Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/61

Rh quiet body, was not accustomed, and which the good Mr. Plumer probably considered too dashing for the place and the occasion.

Clay had scarcely returned to Kentucky when the citizens of his county sent him again to the state legislature as their representative, and he was elected Speaker of the Assembly. The debates which occurred gave him welcome opportunity for taking position on the questions of the time. The comfortable, calm, and joyous prosperity of the country, which had prevailed under Jefferson's first and at the beginning of his second administration, had meanwhile been darkly overclouded by foreign complications. The tremendous struggle between Napoleonic France and the rest of Europe, led by England, was raging more furiously than ever. The profitable neutral trade of the American merchant marine was rudely interrupted by arbitrary measures adopted by the belligerents to cripple each other, in utter disregard of neutral rights. The impressment and blockade policy of Great Britain struck the American mind as particularly offensive. Of this more hereafter. The old animosity against England, which had somewhat cooled during the short period of repose and general cheerfulness, was fanned again into flame. Especially in the South and West it burst out in angry manifestations. In the Kentucky legislature its explosion was highly characteristic of the lingering backwoods spirit. It was moved that in no court of Kentucky should any decision of a British