Henry Clay

The American political leader and secretary of state Henry Clay (1777-1852) came to national prominence as leader of the "War Hawks," who drove the country into the War of 1812. For the next 40 years he worked for international peace and sought to reconcile warring factions in the nation.

Henry Clay was born on April 12, 1777, in Hanover County, Va., the seventh of nine children of the Reverend John Clay and Elizabeth Hudson Clay. Henry's father died in 1781, the year British and loyalist soldiers raided the area and looted the Clay home. Ten years later his mother remarried and his stepfather moved the family to Richmond, where Henry worked as a clerk in a store and then, from 1793 to 1797, as secretary to George Wythe, chancellor of the High Court of Chancery. Henry had little regular education, but he read in Wythe's library and learned to make the most of scanty information. He moved to Lexington, Ky., in November 1797 and made a reputation as a lawyer. In 1799 he married Lucretia Hart, of a leading family in the community. They had 11 children.

Clay's life-style was that of the frontier South and West; he drank and gambled through the night for high stakes. John Quincy Adams commented, "In politics, as in private life, Clay is essentially a gamester." He fought two duels, one in 1809 and the other in 1826. This did not hinder a public career in young America, and Clay had attributes which served him well in politics. He was tall and slim with an air of nonchalance, and he had a sensitive, expressive face, a warm spirit, much personal charm, and an excellent speaker's voice. Adams, who had observed him closely, said Clay was "half-educated" but added that the world had been his school and that he had "all the virtues indispensable to a popular man."

Early Political Career

In 1803 Clay was elected to the Kentucky Legislature. In 1806 and again in 1810 he was sent to the U.S. Senate to fill out short terms. In 1811 he was elected to the House of Representatives. He was immediately chosen Speaker and was elected six times to that office, making it a position of party leadership.

By 1811 Clay was fanning the war spirit and the aggressive expansionism of the young republic. He said that the "militia of Kentucky are alone competent" to conquer Montreal and Upper Canada, and he organized the war faction in the House of Representatives. Clay was one of five men selected to meet British representatives at Ghent in 1814; there the failure of American arms forced them to a treaty in which no single objective of the war was obtained.

In the House again from 1815 to 1825 (except for the term of 1821-1823, when he declined to be a candidate), Clay developed his "American System," a program designed to unite the propertied, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the East with the agricultural and entrepreneurial interests in the West. It would establish protection for American industries against foreign competition, Federal financing of such internal improvements as highways and canals, and the rechartering of the United States Bank to provide centralized financial control. Clay succeeded for a time in part of his program: the Bank was rechartered and protective tariffs were enacted, reaching a climax in 1828 with the "Tariff of Abominations." But the internal improvements were not carried out in his lifetime (it required the Civil War to nationalize the country sufficiently for such measures), and long before Clay's death the Bank and the protective tariff had fallen at the hands of the Democrats.

Slavery and Politics

Missouri's application for statehood in 1819 raised the issue of slavery and shocked the nation "like a firebell in the night," as the aged Thomas Jefferson said. Clay had advocated gradual emancipation in Kentucky in 1798, asserting that slavery was known to be an enormous evil. Though he came to terms with the institution in practice—owning, buying, and selling slaves—he was never reconciled to it in principle. When he died he owned some 50 slaves. His will distributed them among his family but provided that all children born of these slaves after Jan. 1, 1850, should (at age 25 for females and 28 for males) be liberated and transported to Liberia. In 1816, Clay was one of the founders of the American Colonization Society, which promoted sending freed slaves to Africa. The racism which he shared with most Americans was an important motivation in the society. (His racism was not restricted to African Americans; he said Native Americans were "not an improvable breed," and that they were not "as a race worth preserving.")

In the Missouri debate he did not devise the basic compromise—that is, that Missouri be a slave state but that slavery henceforth be prohibited in territory north of 36°30'. But he resolved the second crisis caused by the Missouri constitutional provision that free Negroes could not enter the state; Clay got assurance from the Missouri Legislature that it would pass no law abridging the privileges and immunities of United States citizens. The role which Clay played in the debate was, in fact, as spokesman for the interests of the slave South. In the controversy over the activities of the abolitionists in the 1830s he defended the right of petition but secured the passage of resolutions in the Senate censuring the abolitionists and asserting that Congress had no power to interfere with the interstate slave trade.

Secretary of State

Clay was a candidate for the presidency in 1824, but three others received more votes, so that his name did not go to the House for election. He defied Kentucky's instruction to cast the state's votes for Jackson, saying he could not support a "military chieftain"; instead, his support elected John Quincy Adams. When Clay subsequently became secretary of state, the traditional steppingstone to the presidency, the cry of "corrupt bargain" was raised. The charge was unwarranted—he had merely supported the man whose views were closest to his own—but the charge lingered for the rest of his life.

Foreign affairs were not particularly important from 1825 to 1829, and most of Clay's diplomatic efforts did not succeed. The United States failed in efforts to purchase Texas from Mexico, nor was progress made toward acquiring Cuba. The State Department was unsuccessful in settling the Maine-Canadian boundary dispute, in securing trade with the British West Indies, and in getting payment from France for losses suffered by Americans during the Napoleonic Wars. Clay had taken a strong position in support of recent Latin American independence movements against Spain, and he tried unsuccessfully to promote active American participation in the Congress of Panama in 1826.

The Adams administration was defeated overwhelmingly in 1828; Clay's own state voted for Andrew Jackson. Adams offered to appoint Clay to the Supreme Court, but he declined and returned to Kentucky. In 1831 he was elected to the Senate and remained in that office until 1842. During these years of Jacksonian democracy Clay fought a losing battle for his American System. In 1833 he devised the compromise on the tariff which brought the nullification threat from John C. Calhoun's South Carolina; his measure provided that duties be lowered gradually until none were higher than 20 percent by 1842. He favored higher duties but said he made the concession to get past the crisis and on to saner times.

Clay correctly estimated that Martin Van Buren was unbeatable in 1837, but he expected the Whig nomination in 1840 and was bitterly disappointed when the aging military hero William Henry Harrison won nomination and election. Clay then anticipated that he would be the actual leader of the administration, but Harrison resisted him for the short time that he lived and Harrison's successor, John Tyler, proved to be opposed in principle to Clay's Whig program. Clay resigned from the Senate in disgust.

Clay was the Whig presidential candidate in 1844, but his equivocation on the expansionist issue of the annexation of Texas cost him the election. He made an abortive effort for the 1848 nomination, which went to the Mexican War general Zachary Taylor. Clay had condemned the initiation of the war but supported it once it got under way.

Compromise of 1850

The fruits of that war brought on another sectional crisis, with threats to dissolve the Union. Clay returned to the Senate in poor health and led in working out the Compromise of 1850. This series of measures admitted California as a free state, organized the new territories without reference to slavery, assumed the public debt of Texas while restricting its area, abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and enacted a fugitive slave law which denied due process and equal protection of the laws to African Americans living in the North. Thus was the rupture of the Union delayed for a decade. Clay died in Washington on June 29, 1852.

Further Reading

The definitive edition of Clay's writings is James B. Hopkins, ed., The Papers of Henry Clay (3 vols., 1959-1963). The best biography of Clay, comprehensive and temperate in interpretation, is Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (1937). An excellent brief study is Clement Eaton, Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (1957), which has a useful bibliographical essay. A fine study of Clay's early life is Bernard Mayo, Henry Clay: Spokesman of the New West (1937). The best 19th-century biography, and still very valuable, is Carl Schurz, Life of Henry Clay (2 vols., 1887-1889).

Additional Sources

Clay, Henry, The life and speeches of Henry Clay, Littleton, Colo.: F.B. Rothman, 1987.

Colton, Calvin, The life and times of Henry Clay, New York, Garland Pub., 1974.

Remini, Robert Vincent, Henry Clay: statesman for the Union, New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.

Schurz, Carl, Henry Clay, New York: Chelsea House, 1980.

Van Deusen, Glyndon G. (Glyndon Garlock), The life of Henry Clay, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1937, 1979. □

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.

"I would rather be right than President."
—Henry Clay

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.

Clay, Henry (1777–1852), statesman and Whig party leader in the second‐party system.Born in Virginia, Clay read law and in 1797 moved to Lexington, Kentucky. After serving in the Kentucky legislature and teaching law at Transylvania University, he won election in 1810 to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served, apart from brief intervals, until 1825, usually as Speaker. An unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1824, he participated in the congressional maneuvering that brought John Quincy Adams to the White House. When Adams appointed him secretary of state, the supporters of Andrew Jackson charged a “corrupt bargain.” After two early appointive terms in the U.S. Senate (1806–1807, 1810–1811), he won election to the Senate in 1831, serving until 1842 and again from 1849 until his death. A perennial presidental candidate, Clay ran four more times between 1832 and 1848, but it was as a master legislator, eloquent orator, and the West's magnetic “Prince Hal” that his reputation lives.

While Speaker of the House in 1812, Clay was among the “War Hawks” who favored declaring war on Britain, but he also served as a peace negotiator at Ghent (1814) and thereafter pursued conciliation in both domestic and foreign affairs. He became known as “the Great Compromiser” for his role in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Tariff Compromise of 1833, and the sectional Compromise of 1850. Coming from the border state of Kentucky, Clay hoped desperately to avoid a civil war. Although a slaveholder, he favored the slaves' gradual emancipation and their removal to Africa. He argued in vain for the right of Native Americans to retain their lands in the Southeast. He warned, correctly, that the 1845 annexation of Texas would worsen sectional tensions and lead to war with Mexico.

As a Whig leader, Clay battled for national economic development through a program he called “the American System.” This included protective tariffs, a national bank, and federal subsidies to “internal improvements” (transportation projects like highways and canals). His Democratic party opponents, fearing the expansion of federal power at the expense of the states, frustrated the plan's adoption. Although Clay ended on the losing side of many controversies, the Republican party that arose after his death implemented much of his economic program.
See also Antebellum Era; Bank of the United States, First and Second; Calhoun, John C.; Canals and Waterways; Colonization Movement, African; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: House of Representatives; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate; Political Parties; Roads and Turnpikes, Early; War of 1812.

Bibliography

Merrill Peterson , The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, 1987.
Robert Remini , Henry Clay, 1991.

Daniel Walker Howe

Henry Clay (1777-1852)

Sources

Statesman

An Enduring Career . Despite losing five presidential races, Henry Clay played a central role in Western—and national—politics for more than four decades. As Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1811 to 1820 and from 1823 to 1825, longer than anyone else in the nineteenth century, Clay emerged as the outstanding Western leader of the period. He also served as John Quincy Adams’s secretary of state from 1825 to 1829 and was regarded as the most influential senator of his era.

A Pioneer Nationalist . Although one of the most prominent leaders to come out of the West, Clay was first and foremost a nationalist. As Speaker of the House in 1812, Clay advocated war against Great Britain to preserve the overseas markets of the nation’s producers. After the War of 1812 Clay introduced plans for an integrated system of protective tariffs, a national bank, and subsidized internal improvements known as the American System. Although Clay intended this program to foster economic development and integrate the regions of the United States politically, many of its provisions joined the North and West, yet isolated the South.

The American System . The American System had direct bearing on westward expansion. Under this scheme the federal government sold public land in the West rather than give it away to settlers, with the proceeds benefiting transportation projects and schools. The plan’s supporters in Congress expected these projects, in turn, to benefit all sections of the nation and tie them together economically. The American System became central to the political beliefs of Whigs, who arose in opposition to Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party.

A Great Compromiser . Clay was also known as the Great Compromiser for his leading role in two watershed legislative compromises: the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850. Though Clay intended these compromises to relieve sectional tensions, neither was able to prevent Southern secession and Civil War.

Sources

Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979);

M. D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);

Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: Norton, 1991).

Clay, Henry (1777–1852) US statesman He served in both the House of Representatives (1811–14, 1815–21, 1823–25), several times as speaker, and in the Senate (1831–42, 1849–52). He was one of the ‘war hawks’ who favoured the War of 1812. He ran for president (1824), and when the election went to the House of Representatives, he threw his support behind the eventual winner, John Quincy Adams. One of the founders of the Whigs, he ran against Andrew Jackson (a bitter political enemy) in 1832. He ran for president again (1844) but was defeated by James Polk. Clay's last years in the Senate were spent trying to work out a compromise between the slave-owning states of the South and the free Northern states. The Compromise of 1850 was one result of those efforts.

Clay, Henry (1777–1852) US statesman and orator. As Speaker of the House of Representatives (1811–14) he played a central role in the agitation leading to the WAR OF 1812, and wasampe of the commissioners responsible for the negotiation of the Treaty of GHENT that ended it. He wasampe of the architects of the Missouri Compromise and won support for his American System, a policy to improve national unity through a programme of economic legislation. His final political achievement lay in helping the passage of the Compromise of 1850 between the opposing Free-Soil and pro-slavery interests. His role in arranging major sectional compromises between North and South (1820, 1833, and 1850) earned him the title of ‘the Great Compromiser’.