Henry S. Foote on Henry Clay

I have only to add that had there been one such man in the Congress of the United States as Henry Clay in 1860-'61 there would, I feel sure, have been no civil war. Had Mr. Clay himself been then living, the same high toned patriotism and consummate statesmanship which had been so efficiently instrumental in 1819, in 1832, and in 1850, in preserving the Republic from the horrors of civil butchery, and from the yet greater evils sure to result from disunion, whenever that shall be effected, would have been seen to achieve a still grander triumph of principle over the embodied factionists of that period, from whose ill counsels such unmeasured evils have been seen to flow.

Henry Stuart Foote, Casket of Reminiscences (1874).