Henry Clay’s Coffin: The Politics of Death and Material Culture

When Senator Henry Clay died in 1852, his Washington DC funeral was followed by weeks of commemoration as his body traveled around the United States on its way to burial in Lexington, Century.  This poster explores how the material culture of Henry Clay's death, particularly how his elaborate coffin, links to major themes in mid-nineteenth-century U.S. history: spectacular political conflict, the development of popular culture, and the advent of consumer culture.  Many mourners for Henry Clay worried that his death marked the death of compromise, an opportunity for the sectional political conflicts of the 1850s to worsen. Clay's corpse was paraded through major northern cities in an elaborate version of a recent invention, the Fisk's patent coffin, a metal coffin intended to prevent the decay of bodily remains.  The press focused public attention on the state of Clay's body and on the material conditions of the coffin, as tens of thousands of readers followed his progress and tens of thousands more came out in person to celebrate the deceased senator.  The poster will analyze how descriptions of Clay's coffin, and related descriptions of his corpse, transformed his death into a political spectacle.  Would Clay's bodily decay mirror the threatened decay of national Union?  Clay's coffin, itself, became the subject of public fascination, in part because Fisk's used Clay's death as a marketing opportunity.  Using a wide array of visual and textual sources including newspapers, songs, pamphlets, engravings, catalogues, manuscripts, and more, this research connects material culture to popular political culture and to a growing body of scholarship on the culture of mourning and death.  Henry Clay's coffin turns out to be a surprisingly interesting, if morbid, way of examining the coming of the U.S. Civil War.