Henry Clay

CLAY, HENRY

Fiery southern lawmaker, Speaker of the House, and SECRETARY OF STATE Henry Clay played a pivotal role in preserving the Union during the early and middle years of the nineteenth century. Clay rose from modest origins to become a well-known politician. During his lifetime, the self-educated leader was known as the Great Compromiser and the Great Pacifier, epithets earned for his ability to find the necessary middle ground between the federal government and the states over issues such as SLAVERY, tariffs, and the admittance of new states to the Union. Argumentative, eloquent, and quick to propose a duel if insulted, he helped forge the MISSOURI COMPROMISE OF 1820 during a career that included five bids for the presidency. His contributions to federal policy ranged from trade and finance to foreign affairs in the administration of President JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.

Born in Hanover County, Virginia, on April
12, 1777, Clay became a lawyer by the age of 20.
He moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he
entered private practice while keeping an eye
open for an entry to politics. Frontier life suited
him. He especially liked gambling and drinking,
pursuits that only exacerbated his hot temper.
But he flourished as an attorney. His sharp oratory
brought him prominence and while not yet
thirty he represented former vice president
AARON BURR in GRAND JURY proceedings
involving Burr’s real estate dealings.
In 1799, Clay married the socially prominent
Lucretia Hart. Clay and his wife eventually had
eleven children, and great tragedy. All six daughters
and one son died at a young age.
Clay rose quickly through Kentucky politics.
He used his opposition to the repressive ALIEN
AND SEDITION ACTS of 1798 as a springboard
into the state legislature in 1803, where he ultimately
served seven terms. Immensely popular
with his fellow lawmakers, Clay was their choice
to fill an expired term in the U.S. Senate in
1806—despite his not having reached the constitutionally
mandated minimum age of thirty.
In 1810, he assumed a vacant seat in the Senate
for a one-year period.
Two ironies emerged from Clay’s early political
career. Both would bear on his future course
as a national leader. First, he opposed slavery and
favored emancipation, an unusual and unpopular
position in nineteenth-century southern politics.
Clay saw slavery as evil. He was not,
however, ultimately interested in African Americans
sharing in U.S. society: he would later
become an originator of the American Colonization
Society, which sought to return former
slaves to Africa, and at his death, his will would
free the fifty slaves he had owned and provide for
their transportation to Liberia. Second, Clay’s
sensitivity to insult and his hair-trigger temper
landed him in personal crises that would continue
throughout his career. He fought his first
duel with a fellow Kentucky lawmaker in 1809,
and by the time he became secretary of state, he
would be DUELING with a U.S. senator.
Brief service in Washington, D.C., whetted
Clay’s appetite for a national political career.
From 1811 to 1821, and 1823 to 1825, he was
elected to the House of Representatives as a
Democratic-Republican. He served as Speaker
of the House for all but two of those years. Clay
advocated a national economic policy that he
called the American System, an ambitious
attempt to link the East and West through transportation
reforms, protectionism in the form of
tariffs to boost U.S. industries, a plan for
national defense, and a reorganization of the
National Bank. Calling for war with Britain in
1812, he became nationally prominent as a leading
member of the so-called War Hawks. In
1814, he acted as a representative to the Ghent
Peace Commission, which ended the WAR OF
1812. Strong stands were his trademark: in 1819,
opposing General Andrew Jackson’s invasion of
Florida, he resigned as Speaker of the House.
In 1820 Clay helped bring about the Missouri
Compromise. This was a federal response
to a bitter controversy over new slave states’
joining the Union, which came to a head when
the slave-owning Missouri Territory applied for
admission in 1818. Northerners objected to the
entry of more slave states. Southerners protested
when the House considered a measure that
would block further slavery in Missouri. Thomas
Jefferson declared the Missouri issue—and in
particular questions of constitutional authority—
to be part of a Federalist conspiracy to
destroy the Union. Clay drafted a compromise, persuading northern lawmakers to drop the
slavery restriction, while southern lawmakers
agreed to limit the geographic boundaries of
slavery. In 1821 he secured a second compromise
in the form of a resolution that prohibited
Missouri from discriminating against citizens
from other states. Clay won wide praise for his
work, although the compromise would be
undone in time by the Supreme Court and the
question of slavery would be ultimately decided
by the Civil War.
As a candidate of the WHIG PARTY, Clay
made his first of five bids for the White House in
1824. He never succeeded, but the first failure
bore fruit. In a runoff between Jackson and
Adams that was decided in the House, Clay gave
his support to Adams, who won. Clay’s reward
was the job of secretary of state, one he had long
coveted.
For years, Democrats bitterly scorned the
obvious deal, and the criticism wounded Clay.
By 1826, he became the target of a particularly
venomous attack by Senator John Randolph, an
old opponent, who compared Clay to one of the
scoundrels from Henry Fielding’s novel Tom
Jones in a series of blasts at Clay’s competence
and ethics as secretary. Clay promptly challenged
Randolph to a little-celebrated pistol
duel—a series of bad aims and misfires in which
neither man could hit anything and the two
ended up shaking hands.
In 1831 Clay was elected to the Senate. He
represented Kentucky for an eleven-year stretch,
to which he added another term from 1849 to
1852. Two of his achievements were significant.
One was the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which
eased the situation caused by South Carolina’s
nullification policy—a political doctrine under
which a state held that it could reject any federal
law that it deemed unconstitutional. Upset over
federal tariffs that it found discriminatory,
South Carolina had refused to allow tariffs to be
collected in its state and had threatened to
secede from the Union. This refusal brought the
first test of a state’s decision to invoke nullification,
and the reaction was swift: President Jackson,
declaring that the state had no right to
nullify a federal law, threatened to send troops.
Clay’s compromise called for a gradually declining
tariff, which pleased South Carolina, averting
further trouble. But, like the Missouri
Compromise, it was a temporary balm to the
aggravations between the North and the South.
Clay’s greatest achievement occurred at the
end of his long career. In 1850, as the question of
slavery threatened to split the nation, he formulated
a plan that fairly decided the admission of
California and the New Mexico and Utah territories
as free or slave states.Again, a compromise
of his averted civil war.
Clay died two years later, on June 29, 1852, in
Washington, D.C. The war he had helped forestall
came less than a decade after his death.
FURTHER READINGS
Baxter, Maurice G. 2000. Henry Clay the Lawyer. Lexington:
Univ. Press of Kentucky.
Clement, Eaton. 1957. Henry Clay and the Art of American
Politics. Boston: Little, Brown.
Remini, Robert V. 1991.Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union.
New York: Norton.