, though I believe the youngest man in it.  The galleries, however, were so much crowded with ladies and gentlemen, and such expectations had been expressed concerning his speech, that he was completely frightened, and acquitted himself very little to his own satisfaction.  He is a man I have great personal regard for.”

This was the anti-bank speech which General Jackson used to say had convinced him of the impolicy of a national bank, and which, with ingenious malice, he covertly quoted in making up his Bank Veto Message of 1832.

Mr. Clay’s public life proper began in November, 1811, when he appeared in Washington as a member of the House of Representatives, and was immediately elected Speaker by the war party, by the decisive majority of thirty-one.  He was then thirty-four years of age.  His election to the Speakership on his first appearance in the House gave him, at once, national standing.  His master in political doctrine and his partisan chief, Thomas Jefferson, was gone from the scene; and Clay could now be a planet instead of a satellite.  Restive as he had been under the arrogant aggressions of England, he had schooled himself to patient waiting, aided by Jefferson’s benign sentiments and great example.  But his voice was now for war; and such was the temper of the public in those months, that the eloquence of Henry Clay, seconded by the power of the Speaker, rendered the war unavoidable.

It is agreed that to Henry Clay, Speaker of the House of Representatives, more than to any other individual, we owe the war of 1812.  When the House hesitated, it was he who, descending from the chair, spoke so as to reassure it.  When President Madison faltered, it was the stimulus of Clay’s resistless presence that put heart into him again.  If the people seemed reluctant, it was Clay’s trumpet harangues that fired their minds.  And when the war was declared, it was he, more than President or Cabinet or War Committee, that carried it along upon his shoulders.  All our wars begin in disaster; it was Clay who restored the country to confidence when it was disheartened by the loss of Detroit and its betrayed garrison.  It was Clay alone who could encounter without flinching the acrid sarcasm of John Randolph, and exhibit the nothingness of his telling arguments.  It was he alone who could adequately deal with Quincy of Massachusetts, who alluded to the Speaker and his friends as “young politicians, with their pin-feathers yet unshed, the shell still sticking upon them,—­perfectly unfledged, though they fluttered and cackled on the floor.”  Clay it was whose clarion notes rang out over departing regiments, and kindled within them the martial fire; and it was Clay’s speeches which the soldiers loved to read by the camp-fire.  Fiery Jackson read them, and found them perfectly to his taste.  Gentle Harrison read them to his Tippecanoe heroes.  When the war was going all wrong in the first year, President Madison wished to appoint Clay Commander-in-Chief of the land forces; but, said Gallatin, “What shall we do without him in the House of Representatives?”