henry clay
united states senator
quote
"I would rather be right than be president."
"I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe any allegiance."
biography
Henry Clay was born on a frontier farm in Hanover County, Virginia on April 12, 1777 to a middle-class family in a low swampy district called "the slashes." He was encouraged by his stepfather to study law under George Wythe and was admitted to the Virginia bar at the age of twenty. Shortly afterward, he moved to Lexington, Kentucky where he developed a thriving practice. There his great leadership and eloquence soon won for him a place in the Kentucky legislature, in which he served for six years, until 1809.
Henry Clay was blessed with a quick mind, a flair for powerful emotional oratory, and an ability to charm people in an attractive manner. As did most in the age he was in, he loved to drink and gamble, and Clay married into a wealthy and socially prominent family and soon gained entry into Kentucky’s most influential circles.
Clay established his great reputation in the House of Representatives, where he served intermittently from 1811 to 1825. In 1806, Clay was chosen to fill an unexpired term in the United States Senate. Although he had not yet reached the legal age of 30, he was permitted to take his seat and at once became prominent. In 1811 he was elected to Congress, and on the first day of the session was chosen Speaker of the House. With the exception of one term, which he refused (1821-23), he remained a representative and the Speaker of the House until 1825. In addition to these 12 years in the House, he served for almost 20 years in the Senate.
In his first term, he became one of the leading "war hawks" who clamored for hostilities in England, winning him much popularity and the support of John C. Calhoun. The two "war hawks," as they were called, by their combined eloquence persuaded a reluctant Congress and president to a declaration of hostilities against Great Britain in 1812. At the end of this rather inglorious war Clay was chosen one of the commissioners who arranged the treaty of Ghent.
In 1820-21 it was Clay who engineered the Missouri Compromise, quieting the harsh controversy that had erupted by maintaining an equal balance between free and slave states. Although he himself was a slave owner, Clay’s views on slavery were moderate, and thus was able to command the support of men with fear of extremism.
An unfortunate circumstance connected with Clay's first candidacy for the presidency reflected unhappily on the rest of his public life. In the election of 1824 he was one of four candidates, none of whom received a majority of votes. In such an emergency the choice of president rests with the House of Representatives. Clay stood fourth on the list and in accordance with the Constitution was dropped from the list of candidates. William Crawford, another candidate, suffered a stroke. The choice therefore lay between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, the two remaining candidates. Clay used his influence in favor of Adams, who was elected by the House of Representatives early in 1825 and elected as the sixth president.
When Adams later appointed Clay to be his secretary of state, Jacksonians raised the charge of a "corrupt bargain." The charge was unfair, but Clay was haunted by it throughout his subsequent career.
Eccentric John Randolph of Virginia referred to Clay as "this being, so brilliant yet so corrupt, which, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, shined and stunk." Clay immediately challenged Randolph to a duel. After ineffective shots by both, Randolph fired his pistol into the air with the remark, "I do not fire at you, Mr. Clay." Thus ended what Senator Thomas H. Benton called "the last high-toned duel I have witnessed."
In 1832 and in 1844, Clay was again a candidate for the presidency but was defeated, first by Andrew Jackson and then by James K. Polk. The third defeat, by a man whom Clay had ridiculed, was not very gracefully received.
Although Clay was a practical politician of flexible beliefs, he emerged as the great champion of the "American System" where he called for a protective tariff in support of home manufactures, internal improvements as aid to road and canal projects, a strong national bank, and distribution of the proceeds of federal lands to the states. With Calhoun he helped pass a tariff act, over President James Madison's veto, for internal improvements. "The leading and paramount object" of his public life he declared to be the preservation of the union.
For finding solutions for numerous controversies between the North and South he earned the name of the Great Pacificator. In one of his speeches (1848) he said: "I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe any allegiance."
Elected to the Senate in 1831, Clay served there until 1842 and again from 1849 until his death. Three times Clay was able by his compromises to bring about concessions that delayed the inevitable struggle. In 1820, while still Speaker of the House of Representatives, he played an important part in the Missouri Compromise. In 1833, when South Carolina attempted to nullify the tariff and threatened to secede from the union, he stepped into the breach with the compromise tariff of 1833. And in 1850, at the most severe crisis the country had yet faced, he again came forward as the author of the Compromise of 1850, which delayed the American Civil War for a decade.
In the same period he became a leader of the new Whig party that emerged to oppose Andrew Jackson’s administration. Perhaps the most heartbreaking event of Clay’s career was his close defeat in the presidential contest of 1844, when his reluctance to back the annexation of Texas cost him support in the South.
Clay died in Washington, D.C., in June 1852, two years after his distinguished contemporary Calhoun. Five months later Daniel Webster died, and the "great trio of oratory," as the three were called, passed into history. He was the author of the famous saying, "I would rather be right than be president."
