This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on the show,

including your story.

Send them to Our American Stories.com.

They're some of our favorites.

And this next story comes to us with the help of John Elfner,

a high school history teacher and a regular contributor to our show.

Kentucky journalist Sam Terry

tells the story of the man they called King Solomon.

In November of 1854, the Reverend William M. Pratt recorded in his diary,

I preached the funeral today of Old King Solomon, 79 years old.

He was born the same year with Henry Clay and had drunk whiskey enough

to float a man-of-war. He was once a person of considerable enterprise and business, but he had been

given to drink a great many years, and yet was inoffensive and of great integrity. Quite a number of

citizens attended his funeral,

and he had a good coffin worth $30, and some 17 carriages processed to the cemetery.

The deceased was William King Solomon, a Virginia native who claimed to have been a boyhood

acquaintance of Harry, as he called Henry Clay,

jesting that his own work as a digger of cellars and cisterns was less elevated than the famous statesman.

His loyalty to Clay was unprecedented.

When one of Clay's opponents for re-election offered strong drink to Solomon in

exchange for his vote, Solomon took him up on the offer and then proceeded to vote for Clay. When

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