Henry Clay’s funeral on July 10, 1852, was the largest ceremonial occasion ever witnessed in Lexington, Kentucky, up until that time. When the correspondent from the Frankfort Commonwealth arrived in town at 6 a.m., he “found the streets already thronged with strangers and citizens, while every road leading to the city poured in a continual stream of carriages, horseman [sic] and pedestrians.” “The number of people assembled at Lexington, was greater than ever was seen in her streets before,” he wrote. Estimates from other observers ranged between 30,000 and 100,000 in attendance. Lexington’s businesses closed, and black crepe, banners, and portraits of the dead senator adorned streets and houses all over town.
After an Episcopal service at Clay’s estate, Ashland, a grand and solemn funeral procession of local, state, and national government officials and dignitaries accompanied Clay’s remains to the Lexington Cemetery at the western edge of town. The people of Lexington and out of town visitors followed on foot for hours as church bells tolled. The reporter claimed the procession “was the most imposing demonstration of sorrow we ever saw. The carriages in it passed two abreast, and by far the greater portion of its length was occupied by persons on foot marching … its length must have been from a mile and a quarter to a mile and a half long.”
At the grave, upon watching “all that [was] capable of interment” being placed in Clay’s vault, the correspondent was moved to quote U.S. Senate chaplain C. M. Butler’s eulogy to Clay: “Burying Henry Clay? Bury the records of your country’s history—bury the hearts of the living millions—bury the mountains, the rivers, the lakes, and the spreading lands from sea to sea, with which his name is inseparably associated, and even then you would not bury HENRY CLAY.”
The Lexington funeral commemorating Henry Clay as an esteemed national politician and hometown hero was, however, merely the culminating event in a weeks-long festival of mourning occasioned by Clay’s death in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 1852. Clay’s remains had traversed many of the expansive rivers and lands that he embodied in the imagination of the Senate chaplain and the Kentucky newspaper reporter. For two weeks before arriving in Lexington, Henry Clay’s remains had traveled a long, circuitous path from D.C. through Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio to Kentucky, stopping in major cities along the way so that elaborate funerals rituals could be enacted (fig. 1).