It was calumny’s masterpiece.  It was a rare stroke of art to get an old dotard of a member of Congress to publish, twelve days before the election, that Mr. Clay had agreed to vote for Mr. Adams, and that Mr. Adams had agreed to reward him by the office of Secretary of State.  When the vote had been given and the office conferred, how plausible, how convincing, the charge of bargain!

It is common to censure Mr. Clay for accepting office under Mr. Adams.  We honor him for his courage in doing so.  Having made Mr. Adams President, it had been unlike the gallant Kentuckian to shrink from the possible odium of the act by refusing his proper place in the administration.  The calumny which anticipated his acceptance of office was a defiance:  Take office if you dare!  It was simply worthy of Henry Clay to accept the challenge, and brave all the consequences of what he had deliberately and conscientiously done.

In the office of Secretary of State Mr. Clay exhibited an admirable talent for the despatch of business.  He negotiated an unusual number of useful treaties.  He exerted himself to secure a recognition of the principles, that, in time of war, private property should enjoy on the ocean the same protection as on land, and that paper blockades are not to be regarded.  He seconded Mr. Adams in his determination not to remove from office any man on account of his previous or present opposition to the administration; and he carried this policy so far, that, in selecting the newspapers for the publication of the laws, he refused to consider their political character.  This was in strict accordance with the practice of all previous administrations; but it is so pleasant to recur to the times when that honorable policy prevailed, that we cannot help alluding to it.  In his intercourse with foreign ministers, Mr. Clay had an opportunity to display all the charms of an unequalled courtesy:  they remained his friends long after he had retired.  His Wednesday dinners and his pleasant evening receptions were remembered for many years.  How far he sympathized with Mr. Adams’s extravagant dreams of a system of national works that should rival the magnificent structures of ancient Rome, or with the extreme opinions of his colleague, Mr. Rush, as to the power and importance of government, we do not know.  He worked twelve hours a day in his office, he tells us, and was content therewith.  He was the last high officer of the government to fight a duel.  That bloodless contest between the Secretary of State and John Randolph was as romantic and absurd as a duel could well be.  Colonel Benton’s narrative of it is at once the most amusing and the most affecting piece of gossip which our political annals contain.  Randolph, as the most unmanageable of members of Congress, had been for fifteen years a thorn in Mr. Clay’s side, and Clay’s later politics had been most exasperating to Mr. Randolph; but the two men loved one another in their hearts, after all.  Nothing has ever exceeded the thorough-bred courtesy and tender consideration with which they set about the work of putting one another to death; and their joy was unbounded when, after the second fire, each discovered that the other was unharmed.  If all duels could have such a result, duelling would be the prettiest thing in the world.