Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/157

Rh Clay's wrath aflame. “The Senator from South Carolina,” he exclaimed, “has said that I was flat on my back, and that he was my master. He my master! I would not own him as a slave!” This retort, although neither witty nor elegant, was at least an emphatic expression of genuine feeling, and much enjoyed by Clay's friends.

On the whole, Clay appeared in this debate to much greater advantage than Calhoun. It was not only the readiness and brilliancy of his eloquence, with its captivating tones, its biting sarcasm, its stirring appeals, and the music of sonorous sentences, that appealed to the hearer and reader, while Calhoun's speech, although compact, precise, and well arranged, was somewhat dry in tone, jerking and rapid in delivery, and without a gesture to enliven it; but Clay was also more truthful, more ingenuous, more chivalrous. His version of the compromise of 1833 certainly accorded more with the facts than did Calhoun's. Clay was, indeed, not justified in representing the compromise as a protection measure. He proposed it to save a little remnant of the “American system,” and to settle a difficulty dangerous to the country without leaving the matter to Jackson's violent impulses. But to say that the compromise was dictated by Calhoun and intended to save Clay, was utterly absurd. Calhoun accepted it, and assented to provisions very distasteful to him, in order to escape from a perilous situation without an entire sacrifice of pride and a total surrender of his cause. John