Henry Clay: The Essential American
By David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler
Random House, 595 pages
The art of compromise is never admired as much as it is during those eras when bitter partisan disputes tend to rend the fabric of our political culture. If in 2010 many Americans lament the willingness of partisans to stand their ground on divisive issues such as health-care reform rather than to embrace halfway measures that might soothe the passions of the hour, it is little surprise that those who worked to bridge an even greater gap between North and South prior to the Civil War a century and a half ago have always had their defenders. Chief among these figures is Henry Clay, whose role as the architect of the Compromise of 1850—a package of legislation that pleased neither abolitionists nor pro-slavers but is credited by some with putting off the outbreak of hostilities for a decade—put a glow of non-partisanship on a career that might otherwise be solely remembered for a ceaseless and always unsuccessful quest for the presidency.
Clay, who is the subject of a comprehensive and readable new biography by the academic duo of David and Jeanne Heidler, is someone whose life ought to seem quite familiar to observers of our own day: the career politician. Born in Virginia in 1777, he won his first election at the age of 26 in 1803, when he took a seat in the Kentucky legislature and then spent the rest of his long life either in office or scheming to get another. Having started out as a stalwart of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, he would eventually found a new party—the Whigs—that would provide the principal opposition to the Democrats, who dominated antebellum America.
During the course of half a century of political activity during which he would serve as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, secretary of state, and, as he is best remembered, a fixture in the U.S. Senate, Clay was in the middle of every great debate. Like Daniel Webster, his fellow Whig and rival in the Senate, Clay was a brilliant orator and attorney whose celebrity was based in no small measure on sonorous speechmaking and courtroom theatrics when such activities were a major source of public entertainment in the young republic.
His first major policy initiative, however, led to trouble. As speaker of the House and the leading “war hawk” in Congress, the young Clay deserves much of the blame for America’s decision to go to war against Britain in 1812. Clay’s role in both fomenting a disastrous conflict and then bringing it to an end as a peace commissioner provided a double irony that was to haunt his political life. Though the war did little good for the country, it was the making of a rough-hewn general named Andrew Jackson who would supplant Clay as the leading political figure of what was then known as America’s West. Even more galling for Clay was that Jackson’s decisive victory over the British at New Orleans actually occurred weeks after a peace treaty Clay had helped draft had been signed in Europe.
In the years following that war, Clay would clash with Jackson over the latter’s conduct during an incursion into then Spanish-controlled Florida. Clay branded as criminal Jackson’s summary executions of British subjects; the general never forgave him. This feud would come to a boiling point a few years later when both were candidates for president in 1824. Jackson won the most popular votes in a four-way race, but the presidency was decided in the House of Representatives, where Clay, the speaker, swung the election in favor of John Quincy Adams. Clay’s reward was the post of secretary of state, a position that at the time was considered a stepping-stone to the presidency. The enraged Jackson and his followers would spend the next four years plotting revenge. Clay was surprised by the way Jackson was able to sway public opinion in what amounted to the birth of retail American politics with a theme that has been sounded repeatedly since then. The role Clay was assigned in the Jacksonian morality play was that of the maker of a “corrupt deal”—a quintessential Washington insider whom the outsider Jackson would sweep away. And that is exactly what happened in 1828.
As leader of the Whig opposition to the popular Jackson, Clay provided a coherent alternative program, the “American System”—a scheme based on his vision of a strong national government that would actively work to promote prosperity. Yet Jackson proved to have a better grasp than Clay of the American people’s suspicion of wealth and their desire for increased democracy at a time when the vote was still highly restricted in many states. Rather than Clay’s American System, what the country got was Jackson’s war against the Second Bank of the United States in the 1830s. Clay decried the empty-headed populism of Jackson’s stance, but the fact that he personally profited from the bank as he reaped a fortune as one of its attorneys only reinforced the notion that he was out of touch with the voters.
This was a recurrent theme in Clay’s career. After Clay’s second run for the presidency, in 1832, ended with Jackson’s overwhelming re-election, it became apparent to some contemporary observers, including many of Clay’s allies, that he was never going to be elected president. The same pattern repeated itself in 1844, when a seemingly golden last chance for the White House again foundered on Clay’s tin ear. By opposing annexation and statehood for Texas, Clay thought to forestall conflict over the addition of a slave state to the union. But support for the doctrine of “manifest destiny” would sweep his little known Democratic opponent James K. Polk, a Jackson protégé, to victory.
Clay’s own equivocal position on slavery offers a clue to his failures as a leader. Clay consistently denounced slavery as a moral evil but believed abolition was impossible. Like many other well-meaning whites of the day—including, it must be said, Abraham Lincoln—Clay supported schemes for gradual emancipation and the return of freed slaves to Africa. But unlike the young Lincoln, Clay owned many slaves. For all his high-flown rhetoric about liberty and rights, as the Heidlers’ narrative illustrates, Clay’s desire for personal wealth and the status that a large agricultural estate such as his grand home in Ashland brought him was just as great as his wish to be president. And Ashland’s prosperity was based in no small measure on the slaves Clay owned.
While the Heidlers’ account of many of the staples of early-19th-century Southern political life, such as duels (Clay engaged in at least two, including one with a U.S. senator while he was secretary of state, over an accusation that Clay cheated at cards), may astonish the modern reader, their discussion of Clay’s predilection for speaking of himself as a “kind master” to his valet, the slave Charles Dupuy, while debating slavery on the floor of the Senate can only be described as cringe-inducing. Though Clay would eventually free Dupuy, he had not been so kind to the slave’s mother, Lottie, who had refused to return to Kentucky with the family after the election of 1828. She sued for her freedom in federal court but was bested at the bar by the famous orator—who thought her action was encouraged by his political opponents—and spent the rest of her life in slavery in Kentucky and Louisiana.
Like many of Clay’s defenders, the Heidlers believe it is wrong to judge him on slavery by taking his views and behavior out of the context of his own time. But that defense is undermined, at least in part, by their discussion of one of his mentors: George Wythe, an influential legal scholar and judge who also served as a delegate to the 1787 Federal Constitutional Convention. Clay, who spent four years in Wythe’s employ during his youth, embraced his teacher’s belief that the idea of American liberty must serve as an example to the world. But he refused to follow his example on slavery, an evil that Wythe opposed as a contradiction to America’s promise. Unlike some other members of the generation of the Founders who freed slaves in their wills, Wythe liberated all his slaves in his lifetime. Though Clay would come to agree with Wythe about how deplorable slavery was as an institution, he would not fight it. The Heidlers depict this as something of a puzzle, but the answer is no mystery: unlike Wythe, Henry Clay was unable to summon the moral courage to rise above the circumstances into which he was born, and he was too ambitious to swim against the pro-slavery tide in the region.
Clay deplored the growing tension between abolitionists and pro-slavery forces and dedicated the last years of his life to trying to concoct a solution that would help the country avoid making a choice between the two in the name of preserving the union. With the prospect of disunion looming, his proposals eventually passed. But the 1850 package that brought California into the union as a free state and banned the slave trade in the District of Columbia (though not slavery itself) contained a poison pill that would do more to whip up support for abolition in the North than any other factor: the Fugitive Slave Act. As the authors note, though the act was thought by Clay to be merely a sop to Southern extremists, by asking and getting Northern Democrats and Whigs like Webster to accept the notion that slave catchers had the right to drag slaves back to captivity even after they had reached the safety of free states, the measure convinced growing numbers of Americans that compromise with slavery and its increasingly strident advocates was not only immoral but also impossible.
Though the Compromise of 1850 is often credited with postponing civil war, it is just as likely that it accelerated the drift to bloodshed. While speaking in defense of the Compromise, Clay rightly asserted that support for disunion was treason. But far from having created a viable modus vivendi that would enable the two sections to agree to disagree, all the man who came to be known as the great compromiser had accomplished was to demonstrate his blindness to the reality of a divided nation on the one issue that counted.
Indeed, what the drama of the great Compromise may also have demonstrated is the emptiness of a politics that is based more on a belief in process than in principle. In 1839, while defending a letter in which he tried to oppose both slavery and abolition, Clay famously quipped that he “would rather be right than president.” In the end, Clay’s significance may not rest so much on his status as one of the two members of the three-time presidential-race loser club but rather on the way he demonstrated that the considerable skills of a lifetime politician can prove unequal to the demands of a crisis if they are so rooted in belief in compromise that they eschew essential principles. Though Henry Clay’s life was an extraordinary personal and political saga, to say, as the Heidlers do, that he was the “essential American” of his age does not so much extol the republican virtues of pre–Civil War America as highlight its greatest shortcomings. That is a lesson that practitioners of democratic politics in any era ignore at their peril.
