“Do not believe all you hear about the Northern sympathy for Lincoln. The Democrats still feel for the South. If Congress does not denounce Lincoln for his unlawful and unconstitutional proceedings, I shall begin to think we have no country!”
Upon leaving the Federal capital we proceeded to the home of Senator Clay’s cousin, Doctor Thomas Withers, at Petersburg, Va. My husband’s health, already feeble, had suffered greatly from the months of strife which culminated in the scenes through which we had just passed, and we had scarcely arrived in Petersburg when a serious collapse occurred. Mr. Clay now became so weakened that fears were reiterated by all who saw him that he could not survive. I was urged to take him at once to Minnesota, the attending physicians all agreeing that this was the one experiment in which lay a chance for prolonging his life. In those days the air of that far western State was supposed to have a phenomenally curative effect upon the victims of asthma, from which for years Mr. Clay had suffered an almost “daily death.” In the present acute attack, his body sick and his heart sore from our late ordeals, fearful of the danger of delay, I at once put into execution plans for the northward trip in which lay even a slender hope for his recovery. No one who had witnessed my husband’s dignified withdrawal from the Senate, who had heard his firm utterance of what was at once a challenge to arms and a warning that Alabama would defend her decision to stand alone, would have recognised the invalid now struggling for his life against the dread disease. He was extremely emaciated.
“When I last saw you,” wrote John T. Morgan[21] from camp, some months later, “your health scarcely justified the hope that you would become one of the first Senators in a new Confederacy. I was grieved that when we came to meet the great struggle in Alabama you were not permitted to aid us further than by your counsels and recorded opinions. I rejoice that you are again our representative in a Senate where the South is not to be defended against foes within her own bosom, but to reap the advantage of the wisdom and experience of her own statesmen.”
My brother-in-law, Hugh Lawson Clay, afterward Colonel on the staff of our friend, General E. Kirby Smith, hurried, therefore, from Alabama to accompany us upon the slow journey made necessary by Mr. Clay’s extreme weakness.