Free Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro Page B

Peterson has written,
    Webster, Clay and Calhoun… were the ornaments of American statesmanship in the era between the founding and the Civil War. At home and abroad, making exception for their common enemy, they were the most celebrated Americans of the time; … All across the country their speeches were read as if the fate of the nation hung on them….
    Sixteen years later, in 1849, it was again in the Senate that Clay, seventy-two years old now, rose to again urge compromise. He had always been thin, but now he was too thin, and frail—he had had to be helped up the stairs in front of the Capitol—and racked by the cough that his friends suspected was consumption although no one dared even to whisper the dreaded word. He didn’t stroll through the desks this time, didn’t move about much at all, in fact, as if he was trying to conserve his strength during the two days he spoke, standing for the most part at his back-row desk in a far corner of the Chamber, but “he spoke with the musical voice of old, with the same passionate intensity”—and, at crucial points, he still tapped the snuffbox. The spectre of sacked cities and desolated fields was very near now, but he was still fighting against it. Victory in the war with Mexico had brought the United States vast new territories—Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California—and the explosive issue of whether these territories should be slave or free was splitting the nation apart, and the dispute was being played out on the floor of the Senate, where for years Calhoun and his followers had successfully blocked admission of the territories as free states, had blocked admission while talk grew of secession, and of civil war. “If any solution to the [problem] … was to be found, it would be up to the Senate to take the lead”—up to the Senate, and to its “Great Compromiser.” For three weeks, Clay had worked and reworked alternate plans, and then, having finally settled on a complicated package of eight separate resolutions, one rainy January evening, haggard and coughing constantly, he had impulsively climbed into a carriage and visited Daniel Webster at Webster’s boardinghouse, and outlined his plan—to which Webster consented. And now, as his biographer wrote, Brave Prince Hal “rose in the Senate chamber and began his last great struggle to save the Union that he loved.”
    From his position in the far corner, the long semi-circle of desks stretched below and away from him, and his gaze traveled along the upturned faces of the men sitting at them as he said: “I implore Senators—I entreat them, by all that they expect hereafter, and by all that is dear to them here below, to repress theardor of these passions, to look at their country in this crisis—to listen to the voice of reason.” Sometimes the physical effort seemed too much for him, and he faltered, but he always went on, for two long days, and one observer wrote, “when in moments of excitement, he stands so firm and proud, with his eyes all agleam, while his voice rings out clear and strong, it almost seems that… the hot blood of youth was still coursing through his veins…. The wonderful old man!” In a stroke, as Peterson puts it, he “seized the initiative from the President, centered it in the Senate…. and set the legislative agenda for the country.” “What a singular spectacle!” wrote the editor of the
New York Herald
—a newspaper long hostile to Clay. “Of all the leaders of the old parties, of all the aspiring spirits of the new ones, including [the President] and the whole of his cabinet, from head to tail, not a single soul, not a single mind has dared to exhibit the moral courage to come out with any plan for settling the whole except it is Henry Clay … solitary and alone.”
    One of the desks below Clay’s had been vacant while he spoke. It was a desk near the center of the Chamber, third from the aisle in the second row on the right—Calhoun’s desk.