Excerpt from Address Before the Whig and Conservative Citizens of Schenectady County: At Union Hall, December 30th, 1839

The friends of Henry Clay in the Convention, adhered to him to the last ballot, with a perseverance befitting their warm hearts and his great name; and when a majority declared for Wm. Henry Harrison, and Mr Clay s letter to his Kentucky friends was read, the magnanimity of soul displayed by those friends, the burning zeal, the unfeigned giief, and the devoted love exhibited by them in the outpourings of their glowing and impassioned eloquence, when they yielded Kentucky' s favorite son to the will of the majority, to promote Dm'on for the sake of the Union, surpass my power of description, and. Were Worthy of the brightest and purest days of the republic. Iesteem it, gentlemen, one of the happiests events of my life, that Iwas permitted to be present at the deliberations of the convention from the commencement to the end, but the thrilling scene of the last day, was an exhibition of self devotion, patriotic feeling and stirring oratory, that had no parallel in the proceedings of any deliberative assembly I ever attended, and would embellish the brightest pages ever written by Milton and Hume. I returned from Harrisburgh more fixed in Republican prin ciples than when I went, and more convinced of the permanency of our free institutions that a nation which could produce on such an oc casion, so many wise heads and honest hearts, contained Within it the elements of restorative vitality, that would secu1e its existence for cen turies; and as our origin and growth as a nation, may be regarded a series of miracles, betokening a special interposition of Providence m cm behalf, so the evils we are now enduring, will, I firmly believe, he directed for our good, and from the hour the Pilgrim Fathers first set foot in America, at Plymouth, it was registered 1n the records of time kept in eternity, that from an insignificant and helpless infancy, this people should grow and wax strong for ages to come, until in the ful ness of time they shall have attained the gigantic stature of a colossal nation which, at some period in the far future, worn out with the wear and tare of twenty centar1es, will run into decay and dissolve into its constituent elements to form new combinations and assume new forms adapted to the wants and condition of its people.

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