For it was not here, in this comfortable mansion, beneath those graceful, hospitable, swaying trees, that THE GREAT COMMONER was born and reared; but in a rude, homely farm-house,[19] which had any man given five hundred dollars for, he would have been enormously swindled, unless he paid in Continental money,--in a primitive, rural, thinly peopled section of Hanover County (near Richmond), Virginia; where his father, Rev. John Clay, a poor Baptist preacher, lived, and struggled, and finally died, leaving a widow and seven young children, with no reliance but the mother's energies and the benignant care of the widow's and orphan's God. This was in 1782, near the close of the Revolutionary War, when so much of the country as had not been ravaged by the enemy's forces, had been nearly exhausted by our own, and by the incessant exactions of a protracted, harassing, desolating, industry-paralyzing civil war. The fifth of these seven children was Henry, born on the 12th of April, 1777, who remained in that humble home until fourteen years of age, when his mother, who had married a second time, being about to remove to Kentucky, placed him in a store at Richmond, under the eye of his oldest brother, then nearly or quite of age, but who died very soon afterwards, leaving Henry an orphan indeed. He was thus thrown completely on his own exertions, when still but a child, and without having enjoyed any other educational advantages than such as were fitfully afforded by occasional private schools, in operation perhaps two or three months in a year, and kept by teachers somewhat ruder than the log tenement which circumscribed their labors. Such was all the "schooling" ever enjoyed by the ragged urchin, whose bright summer days were necessarily given to ploughing and hoeing in the corn-fields, barefoot, bareheaded, and clad in coarse trowsers and shirt, and whose daily tasks were diversified by frequent rides of two or three miles to the nearest grist-mill, on a sorry cob, bestrode with no other saddle than the grain-bag; whence many of his childhood's neighbors, contrasting, long afterward, the figure he cut in Congress, at Ghent, in Paris or London, with that which they had seen so often pass in scanty garb, but jocund spirits, on these family errands, recalled him to mind in his primitive occupation as _The Mill-Boy of the Slashes_, by which _sobriquet_ he was fondly hailed by thousands in the pride of his ripened renown.