“I would show their opposition to colonization.  Show its humane, religious, and patriotic aims; that they are to separate those whom God has separated.  Why do the Abolitionists oppose colonization?  To keep and amalgamate together the two races, in violation of God’s will, and to keep the blacks here, that they may interfere with, degrade, and debase the laboring whites.  Show that the British nation is co-operating with the Abolitionists, for the purpose of dissolving the Union, etc.”

This is so very absurd, that, if we did not know it to express Mr. Clay’s habitual feeling at that time, we should be compelled to see in it, not Henry Clay, but the candidate for the Presidency.

He really thought so in 1843.  He was perfectly convinced that the white race and the black could not exist together on equal terms.  One of his last acts was to propose emancipation in Kentucky; but it was an essential feature of his plan to transport the emancipated blacks to Africa.  When we look over Mr. Clay’s letters and speeches of those years, we meet with so much that is short-sighted and grossly erroneous, that we are obliged to confess that this man, gifted as he was, and dear as his memory is to us, shared the judicial blindness of his order.  Its baseness and arrogance he did not share.  His head was often wrong, but his heart was generally right.  It atones for all his mere errors of abstract opinion, that he was never admitted to the confidence of the Nullifiers, and that he uniformly voted against the measures inspired by them.  He was against the untimely annexation of Texas; he opposed the rejection of the anti-slavery petitions; and he declared that no earthly power should ever induce him to consent to the addition of one acre of slave territory to the possessions of the United States.

It is proof positive of a man’s essential soundness, if he improves as he grows old.  Henry Clay’s last years were his best; he ripened to the very end.  His friends remarked the moderation of his later opinions, and his charity for those who had injured him most.  During the last ten years of his life no one ever heard him utter a harsh judgment of an opponent.  Domestic afflictions, frequent and severe, had chastened his heart; his six affectionate and happy daughters were dead; one son was a hopeless lunatic in an asylum; another was not what such a father had a right to expect; and, at length, his favorite and most promising son, Henry, in the year 1847, fell at the battle of Buena Vista.  It was just after this last crushing loss, and probably in consequence of it, that he was baptized and confirmed a member of the Episcopal Church.