“If any one State, or a portion of the people of any State, choose to place themselves in military array against the government of the Union, I am for trying the strength of the government.  I am for ascertaining whether we have a government or not.”

Again: 

“The Senator speaks of Virginia being my country.  This UNION, sir, is my country; the thirty States are my country; Kentucky is my country, and Virginia no more than any State in the Union.”

And yet again: 

“There are those who think that the Union must be preserved by an exclusive reliance upon love and reason.  That is not my opinion.  I have some confidence in this instrumentality; but, depend upon it that no human government can exist without the power of applying force, and the actual application of it in extreme cases.”

Who can estimate the influence of these clear and emphatic utterances ten years after?  The crowded galleries, the numberless newspaper reports, the quickly succeeding death of the great orator,—­all aided to give them currency and effect.  We shall never know how many wavering minds they aided to decide in 1861.  Not that Mr. Clay really believed the conflict would occur:  he was mercifully permitted to die in the conviction that the Compromise of 1850 had removed all immediate danger, and greatly lessened that of the future.  Far indeed was he from foreseeing that the ambition of a man born in New England, calling himself a disciple of Andrew Jackson, would, within five years, destroy all compromises, and render all future compromise impossible, by procuring the repeal of the first,—­the Missouri Compromise of 1821.

Henry Clay was formed by nature to please, to move, and to impress his countrymen.  Never was there a more captivating presence.  We remember hearing Horace Greeley say that, if a man only saw Henry Clay’s back, he would know that it was the back of a distinguished man.  How his presence filled a drawing-room!  With what an easy sway he held captive ten acres of mass-meeting!  And, in the Senate, how skilfully he showed himself respectfully conscious of the galleries, without appearing to address them!  Take him for all in all, we must regard him as the first of American orators; but posterity will not assign him that rank, because posterity will not hear that matchless voice, will not see those large gestures, those striking attitudes, that grand manner, which gave to second-rate composition first-rate effect.  He could not have been a great statesman, if he had been ever so greatly endowed.  While slavery existed no statesmanship was possible, except that which was temporary and temporizing.  The thorn, we repeat, was in the flesh; and the doctors were all pledged to try and cure the patient without extracting it.  They could do nothing but dress the wound, put on this salve and that, give the sufferer a little respite from anguish, and, after a brief interval, repeat the operation.  Of all these physicians Henry Clay was the most skilful and effective.  He both handled the sore place with consummate dexterity, and kept up the constitution of the patient by stimulants, which enabled him, at last, to live through the appalling operation which removed the cause of his agony.