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 from politics for fifty years. Still more
honorable was it in Mr. Clay, that, in 1829, when Calhoun was maturing
nullification, he could publicly say that among the acts of his life
which he reflected upon with most satisfaction was his youthful effort
to secure emancipation in Kentucky.
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