Henry Clay

American politician

• Born: April 12, 1777
• Birthplace: Hanover County, Virginia
• Died: June 29, 1852
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Clay was a dominant figure in American politics during the first half of the nineteenth century. His so-called American System and efforts to find a national compromise in the controversy over slavery helped ease the growing tensions within the Union.

Early Life

Henry Clay was born on a Virginia farm. His parents, the Reverend John Clay, a Baptist minister, and Elizabeth Hudson Clay, were of English descent and reasonably prosperous, though certainly not wealthy. His father died when Henry was four, but his mother was remarried within a year to Captain Henry Watkins, who maintained the family’s financial status. Henry received a few years of schooling and developed remarkable penmanship, a skill that served him well when his stepfather moved the family in 1792.

At the age of fifteen, Clay stayed in Richmond to work for the Clerk of the High Court of Chancery. In 1793, Clay was hired by the famous lawyerGeorge Wythe as a part-time secretary. Almost seventy, Wythe was a leader of Virginia’s bar and had enjoyed a distinguished career as teacher of law and classics. Under Wythe’s tutelage, Clay studied the law and, a few years later, left his clerk’s position to study under Robert Brooke, former governor and later attorney general of Virginia. In November, 1797, Clay passed his bar examination.

Like other ambitious Virginians, the young attorney moved to Kentucky, where confusion over land claims created a lawyer’s paradise. At twenty, Clay was over six feet tall, thin, and walked with a shambling gait. His face, capable of creating considerable impact with a change of expression, was capped by hair so light as to be almost prematurely white. His eyes were small, gray, and piercing, his nose prominent, and from his large mouth issued his most valuable asset: his voice. Coupled with an emotional temperament, this voice, suited for an actor, made him a formidable opponent in frontier courts, where persuasion was frequently more important than legal knowledge.

The stage for Clay’s legal theatrics was Lexington, Kentucky, a village on its way to becoming the “Athens of the West.” Though appearing in frail health, Clay demonstrated his skill in local debates and was admitted to the Kentucky bar on March 20, 1798. Before a successful legal career made him a local legend, the budding jurist married Lucretia Hart, daughter of the influential merchant Thomas Hart. The marriage not only connected Clay with an important local family but also provided him with a patient, loving wife who bore him eleven children. By 1800, Henry Clay was a member of Lexington’s establishment.

Life’s Work

Clay’s debut as a radical Jeffersonian came when he spoke for a liberalization of the state’s constitution and made speeches attacking the Alien and Sedition Acts. He supported Jefferson in 1800 and, in 1803, won election to the Kentucky legislature. There he demonstrated his talent as a parliamentary tactician and also flirted with disaster by becoming counsel for Aaron Burr, who was charged with an alleged conspiracy to invade Mexico. Unaware of the extent of Burr’s activities, Clay successfully defended Burr in Kentucky’s courts, but later, as the import of Burr’s schemes became apparent, Clay repudiated his dangerous client.

While acting as counsel for Burr, Clay was selected to fill an unexpired term in the U.S. Senate. Apparently no one paid any attention to the fact that he was a few months short of the required age. This brief performance in Washington, D.C., began a lifelong crusade for a national program based on internal improvements at federal expense and a protective tariff. Such measures were joined by an expansionistic, anti-British foreign policy. Clay’s jingoism increased when he moved to the House of Representatives and became its Speaker. There, along with other “war hawks,” Clay helped push the nation into the War of 1812. When the struggle did not bring victory, Clay found himself a member of the American delegation sent to Ghent, Belgium, to negotiate an end to the war he had helped to create. In spite of the negative reaction of John Quincy Adams, head of the delegation, who objected to Clay’s Western habits of drinking, swearing, and gambling, the Kentuckian proved an able diplomat.

In the postwar years, Clay became a chief proponent of American nationalism and envisioned a truly united country tied together by bonds of economic interest as well as a common ideology. The government’s role in his American System was to promote harmony through economic development. Key to his system was a new national bank. Suspicious of the first Bank of the United States , Clay had helped to block its recharter in 1811, but financial confusion during the war convinced him that a centralized financial system was imperative. From this time until the end of his career, Clay’s name would be associated with the idea of a national bank.

Clay’s legislative success made it seem that Clay’s elevation to the White House was only a matter of time. His successful solution to the slavery controversy further encouraged his supporters. In 1819, Missouri applied for admission as a slave state. Hostility on both sides of the question threatened to divide the Union. Though a slave owner himself, Clay had moral reservations about slavery and supported gradual emancipation coupled with colonization. In fact, Clay had been a founder of the American Colonization Society in 1816. In his mind, however, the abolition of slavery was of less importance than the preservation of the Union. In the House, he helped frame the famous Missouri Compromise , which brought in Maine as a free state to balance Missouri and divided the rest of the Louisiana Territory. Though many politicians were involved, the compromise was seen as Clay’s handiwork.

Clay’s popularity did not immediately convert into political success. Clay was unhappy with the Monroe administration. The president selected a New Englander, John Quincy Adams, as secretary of state, a post that Clay had expected. Sectional harmony had been purchased at the cost of alienating Kentucky’s “Hotspur.” Clay frequently criticized the administration’s lack of support for the Latin American revolutions, a stand that made him popular in South America. His persistence was rewarded with Monroe’s famous doctrine in 1823, but from Clay’s perspective it was too little, too late. Most important, however, his quibbling with the Monroe administration obscured a serious threat to his political future: Jacksonian democracy.

Since 1800, the U.S. politics had been dominated by Jefferson’s party, but, in 1824, four prominent leaders, Clay, Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford, and John Quincy Adams, entered the contest for president. Almost everyone underestimated the military hero from the War of 1812, Jackson. When the final votes were in, no candidate had a majority, but Jackson won a plurality. Shocked and disappointed, Clay came in fourth and was thus eliminated from consideration by the House. When Clay announced his support for Adams, which in effect made Adams president, Jackson was furious.

Suspicions of underhanded dealing seemed confirmed when Adams appointed Clay secretary of state. This supposedly “corrupt bargain” provided a rallying cry for Jacksonians in the next election. While there is no evidence of prior arrangement, Jackson’s complaint reveals an important difference between him and his rivals. Adams, Crawford, and Clay were all part of the leadership in Washington. Jackson, while a national military hero, had never been part of the Washington establishment. There was simply not enough room at the top, and Jackson became a lightning rod attracting those in politics and society who felt left out. Moreover, Democrats, taking advantage of extended suffrage, directed their appeal toward the common person even though Jackson and his allies were hardly common men.

Clay’s new role in foreign affairs turned out be of little political value. The real drama was taking place internally, where followers of Jackson made a wreck of Adams’s administration. The president was no match for the new kind of politician. Adams’s style of leadership suited an earlier age; politics now stressed personality. Cold, aloof, and even arrogant, the president introduced a program designed to improve his constituents. Jacksonians were content to direct their appeal to the lowest common denominator. In 1828, Jackson’s presidential victory changed American politics forever.

With Jackson and his minions ensconced in the White House, the anti-Jacksonian opposition began to fall apart. By mid-1829, however, Clay’s Kentucky estate had become the center of another presidential campaign, and, in late 1831, its master once again returned to the Senate and was quickly nominated for president by a national Republican convention. The ensuing struggle revolved around the second Bank of the United States. Motivated by partisan concerns, the bank’s supporters pushed for recharter before it was necessary. Clay believed that the effort would place Jackson in an untenable position. He was wrong. Jackson reacted quickly by vetoing the recharter bill and destroying the bank by removing government deposits. Jackson’s policies did cause defections among his supporters, but his enemies miscalculated the impact on the electorate. As ignorant of banking practices as their president, voters sympathized with Jackson’s struggle, and the result was a smashing defeat of Clay’s presidential aspirations.

There was no time for recriminations. As dust from the election settled, a South Carolina convention passed an Ordinance of Nullification against the tariffs of 1828 and 1832. The power to act rested with the president. Supposedly in favor of states’ rights and less than enthusiastic about a tariff, Jackson, as usual, surprised everyone. Standing firmly for national supremacy, he asked Congress to pass the so-called Force Bill, granting the executive special authority in the crisis. Congress began to scramble for a compromise that would avert a military confrontation between South Carolina and the federal government. At center stage was Henry Clay. His compromise tariff gave South Carolina an excuse to back down without losing face. Once again, Clay had been instrumental in saving the Union.

In Jackson’s second term, a new opposition party was created by a single idea: hatred of Andrew Jackson. It reached into British history for a name signifying resistance to tyranny: Whig. Its program was dominated by Clay’s American System coupled with a bias against executive power, but it also adopted attitudes toward political opportunism pioneered by Jacksonians. To Clay’s disappointment, the new party was too fragmented to unite around a single candidate in 1836.

Hoping to throw the election into the House, the Whigs selected three sectional candidates to face Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren . The strategy failed; Van Buren won. Whig frustration vanished when, a few months into the new administration, the country was rocked by an economic depression. Clay, secure in the Senate, was in an excellent position for the election of 1840, but his fellow Whigs were unsure. With his legions of enemies, Clay’s name could unite Jacksonians as nothing else could. As a result, the party’s convention turned away from its real leader and chose William Henry Harrison . Inwardly furious, Clay publicly supported the Harrison ticket.

The Whigs won, at last, by turning the tables on their enemies. Harrison was a military hero, and the campaign that elected him avoided serious political discussion. Still, most Whigs viewed the victory as a chance to reverse the tide in favor of Clay’s American System. They soon realized that they were mistaken. Harrison’s death a few months after inauguration brought to the White House a man who did not share Whig ideals. John Tyler had been nominated for vice president to ensure the loyalty of southern Whigs. When Congress passed the Whig legislative agenda, Tyler promptly vetoed the most significant measure, a bill creating a national bank. The result was chaos. Most of the cabinet resigned, and Tyler governed without party backing.

Tyler’s defection left Clay the unchallenged leader of his party, and the presidency, in 1844, seemed his. Once again, however, fate intervened. Pressure for annexation of Texas had been growing. Clay, like other established leaders, feared Texas would rekindle the slavery controversy. Though generally an expansionist, he came out against annexation, expecting that a similar stand by the likely Democratic nominee, Van Buren, would remove the touchy question. After Clay’s nomination, the Democrats repudiated Van Buren and nominated the ardent annexationist James K. Polk of Tennessee. As the campaign progressed, Texas captured the public imagination, and Polk’s narrow victory was probably the bitterest defeat of Clay’s career.

In such circumstances most men would have welcomed retirement, but Clay’s unquenchable love of political combat made it impossible. Moreover, the country needed him. As feared, Texas brought with it the Mexican War and reopened debate over slavery. Clay hoped for the Whig presidential nomination in 1848, but for the last time his party betrayed him. Concerned about his age and poor health, the Whigs nominated another military hero, Zachary Taylor .

Bitter but unbowed, Clay played one last role on the American political stage. Unsophisticated in politics, newly elected President Taylor only exacerbated the conflict over slavery. When California applied for admission as a free state with the administration’s blessing, the country once again faced disunion. As always, the senator from Kentucky stood in the way of a complete rupture within the Union. In spite of frail health, he framed a series of measures that became the famous Compromise of 1850 . Working in the brutally hot Washington, D.C., summer until his health broke, Clay turned over the leadership of the compromisers to a younger colleague, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, and watched from the sidelines as Douglas pushed through the final legislation. This desperate attempt at sectional peace had only a brief life, but Henry Clay did not live to see it collapse. He died in Washington, D.C., the scene of so many of his triumphs, on June 29, 1852, two years before his last compromise unraveled.

Significance

Throughout his long career, Clay’s programs and personality were always controversial. To supporters, he was the best that American politics had to offer, and they often regarded him with near adulation. To enemies, he represented the United States at its worst, and they hated him with unbridled passion. Like most politicians, some of his positions changed with time and circumstance, but one element remained consistent—his vision of national purpose. Clay saw his country as the hope of humankind. He genuinely believed the republican system to be superior and looked forward to its spread. In a sense, his American System was designed to further this aim by making the United States stronger. The Union could continue to exist, Clay believed, only if the states would work for mutual benefit. The cement that would glue the nation together was a cooperative economic system managed by the common government.

Clay’s vision was a short-run failure. During his own time, the American System was submerged under the rising tide of Jacksonian democracy and the new style of politics it spawned. Only eight years after Clay’s death the country he loved was embroiled in the civil war that his many compromises had sought to avert. Like so many of his generation, Clay had been unable to face the moral dilemma created by slavery, which could not be compromised away. In the long run, however, Clay’s vision was a success. The country that emerged from the Civil War was much closer to Clay’s America than to Jackson’s.

Bibliography

Baxter, Maurice G. Henry Clay and the American System. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Detailed study of Clay, his views on economic development, and his impact upon American government.

Eaton, Clement. Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics. Boston: Little, Brown, 1957. A concise biographical treatment in The Library of American Biography, edited by Oscar Handlin. Concentrating on Clay’s political career, it follows the evolution of Clay from an advocate of Western interests to a true nationalist.

Howe, Daniel Walker. The Political Culture of American Whigs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. A thoughtful analysis of Whig ideology. Clay is a central figure, and the book contains valuable insights into the source of Whiggery.

Mayo, Benard. Henry Clay: Spokesman of the New West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937. The classic, scholarly biography of Clay. A colorful, well-written account that deals with Clay’s private as well as public life. The treatment of Clay’s early life in Kentucky is particularly valuable.

Poage, George Rawlings. Henry Clay and the Whig Party. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936. A biographical treatment that concentrates on Clay’s role in the founding and development of the Whig Party. The work is well documented but somewhat dated.

Remini, Robert Vincent. Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Remini, who has written several books about Andrew Jackson, here provides a comprehensive and scholarly biography of Jackson’s rival, Clay. Includes a chronology and a genealogy of Clay’s family.

Sargent, Epes. The Life and Public Services of Henry Clay Down to 1848. Buffalo, N.Y.: Derby, Orton, and Mulligan, 1853. Completed soon after Clay’s death as a memorial to the leader of American Whiggery. Biased and dated, but still an excellent example of the pro-Clay biographies written during his era.

Shankman, Kimberly Christner. Compromise and the Constitution: The Political Thought of Henry Clay. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1999. Examines Clay’s political thinking and his approach to republican statecraft.

Van Deusen, Glyndon G. The Life of Henry Clay. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937. A somewhat critical biography of Clay. Well researched and well written, the study provides balance when compared with the usual attitude of Clay’s biographers.

Watson, Harry L. Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998. Dual biography, describing the two men’s conflicting visions for the future of the United States. Includes reprints of twenty-five primary documents, including speeches and letters.