Kentuckians in the National Portrait Gallery: part one

Shelby, Clay had significant ties to Clark County

While clean­ing out the attic, Clare found a four-vol­ume, leather-bound set of books enti­tled The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, 1859 edi­tion, by James B. Longacre and James Herring.  (The first edi­tion of these works appeared in the 1830s.) 

Each vol­ume cov­ers thir­ty-six sub­jects with an accom­pa­ny­ing bio­graph­i­cal sketch and an engrav­ing of their por­trait.  A huge sum, $40,000, was spent prepar­ing steel engrav­ings from the orig­i­nal por­traits.  Six Kentuckians are includ­ed in these works, and each has sig­nif­i­cant ties to Clark County.  That list includes Isaac Shelby, Henry Clay, Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, Simon Kenton, and Zachary Taylor.

While doing back­ground research for this arti­cle, sev­er­al mis­tak­en ideas had to be dis­card­ed.  I assumed that all the orig­i­nal por­traits of the sub­jects hung in the National Portrait Gallery on the mall in Washington, D.C.  But, as I learned and you may already know, the NPG was not estab­lished until 1962.  It turns out the authors coined the term more than a cen­tu­ry before there was an actu­al “gallery.”  The authors state in the pref­ace to Volume 1, “The por­trait painters whose scat­tered works are here col­lect­ed [are] pre­served by the art of the engraver.”

The repro­duc­tion of Isaac Shelby was made from the orig­i­nal oil paint­ing of Shelby, exe­cut­ed by Matthew Harris Jouett in about 1816.  The Filson Historical Society in Louisville owns this invalu­able portrait. 

Isaac Shelby (1750−1826) was an offi­cer in the Revolutionary War.  He played a key role in the American vic­to­ry at King’s Mountain.  Shelby was select­ed by vot­ers as Kentucky’s first gov­er­nor.  America’s sec­ond war with England, the War of 1812, was fought dur­ing Shelby’s sec­ond term.  Gen. William Henry Harrison, mil­i­tary com­man­der in the Northwest Territory, asked the gov­er­nor for his sup­port.  At age 62, Shelby led an army of 3,500 Kentucky vol­un­teers to the north­west, where they joined Harrison in a cam­paign that cul­mi­nat­ed in the American vic­to­ry at the Battle of the Thames.  Shelby mar­ried Susanna Hart, whose father, Nathaniel Hart, was killed by Indians near Fort Boonesborough.

Isaac Shelby owned land in Clark County.  He and his broth­er Evan both obtained 500-acre tracts by virtue of mil­i­tary war­rants.  These land war­rants were issued for ser­vice in the French and Indian War, not the Revolutionary War.  Isaac Shelby did not fight in the for­mer; he pur­chased the war­rant from anoth­er sol­dier who had.  The land lay on the east side of a patent award­ed to Dr. Thomas Hind.  Shelby’s tract was sit­u­at­ed on the east side of present-day Becknerville Road, strad­dling Colby Road.

Two engrav­ings of Henry Clay were includ­ed for sev­er­al rea­sons.  First, they are not among the more com­mon­ly seen por­tray­als of Clay.  Secondly, one of the engrav­ings was not made from a paint­ing but rather from a daguerreo­type, an ear­ly type of pho­to­graph­ic print.  That like­ness is thought to have been cap­tured by Samuel Root in about 1851 at his New York stu­dio.  The oth­er illus­tra­tion of Clay, show­ing a much younger man, is from the 1833 edi­tion of the work. 

Henry Clay (1777−1852) came to Kentucky in the win­ter of 1797 and set­tled in Lexington.  Few are aware that he began his law prac­tice in Winchester.  On February 27, 1798, the 21-year-old Clay was admit­ted to the Clark County bar.  This pre­dat­ed his license to prac­tice in Fayette, obtained on March 20, 1798.  It is dif­fi­cult to com­ment on Clay’s per­for­mance in Clark County as the old court records rarely list the attorney’s name.  The first case I could locate was Ambrose Bush v. Luke Holder in February 1799.  The case was set­tled out of court.

Clay also served as the deputy state’s attor­ney for the Clark County Court of Quarter Sessions.  This was the equiv­a­lent of today’s coun­ty attor­ney.  He was appoint­ed to that post in April 1801 and resigned that post after serv­ing for one year. 

“By a remark­able coin­ci­dence,” Henry Clay is said to have “made his first speech in a law case in the court house at Winchester, and also his last in a case tried there just before he went to Washington city for the last time.”  The author­i­ty for this state­ment is Richard H. Collins’ History of Kentucky. 

A sim­i­lar claim was made by James Flanagan, a local judge and his­to­ri­an of Clark County.  According to Judge Flanagan, Clay made his last speech at court in the cel­e­brat­ed will con­test of Joel Quisenberry’s heirs.  After the wealthy Quisenberry died in 1847, his daugh­ters brought suit to break his will on grounds of incom­pe­tence and undue influ­ence by his sons.  A ver­i­ta­ble who’s who of attor­neys rep­re­sent­ed the par­ties.  Henry Clay appeared for the plain­tiffs (daugh­ters).  The tri­al end­ed in a hung jury.  In his open­ing speech, Clay “allud­ed feel­ing­ly to the fact that fifty years before he had made his debut as an attor­ney at the bar of Winchester.”  Flanagan, who was twen­ty-sev­en years old at the time, wit­nessed the speech.