fore, he urged was clearly illegal and a conviction would be impossible. The startled Court stopped the speaker and forbade the argument. Mr. CLAY declared with dignity and solemn earnestness that if he could not argue the whole case to the jury he had no more to say, and abruptly left the room. Of course the Court soon summoned him back and allowed him to pursue his own course. He now, with redoubled vehemence, renewed his argument, and gained a verdict solely upon this point of law-without any reference to the nature of the testimony that had been adduced.

In criminal cases, which were much the most frequent at that early day, in the State of Kentucky, Mr. CLAY was almost uniformly engaged on the side of the defendant. He was led to this by his strong natural sympathies not less than by the high reputation he had acquired in the professional conduct of similar cases. And, it is recorded, as an evidence of his remarkable power at the bar, that not one of the many prisoners tried for capital crimes whom he defended, ever received sentence of death at the hands of the law. Only one case appears in which he acted the part of Public Prosecutor; and in that, he procured the conviction of a slave who was indicted for murder in having killed his overseer in return for a blow before inflicted upon him for some imaginary offence. That even this discharge of his duty was repugnant to the inherent kindness of Mr. CLAY's nature is shown by the fact that he has often been heard to regret, more than any other act of his life, the part he took in the conviction. of this friendless negro.

But a single example of his ability and success in the trial of civil cases is preserved, though it is said generally that he

had no rival in the management of suits that involved the land-laws of Virginia and Kentucky. In one of these cases, being called away by business of his own, he left the whole to his associate counsel. Two days were spent upon the argument, and Mr. CLAY's colleague had been foiled at every point. Just as the trial was about to close Mr. CLAY entered the Court; and, though he knew next to nothing of the nature of the testimony, after a brief consultation with his friend, he drew up in written form the instructions he wished the Court to give to the jury, and maintained his positions with such cogency and force that his request was granted, and the case was at once decided in his favor. For the quickness of his comprehension and the ready power with which he seized upon, and maintained, the principal points of any case, so remarkably evinced upon this trial, Mr. CLAY in his after life has been especially distinguished.

Mr. CLAY's first entrance upon political life was proudly signalized by that chivalric boldness, so marked a feature of his whole character, which threw to the winds every thought of personal popularity and gave force only to the generous impulses of his heart and to his own profound conviction of the truth and justice of the principle he had espoused. In 1797, the very year in which he had first put his foot within her borders, Kentucky was taking measures to frame for herself a new Constitution. In many respects the provisions of the old one were unsuited to her rapid growth and to the peculiar temper of her inhabitants. Slavery had been legalized upon her soil and had become firmly wrought into her social frame-work. This, though by no means a subject of general complaint, was still regarded with deep hostility by a respectable minority of her people; and they had submit

ted for consideration a plan for its gradual and safe abolition. Their proposed object at once enlisted the most ardent sympathies of Mr. CLAY; and by all the means within his reach, through the public press and in assemblies of the people, his best powers were exerted for its success. He was impelled to this course by a deep conviction of the justice of the cause not less than by the profoundest sympathies of his nature. Then, as now and through all his life, he expressed, openly and frankly, his thorough opposition to slavery in all its forms-deploring its existence, zealously seeking to break its chains, when the disruption would not endanger the peace and happiness of the slaves themselves, as well as of their masters, and to soften its asperities by all the means within his reach. Then, as now, he regarded the sanctity of Law and the well-being of Society as considerations of the highest importance-and the first as the sole condition of the last. He looked upon slavery as it exists at the present day in several of the States of this Union, as a grievous misfortune-a sad calamity which from its nature could not be shaken off with the tyranny of the mother country which had entailed it upon them. It had become deeply rooted in their social and political institutions, had intertwined itself with all the interests of the people, and had drawn to itself a large portion of the life of the State. Any sudden effort to uproot it from its deep foundation, he then perceived, as clearly as he has always seen it since, must be attended with most imminent danger to the institutions and interests that have grown up around it, and must spread desolation over the fair face of society. Nor in his view would a summary emancipation be productive of less certain ruin to the slaves themselves than to the other members of the commonwealth. Without exception they were ignorant, destitute of moral culture, and

by no means prepared for the unprotected condition into ***which their rash and ill judging friends of the present day

are striving to see them plunged. All these considerations had the same weight with Mr. OLAY in 1797 as they have ever exerted since; and the plan of relief to which he then gave his ardent support, and which he still regards as upon "the whole the safest and the best, embraced them all in its provisions. It proposed that the generation then in bondage should so remain; but that all their offspring, born after the passage of the law, should receive their freedom on arriving at a certain age; and made it the duty of their masters to give to them, meantime, such instruction as should fit them for the contemplated change in their condition. This plan had been some years before adopted in Pennsylvania—at the instance of Dr. FRANKLIN; and the fact that a man of so eminent ability and so highly practical in all his schemes had given to it his warm approval, spoke almost as loudly in its favor as did the distinguished success with which it had been crowned in his noble State.

But though founded in essential justice and shown to be essentially safe to the commonwealth, the people of Kentucky were decidedly hostile to these great principles: and by the ardor with which he upheld and enforced them the rising fame of Mr. CLAY was overcast by public odium. The great majority of the members of the Convention which assembled to revise the Constitution of the State voted against any change in this feature of her existing laws; and though Mr. CLAY bowed with the utmost deference, as he has always done, to the will of the People, who alone had a right to decide the question, his own conviction of the 'justice of his cause remained unclouded, and his sympathies for the

slave uncooled by marked manifestations of the popular displeasure-always so chilling to the heart of young ambition. He continued, without fear, to plead the cause of the oppressed negro. In his professional practice whenever his aid could be of any service to the slave, it was freely offered; and it is said that he never, in the whole course of his life, failed at the bar to obtain a decision in favor of one whose cause he had espoused.

The same impulsive love of freedom, and hatred of any encroachment upon its just enjoyment, which led Mr. CLAY into this sagacious though unpopular measure of relief to the African slaves, soon found, in the rising events of the day, new field for its exercise, and it urged Mr. CLAY into the upport of a cause more consonant with the feelings of the people than that in which he had just incurred their deep fislike. In 1798-9 the famous Alien and Sedition laws were established, during the administration, though in no ther respect under the auspices, of the elder ADAMS.

So palpably were they in direct violation of the spirit of bur institutions, that the circumstances under which they were passed, and the evidence they furnished of the exceeding caution which marked every step of our first great experiment in the establishment of national freedom, seemed not in the least to mitigate the intense indignation which intantly greeted their enactment. The attempt to establish in this country political institutions, based upon the fundamental principles of equality and the right of self-government, which was at that time very far from being completely uccessful, was not a sudden and violent uprising of men laBoring under a sense of wrongful oppression; it was no vol