Here he commenced and continued the practice till the year 1803, when he was first elected to the Kentucky Legislature.  By successive elections he was continued in the Legislature till the latter part of 1806, when he was elected to fill a vacancy of a single session in the United States Senate.  In 1807 he was again elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives, and by that body chosen Speaker.  In 1808 he was re-elected to the same body.  In 1809 he was again chosen to fill a vacancy of two years in the United States Senate.  In 1811 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, and on the first day of taking his seat in that body he was chosen its Speaker.  In 1813 he was again elected Speaker.  Early in 1814, being the period of our last British war, Mr. Clay was sent as commissioner, with others, to negotiate a treaty of peace, which treaty was concluded in the latter part of the same year.  On his return from Europe he was again elected to the lower branch of Congress, and on taking his seat in December, 1815, was called to his old post-the Speaker’s chair, a position in which he was retained by successive elections, with one brief intermission, till the inauguration of John Quincy Adams, in March, 1825.  He was then appointed Secretary of State, and occupied that important station till the inauguration of General Jackson, in March, 1829.  After this he returned to Kentucky, resumed the practice of law, and continued it till the autumn of 1831, when he was by the Legislature of Kentucky again placed in the United States Senate.  By a reelection he was continued in the Senate till he resigned his seat and retired, in March, 1848.  In December, 1849, he again took his seat in the Senate, which he again resigned only a few months before his death.

By the foregoing it is perceived that the period from the beginning of Mr. Clay’s official life in 1803 to the end of 1852 is but one year short of half a century, and that the sum of all the intervals in it will not amount to ten years.  But mere duration of time in office constitutes the smallest part of Mr. Clay’s history.  Throughout that long period he has constantly been the most loved and most implicitly followed by friends, and the most dreaded by opponents, of all living American politicians.  In all the great questions which have agitated the country, and particularly in those fearful crises, the Missouri question, the nullification question, and the late slavery question, as connected with the newly acquired territory, involving and endangering the stability of the Union, his has been the leading and most conspicuous part.  In 1824 he was first a candidate for the Presidency, and was defeated; and, although he was successively defeated for the same office in 1832 and in 1844, there has never been a moment since 1824 till after 1848 when a very large portion of the American people did not cling to him with an enthusiastic hope and purpose of still elevating him to the Presidency.  With other men, to be