I fear I have saved too many like you, who
ought to be hanged." The anecdotes printed of his exploits in cheating
the gallows of its due are of a quality which shows that the power of
this man over a jury lay much in his manner. His delivery, which
"bears absolute sway in oratory," was bewitching and irresistible, and
gave to quite commonplace wit and very questionable sentiment an
amazing power to please and subdue.

We are far from thinking that he was not a very able lawyer. Judge
Story, we remember, before whom he argued a cause later in life, was
of opinion that he would have won a high position at the bar of the
Supreme Court, if he had not been early drawn away to public life. In
Kentucky he was a brilliant, successful practitioner, such as Kentucky
wanted and could appreciate. In a very few years he was the possessor
of a fine estate near Lexington, and to the single slave who came to
him as his share of his father's property were added several others.
His wife being a skilful and vigorous manager, he was in independent
circumstances, and ready to serve the public, if the public wished
him, when he had been but ten years in his Western home. Thus he had a
basis for a public career, without which few men can long serve the
public with honor and success. And this was a principal reason of the
former supremacy of Southern men in Washington; nearly all of them
being men who owned land, which slaves tilled for them, whether they
were present or absent.

The young lawyer took to politics very naturally. Posterity, which
will judge the public men of that period chiefly by their course with
regard to slavery, will note with pleasure that Clay's first public
act was an attempt to deliver the infant State of Kentucky from that
curse. The State Constitution was to be remodelled in 1799. Fresh from
the society of Chancellor Wythe, an abolitionist who had set free his
own slaves,--fresh from Richmond, where every man of note, from
Jefferson and Patrick Henry downwards, was an abolitionist,--Henry
Clay began in 1798, being then twenty-one years of age, to write a
series of articles for a newspaper, advocating the gradual abolition
of slavery in Kentucky. He afterwards spoke on that side at public
meetings. Young as he was, he took the lead of the public-spirited
young men who strove to purge the State from this iniquity; but in the
Convention the proposition was voted down by a majority so decisive as
to banish the subject