There have been many great men and women to sit in the House and the Senate. Few, however, have rivalled Henry Clay — who first came to Congress in 1806 at the age of 29 and served for much of the next 46 years, until his death in 1852.
Clay was unique in how he applied his special talents — for oratory, for glad-handing, for politicking — to national purposes. One can appreciate this from the subtitles of recent Clay biographies. Robert Remini — though generally partial to Clay’s rival Andrew Jackson — subtitled his work “Statesmen for the Union.” David and Jeanne Heidler call him “The Essential American.” H.W. Brands’s book — Heirs of the Founders — identifies Clay along with John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster as an “American Giant.” James Clotter calls him, “The Man Who Would Be President.”
Klotter’s title suggests a special irony about Clay, who tried and failed three times to secure the presidency. There was nothing more that he wanted, but he never achieved it. Yet it was his work in Congress that proved so important. Clay held the Union together during this tumultuous period of American history, built up Congress as an institution, and provided a vision of how republican politics could function in the legislature.
Harry of the West
Born in Virginia in 1777, Clay settled in Lexington, Kentucky in 1797, where he soon established a thriving law practice. He earned a reputation for his oratorical brilliance and legal skills, particularly in representing the interests of the local elite. He was also a drinker, gambler, ladies man, and dueler. He was injured after he exchanged rounds with Federalist Humphrey Marshall.
Clay began his first of four stints in the United States Senate in 1806, just briefly to finish the remainder of his predecessor’s term. Though he was only 29 at the time, his ineligibility was not challenged. Even at this early point in his career, he was an unabashed nationalist, calling for government sponsorship of internal improvements — a point that many Jeffersonian Republicans agreed with, but worried that it required a constitutional amendment. Clay impressed Washingtonians not only with his flair for oratory, but his ability to wheel and deal with fellow politicos.
First elected to the House in 1810, Clay was chosen as the speaker of the 12th Congress while a freshman, the only person ever to achieve that honor. Relations with Great Britain were at their most fraught since the Revolution, and Clay emerged as a key “War Hawk,” encouraging the James Madison Administration to go to war. In 1814, Madison appointed Clay to join a peace delegation that included Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin and Senator John Quincy Adams. Clay was an integral part in negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, signed on Christmas Eve of that year.
The end of the war brought an upsurge of nationalism, and a boost to Clay’s soaring prestige. Sometimes called “Harry of the West” or “Prince Hal,” Clay emerged as the first great political figure outside the original 13 states. From his perch as speaker, Clay shepherded Madison’s ambitious legislative agenda through the 15th Congress — including a new Bank of the United States and a protective tariff. Clay would include these two proposals along with an initiative to build internal improvements into a package he entitled the “American System,” a program of federally-directed national development that would balance the benefits of federal investment across all the major regions of the nation.
Bargains and Compromises
Clay had hoped to be named secretary of state in the administration of James Monroe, but the position went to Adams. Clay remained in Congress and turned his ambitious energy toward lawmaking. He helped broker the Missouri Compromise (1820), which brought Missouri into the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and established a boundary line for slavery into the Louisiana Territory. This showed Clay at his most skilled yet principled, working the backrooms to secure passage of a deal that would promote territorial expansion while holding the Union together.
Clay launched his first of three presidential bids in 1824, positioning himself as a son of the West and an unabashed advocate of the American System. But he finished fourth in the running — behind General Andrew Jackson, Adams, and Secretary of Treasury William Crawford. His position as Speaker essentially made him kingmaker, as the absence of an electoral college majority meant the House had to decide the victory. Clay used his leverage to secure the presidency for Adams, despite the fact that Jackson had won more votes (although New York, where Adams ran much stronger than Jackson, did not have a popular vote contest). Adams in turn made Clay secretary of state, prompting charges of a “corrupt bargain,” an alleged quid pro quo between the two to deny Jackson, the people’s choice, the presidency.
In truth, Clay never would have supported Jackson, whom he had once denounced as a “military chieftain” for his illegal invasion of Florida during the Monroe Administration. Adams and Clay were polar opposites in terms of personality — the stiff and puritanical Adams was quite a contrast to the western gambler Clay — but ideologically they were similar. Adams’s fraught administration saw the emergence of a new party system, in which the Jacksonian Democrats were arrayed against the National Republicans, later the Whigs.
Adams was soundly defeated in 1828 and Clay retired from politics, but only temporarily. He returned to the Senate in 1831 with dreams of finally winning the White House. The National Republicans nominated him as their candidate to challenge Jackson in 1832. The contest for the presidency focused on the Bank of the United States. Clay had long championed it, but Jackson had vetoed its recharter earlier that year. Clay was optimistic that nationwide support for the Bank, which had helped grow the economy, would lift him to the White House, but it was not to be. The people trusted Jackson, and Clay was defeated.
The Great Triumvirate
Clay spent the next decade in the United States Senate, where he continued to advocate for the American System, to minimal success. The newly-christened Whig Party won the presidency in 1840 with William Henry Harrison as its nominee, and Clay was optimistic that his nationalist policies would be enacted. But Harrison died shortly after his inauguration and John Tyler was elevated to the presidency. Tyler was an old-school Jeffersonian, chosen to bring balance to the ticket but far more conservative in his views. He vetoed an effort to restore the Bank, a frustration for Clay.
Still, Clay maintained an important role. In 1833 he secured his second great compromise, bringing an end to the Nullification Crisis. South Carolina, suffering economic stagnation and burdened by extremely high tariff rates, had declared the tariff of 1828 null and void in its state in November 1832. Jackson threatened to march an army to the Palmetto State to assert federal authority, and Congress passed the Force Bill to empower him to do precisely that. But Clay worked behind the scenes with John C. Calhoun — the leader of the South Carolina nullifiers — to reach a compromise in which tariff rates would slowly be reduced. Clay’s success vaunted him to the summit of congressional personalities — a “Great Triumvirate” that included Calhoun and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. For the next decade, these men would dominate the upper chamber, transforming it into an august forum in which the nation’s great disputes were debated by its most formidable leaders.
In 1844 the Whig Party chose Clay — now 67 and a senior statesman — as its presidential nominee. This time, he nearly won, falling just short to Democrat James K. Polk. The main issue that undermined Clay was the annexation of Texas. Southerners clamored to bring Texas into the Union, but New Englanders were opposed to the addition of another slave state. Clay, as always intent on maintaining national unity, was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He equivocated on the issue, undermining his position in enough states for Polk to eke out a narrow victory.
Last Act
Clay was a staunch opponent of the Mexican-American War, a conflict that the United States won easily but in historical retrospect appears like a nakedly imperialistic land grab. Desperate to acquire California, the Polk Administration had goaded Mexico into a war that it easily won. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo added the western third of the present-day United States to the nation, but it also sparked another sectional crisis. In 1850 California applied for admission to the Union as a free state, a move that would upset the sectional balance.
For the last time, Clay — the nationalistic compromiser — sprung into action. He built a bargain to secure the admission of California, just as he had done with Missouri 30 years earlier. To appease the South, Congress enacted the harsh Fugitive Slave Act that facilitated the capture and re-enslavement of slaves who escaped to the North. It also opened the door to slavery in the newly acquired territories in the West.
Unlike the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850 failed to secure broad acceptance. Whig voters in the North abandoned the party, which disappeared after the 1852 election. From its ashes would rise the new Republican Party. Southerners, particularly Southern Democrats, would look upon this compromise as a betrayal, and become increasingly radicalized to secede from the Union. Still, Clay’s final compromise held the Union together for a little over a decade — enough time for northern industry to grow to the point that the Union could overwhelm the Confederacy with sheer military might during the Civil War.
Clay would not live to see this. Already suffering from poor health, he retired from politics in 1852, and died on June 29, 1852 at the age of 75.
Clay’s Enduring Legacy
Clay’s life is so remarkable that his biography basically serves as the textbook history of American politics from the War of 1812 until the Compromise of 1850. Clay was always in the thick of the action — his skillful oratory, his personal charm and magnetism, and his preternatural skills at backroom dealing, made him indispensable. Of all the men who sought the presidency between James Madison and Abraham Lincoln, Clay was among the best of them, if not the best.
While Clay’s contributions to the Union have been heralded in textbooks for generations, his role in building Congress are more often overlooked. Clay was integral in transforming the legislature into the first branch of the government, in three important ways.
First, he essentially created the role of speaker. Mainly a ceremonial role before 1811, with Speaker Clay it became a position of real power — Clay stocked key committees with his pro-war allies and sidelined his opponents. Importantly, he ousted John Randolph of Roanoke — a persistent and vituperous critic of Madison — from the chairmanship of Ways and Means. The modern speakership we take for granted, one in which its occupant leads a majority coalition, was first realized by Henry Clay.
Second, Clay helped elevate Congress into a forum of national debate. Nowadays, nobody looks to Congress for great oratory. Senators often give speeches to empty chambers, hoping that C_SPAN video clips of them will go viral. Clay’s speeches, however, were events. Washingtonians would pack the gallery to hear Clay expound in speeches that would sometimes last all day, then go into a second day. Clay was at turns funny and dramatic, playful and deeply serious. Newspapers across the country would reprint Clay’s speeches, which would drive the national conversation. Along with Webster and Calhoun, he elevated Congress to a forum where public opinion was given an actual, meaningful voice.
Third, Clay was the embodiment of Madisonian political theory. In Federalist 10 Madison envisioned that republican politics could work on a continental scale precisely because its diversity would force factions to compromise. For forty years, Clay was the instigator of every great compromise. Nobody did more to hold the diverse sections of the country together than Clay. And his efforts were not merely logrolling for its own sake, but agreements designed to secure national purposes. His backroom wheeling and dealing was always about securing national economic development, promoting westward expansion, or holding together the Union.
Clay, more than any other statesman from the second generation of Americans, connects the American Founders to Abraham Lincoln. It was not simply that Clay helped hold the Union together until, under Lincoln, it could triumph over slavery and secession. Clay offered a practical lesson on what republican politics should be. He wrote no great political treatise, but rather instructed his countrymen in the way he forged political compromise.
Nobody was more aware of the importance of Clay than Lincoln himself. Clay was his “beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life,” as he once said. And in 1852 Lincoln eulogized him as a man who “knew no North, no South, no East, no West, but only the Union.” Lincoln bemoaned, “Alas! Who can realize that Henry Clay is dead! Who can realize that never again that majestic form shall rise in the council-chambers of his country to beat back the storms of anarchy which may threaten, or pour the oil of peace upon the troubled billows as they rage and menace around?”
Who, indeed.
Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford Senior Nonresident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of five books, most recently Democracy or Republic? The People and the Constitution (AEI Press, 2023).
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