The Western Star

America has seen few political personalities as attractive as Henry Clay. Born in Virginia in 1777, he moved while a young man to that “spreading meadow whence the rivers flow,” which is central Kentucky. He had the right combination of appearance, magnetism, audacity and eloquence to please the card-, horse-, and politics-loving aristocracy which dominated that region, and his star rose fast. In 1806 he became United States Senator, and in 1850, forty-four years later, he was still a dominant political figure in his state and in the nation. In between political activities he lived the life of a gentleman-planter at his beautiful estate “Ashland,” outside Lexington, and dispensed a convivial hospitality.

In Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Little, Brown, $3.50) Professor Clement Eaton surveys his career for the Library of American Biography series. Clay was one of the American commissioners sent to Ghent to negotiate a treaty following the well-nigh disastrous war of 1812. The contrast between his behavior and that of John Quincy Adams, who read five chapters of the Bible every day and retired at nine, has become legendary. But Clay was an expert poker player; and had he not brought to the treaty table what he learned at the poker table, it is doubtful whether the United States would have emerged so favorably from a war which it can hardly be said to have won.

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Richard M. Weaver

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America has seen few political personalities as attractive as Henry Clay. Born in Virginia in 1777, he moved while a young man to that “spreading meadow whence the rivers flow,” which is central Kentucky. He had the right combination of appearance, magnetism, audacity and eloquence to please the card-, horse-, and politics-loving aristocracy which dominated that region, and his star rose fast. In 1806 he became United States Senator, and in 1850, forty-four years later, he was still a dominant political figure in his state and in the nation. In between political activities he lived the life of a gentleman-planter at his beautiful estate “Ashland,” outside Lexington, and dispensed a convivial hospitality.

In Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Little, Brown, $3.50) Professor Clement Eaton surveys his career for the Library of American Biography series. Clay was one of the American commissioners sent to Ghent to negotiate a treaty following the well-nigh disastrous war of 1812. The contrast between his behavior and that of John Quincy Adams, who read five chapters of the Bible every day and retired at nine, has become legendary. But Clay was an expert poker player; and had he not brought to the treaty table what he learned at the poker table, it is doubtful whether the United States would have emerged so favorably from a war which it can hardly be said to have won.