Representative Matthew Clay

Matthew Clay (March 25, 1754 – May 27, 1815) was a Virginia lawyer, planter, Continental Army officer, and politician who served in the Virginia House of Delegates and for nine terms in the United States House of Representatives representing Pittsylvania County. A member of the Jeffersonian Republican, or Democratic-Republican, Party, he was an influential figure in early national politics and participated actively in the legislative process during a formative period in American history, representing the interests of his Virginia constituents.

Clay was born on March 25, 1754, likely in that part of then-vast Goochland County, Virginia, which became Cumberland County in 1749 and later Powhatan County in 1777. He was the son of Martha Green and her husband Charles Clay, a planter and the son of Henry Clay of Chesterfield County. Through his father’s family, Matthew Clay was closely connected to one of the most prominent political lineages in early America: his uncle (his father’s brother) was the grandfather of Henry Clay of Kentucky, making the later statesman Henry Clay his first cousin. Matthew Clay grew up in a large and well-connected family. His brothers included the Reverend Charles Clay (1745–1820), General Green Clay (1757–1828), the Reverend Eleazer Clay, and Thomas and Henry Clay, as well as a sister, Martha Clay. Although specific details of Matthew Clay’s schooling are not known, his brothers were well educated, suggesting that he likely received a solid, if informal, education suitable for a future lawyer and public official. His father patented extensive tracts of land in what became eastern Pittsylvania County (then part of Halifax County), property that Matthew would ultimately inherit from a sibling and later develop as a planter.

During the American Revolutionary War, Clay entered military service in the Continental Army. He joined the Ninth Virginia Regiment on October 1, 1776, as an ensign and probably took part in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania campaigns, though he was on detached duty and not present at the disastrous Battle of Germantown. In May 1778 he was promoted to second lieutenant, and as casualties and consolidations reduced the Virginia line, his depleted regiment was merged into the First Virginia Regiment. By the end of 1778 he was serving as quartermaster of that regiment. Clay was not with the unit when it was ordered south and subsequently captured at the fall of Charleston in 1780. In February 1781 he was reassigned to the Fifth Virginia Regiment, a unit that existed largely on paper and was soon dissolved. He was mustered out of the Continental Army in January 1783 and became entitled to more than 2,660 acres of western bounty land in recognition of his service.

Following the war, Clay began his civil career in Richmond, where he worked as a clerk for the state solicitor general. His family remained active in public affairs; his brothers Charles and Green Clay both served as delegates to the Virginia Ratification Convention of 1788, where they opposed ratification of the proposed federal Constitution unless a Bill of Rights was added. Shortly thereafter, Matthew Clay moved to Pittsylvania County to farm land he had inherited from a brother. He established his home near Chestnut Level and combined planting with the practice of law, occupations he would pursue for the rest of his life. In addition to his legal and agricultural work, he became involved in local development and was named in 1793 as one of the original trustees of the then-unincorporated town of Danville, alongside Thomas Tunstall, William Harrison, John Wilson, Thomas Fearne, George Adams, and Thomas Smith.

Clay’s political career began in the Virginia House of Delegates. Pittsylvania County voters first elected him as one of their representatives in 1790, and he was re-elected four times, serving continuously through 1794. In the House of Delegates he served on the Committee of Propositions and Grievances and, in 1790, was appointed to a commission to improve the upper Roanoke River to permit commercial navigation. The following year he headed a commission to consider the removal of dams on the Bannister River to allow upstream migration of shad, a herring species important for both subsistence and commerce. As a member of the Committee on Religion in 1791, Clay supported a compromise measure, ultimately unsuccessful, that would have allowed the Episcopal Church to retain its glebe lands for the support of the minister and the poor of the parish; his position was informed in part by family ties, as his brother Charles had been rector of St. Anne’s Parish in Albemarle County before leaving the ministry to farm in Bedford County. Clay also advocated expanding suffrage to all white men who either owned property or could be compelled to bear arms, arguing on grounds of fairness. Known for a combative debating style, he once accused Pittsylvania’s other delegate of improprieties during the 1791 session and later made a formal apology to the House for his conduct.

Clay first sought national office in 1793, when he attempted to unseat incumbent Congressman Isaac Coles but was defeated. He ran again in 1796 and this time succeeded, in part by attacking Coles for having married an Englishwoman rather than a Virginia woman. Elected as a Democratic-Republican, Clay entered the Fifth Congress and was re-elected to the Fifth and seven succeeding Congresses, serving from March 4, 1797, to March 3, 1813, despite changes in district boundaries. In 1797 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives unopposed; in 1799 he was re-elected, defeating Federalist Isaac Coles; and in 1801 he was re-elected unopposed. Over his nine terms in Congress, Clay served on the Committee of Revisal and Unfinished Business and the Committee of Elections, becoming the ranking member of the latter in 1809. He also served on the Committee on Militia and became its chairman in the Tenth Congress. Initially a Jeffersonian Republican, he opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts and, in 1803, opposed the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801. Over time he became known for his strong devotion to states’ rights and a strict construction of the Constitution, positions that sometimes aligned him with figures who were otherwise critics of the Jeffersonian mainstream, such as John Randolph of Roanoke and John Taylor of Caroline. Reflecting his independent streak, he was one of only six Democratic-Republican representatives to vote against the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Clay’s later congressional career was marked by increasing factionalism within Virginia Republican politics and by the mounting tensions that led to the War of 1812. In the presidential maneuvering of 1808 he favored James Monroe over James Madison and only reluctantly agreed that Monroe should not formally challenge Madison and risk splitting the party. His stance on the question of war with Great Britain proved especially consequential. When the House voted in June 1812 on the Declaration of War, Clay abstained, one of only two Virginia Republicans who declined to support the measure. This refusal to vote for war was unpopular among many of his constituents and contributed to his defeat in a Republican primary in 1813 by John Kerr, who had previously challenged him unsuccessfully in 1811. As a result, Clay did not serve in the Thirteenth Congress. He regained his seat in the April 1815 election to the Fourteenth Congress, but he died before he could be sworn in, becoming one of the members of Congress who died in office during the period 1790–1899.

Clay’s personal life was closely tied to the social and economic structures of his region. On December 4, 1788, he married Mary Williams of Pittsylvania County. She died on March 25, 1798, after bearing two sons and two daughters. Her gravestone records her father and husband and mentions a daughter Sally and a son Joseph, while Clay’s will named his children as Joseph, Martha, and Amanda Anne; another daughter, Mary, perished in the Richmond Theatre fire of 1811. After Mary Williams’s death, Clay married Ann Saunders of Buckingham County, who bore him one daughter before dying on July 10, 1806. Evidence from his will suggests that Clay may also have had children out of wedlock; he directed his sons, whom he named as his executors, to provide for three girls and one boy when they reached the legal age for their gender. At his death he owned more than 3,000 acres in Kentucky and more than 1,800 acres in Pittsylvania County, along with at least thirteen enslaved people, reflecting his status as a substantial planter. His will further instructed his sons to give a fourteen-year-old boy named William Penn a horse, bridle, saddle, clothing, and $1,000 upon reaching the age of twenty-one, and to emancipate three mixed-race girls, then about eight years old, when they turned eighteen, providing each with clothing, $500, and transportation out of Virginia.

Matthew Clay died suddenly at Halifax Court House, Virginia, on May 27, 1815, while returning home from Richmond. He was never sworn into the Fourteenth Congress to which he had just been elected. His remains were probably interred in the family burial vault in Pittsylvania County, where his first wife and at least one of their children were also buried. At the time of his death he was remembered as a vigorous advocate of states’ rights and strict constitutional interpretation, a long-serving representative of Pittsylvania County in both state and national legislatures, and a figure whose career spanned the Revolutionary era, the creation of the federal government, and the early decades of the American republic.