For six weeks Mr. Clay exerted his eloquence, his arts of pacification, and all the might of his personality, to bring members to their senses.  He even had a long conference with his ancient foe, John Randolph.  He threw himself into this work with such ardor, and labored at it so continuously, day and night, that, when the final triumph was won, he declared that, if Missouri had been kept out of the Union two weeks longer, he should have been a dead man.  Thirty-four years after these events Mr. S.G.  Goodrich wrote: 

“I was in the House of Representatives but a single hour.  While I was present there was no direct discussion of the agitating subject which already filled everybody’s mind, but still the excitement flared out occasionally in incidental allusions to it, like puffs of smoke and jets of flame which issue from a house that is on fire within.  I recollect that Clay made a brief speech, thrilling the House by a single passage, in which he spoke of ‘poor, unheard Missouri’ she being then without a representative in Congress.  His tall, tossing form, his long, sweeping gestures, and, above all, his musical yet thrilling tones, made an impression upon me which I can never forget.”

Mr. Clay, at length, had completed his preparations.  He moved for a committee of the House to confer with a committee of the Senate.  He himself wrote out the list of members whom he desired should be elected, and they were elected.  At the last conference of the joint committees, which was held on a Sunday, Mr. Clay insisted that their report, to have the requisite effect upon Congress and the country, must be unanimous; and unanimous it was.  Both Houses, with a surprising approach to unanimity, adopted the compromise proposed; and thus was again postponed the bloody arbitrament to which the irrepressible controversy has since been submitted.

Clay’s masterly conduct on this occasion added his name to the long list of gentlemen who were mentioned for the succession to Mr. Monroe in 1825.  If the city of Washington had been the United States, if the House of Representatives had possessed the right to elect a President, Henry Clay might have been its choice.  During the thirteen years of his Speakership not one of his decisions had been reversed; and he had presided over the turbulent and restive House with that perfect blending of courtesy and firmness which at once restrains and charms.  The debates just before the war, during the war, and after the war, had been violent and acrimonious; but he had kept his own temper, and compelled the House to observe an approach to decorum.  On one occasion he came into such sharp collision with the excitable Randolph, that the dispute was transferred to the newspapers, and narrowly escaped degenerating from a war of “cards” to a conflict with pistols.  But the Speaker triumphed; the House and the country sustained him.  On occasions of ceremony the Speaker enchanted every beholder by