He was the architect of his own fortunes. His early opportunities were limited, and he had never been able to obtain a liberal education. His father was a Baptist preacher, at that time of no account in Virginia, and there was no relationship with “first families.” Henry Clay was strictly of the people and a son of the people; his blood was intensely red, without any tinge of patrician blue. Early left an orphan he ate the bread of poverty, and at a tender age was taught to work for a livelihood, to plough, to dig and labor in the harvest field. He was generally known in the region as “the Mill Boy of the Slashes.” Fortunately for him when he was fourteen years of age, his mother married a second husband, a man quick to perceive the ability of the youth and to find him opportunity. He was placed for a year in a retail store in Richmond, and afterward in the office of the clerk of the High Court of Chancery. A biographer describes him at this period as raw-boned, lank and awkward, with a countenance by no means handsome, and dressed in garments home-made and ill-fitting, with linen starched to such a stiffness as to make him look peculiarly strange and uncomfortable. As he took his place at the desk to copy papers, his new companions tittered at his appearance, and his blushing confusion. They soon learned to like him, however, and he was found to be a faithful and industrious worker. He read incessantly during his hours of leisure but unfortunately acquired a habit of cursory perusing, a “skimming over” which he never conquered, and which seriously interfered with thoroughness. This became afterward to him a source of profound regret. 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.”