“The conquest of Canada is in your power,” he said. “I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state that I verily believe that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.... The withered arm and wrinkled brow of the illustrious founders of our freedom are melancholy indications that they will shortly be removed from us. Their deeds of glory and renown will then be felt only through the cold medium of the historic page; we shall want the presence and living example of a new race of heroes to supply their places, and to animate us to preserve inviolate what they achieved.... I call upon the members of this House to maintain its character for vigor. I beseech them not to forfeit the esteem of the country. Will you set the base example to the other House of an ignominious surrender of our rights after they have been reproached for imbecility and you extolled for your energy! But, sir, if we could be so forgetful of ourselves, I trust we shall spare you [Vice-President George Clinton] the disgrace of signing, with those hands so instrumental in the Revolution, a bill abandoning some of the most precious rights which it then secured.” Other members both of the House and of the Senate had made war speeches, and in Clay’s harangue no idea could be called original; yet apart from the energy and courage which showed a new and needed habit of command, these sentences of Clay’s maiden speech marked the appearance of a school which was for fifty years to express the national ideals of statesmanship, drawing elevation of character from confidence in itself, and from devotion to ideas of nationality and union, which redeemed every mistake committed in their names. In Clay’s speech almost for the first time the two rhetorical marks of his generation made their appearance, and during the next half century the Union and the Fathers were rarely omitted from any popular harangue. The ideas became in the end fetiches and phrases; but they were at least more easily understood than the fetiches and phrases of Jeffersonian republicanism which preceded them. Federalists used the name of Washington in the same rhetorical manner, but they used it for party purposes to rebuke Washington’s successors. The Union and the Fathers belonged to no party, and might be used with equal advantage by orators of every section. Clay enjoyed almost alone for years the advantage of winning popularity by this simple means; but in 1810, at least along the Atlantic coast, such appeals had little popular success. Least of all had they weight in the Senate, which listened unmoved to Clay’s oratory, and replied to it immediately on the same day by passing the “ignominious surrender” of national rights by a vote of twenty-six to seven. Giles did not vote. Samuel Smith, Leib, and even Crawford were in the majority.