His diligence at work attracted the attention of the Chancellor, George Wythe, who selected him for amanuensis to write out and record the decisions of the Court. This was the turning point of his career. Wythe was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and member of the Convention that framed the Federal Constitution. He believed in what he promulgated, emancipating his slaves and making provision for their subsisting. Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall had been his students. The four years thus spent there decided Clay to become a lawyer, and he entered the office of Robert Brooke the Attorney-General as a regular student. A year later he received the license to practice. At the age of twenty he set out for Kentucky to seek his fortune, making his residence at Lexington then styled “the literary and intellectual centre of the West.”
He became, like all Southern men of note, a politician, and quickly gained distinction as a speaker. In 1797 a Convention was held to revise the Constitution of the State, and he labored assiduously, but without success to procure the adoption of a system of emancipation. He saved his popularity, however, by vigorously declaring against the Alien and Sedition Laws of Congress. So much easier is it to resent and deplore the wrongs that others commit than to repent of those we commit ourselves. Mr. Clay was from this time a champion of the helpless and the wronged. It required personal as well as moral courage. There were men in Kentucky who regarded themselves as leaders in Society and above being held to account for unworthy and lawless acts. Colonel Joseph Daviess, then District Attorney of the United States and a Federalist, perpetrated a brutal assault upon a private citizen. Everybody feared him but Mr. Clay. He took the matter boldly up. Daviess warned him to desist, but was unable to frighten him even by a challenge to a duel. With like sentiment toward a man that he conceived to be wronged, he became a defender of Aaron Burr, but on learning of deception he refused further friendly relations.
After a period of service in the Legislature, Mr. Clay was chosen to fill an unexpired term in the Senate at Washington and took his seat in December, 1806, when under thirty years of age. He seems to have paid little heed to the unwritten law of reticence, but took active part in speaking and legislating. He advocated the projects of a bridge across the Potomac, and also roads and canals to facilitate communication between the Atlantic Seaboard and the region west of the Allegheny Mountains. A monument near Wheeling commemorates his support of the Cumberland Road.