Public office of Henry Clay

The boldness of his positions notwithstanding, Clay’s eloquent defense of republican values and national honor endeared him to Kentuckians, who elected him to seven terms in the Kentucky legislature (1803–06, 1807–09). Appointed twice to fill unexpired terms in the U.S. Senate, he was a capable and diligent member of that body too, though he found the Senate’s elaborate rules and artificial courtesies foolish and stultifying. He much preferred the rough-and-tumble U.S. House of Representatives, to which he won election in 1811 and where he became the youngest speaker of the House to that date. In addition to achieving this important post in his freshmen term, Clay transformed the speaker from a mere parliamentarian into a political force whose appointment power over committees and their chairmen increased his control of legislative agendas. As speaker and one of the leaders of the faction called the War Hawks, Clay was key in securing a declaration of war against Great Britain in June 1812. He also served on the American peace delegation at Ghent that negotiated the treaty signed December 24, 1814, which ended the War of 1812.

The experience on that peace commission made him a likely candidate to head Pres. James Monroe’s State Department in 1817, but Monroe chose John Quincy Adams, which infuriated Clay; Clay and Adams had often quarreled while serving together in Ghent. Clay remained in the House of Representatives, where his hold on the speakership went largely unchallenged, allowing him to irritate and occasionally hector Monroe and Adams on such issues as establishing diplomatic relations with Latin American republics as they broke away from the Spanish empire. Clay became an outspoken critic of Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson for his unauthorized attack on Spanish forts in Florida in 1818, insisting that Jackson had usurped the exclusive war power of Congress. Jackson never forgave Clay for this criticism, and the two remained enemies for the rest of Jackson’s life.

Faulty recollection—both by Clay’s contemporaries and by some historians—wrongly credited Clay with the creation of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The amendment that was the linchpin of that measure was actually introduced by Sen. Jesse Thomas of Illinois. Clay’s part in the matter consisted of his securing passage in the House of Representatives through procedural legerdemain. On the other hand, Clay was the principal architect of the Second Missouri Compromise, which resolved objections over the proposed Missouri state constitution, an impasse that could have aborted the entire effort at compromise. Clay’s activities in those instances are usually described as laudable examples of his ability to cultivate accommodation between otherwise irreconcilable camps, yet Clay and his colleagues, by avoiding a confrontation over slavery, chose political expediency over human liberty. For Clay, it was a departure from his earlier altruism when confronting slavery in Kentucky, and it would be years before he cast off political convenience to resume a commendable antislavery stance at the end of his life. He then openly condemned slavery and provided for the freedom of his enslaved people in his will.

Clay was an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in the election of 1824. He clashed with Jackson amid a crowded field of candidates in which none garnered the required majority in the electoral college, thus leaving the election to be determined by the House of Representatives. The three candidates who won the most electoral votes—Jackson, Adams, and William H. Crawford—were placed before the House, where Clay’s effective methods of coalition building made him the central figure in the vote that made Adams president. Jackson’s supporters were outraged because he had won the popular vote in the general election, but their fury was boundless when Adams then selected Clay for secretary of state. Clay had early decided to support Adams because he thought Jackson unfit for the presidency, but his appointment to the State Department had the look of a cynical trade. Soon Jackson joined his supporters in labeling it a “corrupt bargain.” Every political opponent Clay ever had from that time on would sooner or later revive the charge, and the phrase “corrupt bargain” dogged him for the rest of his life. At first he tried to counter the accusation, even fighting a bloodless duel with eccentric Sen. John Randolph of Virginia for having described Clay as a “blackleg” (cheating gambler). Clay eventually resolved to ignore the attacks, but he was never resigned to them.

Ironically, his alleged prize of the State Department proved a toxic mixture of unrewarding work and foiled initiatives. Clay grew to detest the clerical demands of directing diplomacy, and almost every project he mounted—whether it was U.S. participation in the Pan-American Congress or favorable trade arrangements with Great Britain—was hobbled by foreign intransigence or Jacksonian political mischief (retribution for the 1824 election). His one notable success involved improved relations with Latin America, an anticipation of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy more than a century later.

The tireless efforts by Jackson’s operatives to block the initiatives of Adams and Clay resulted in a seemingly foreordained Jackson victory in the presidential election of 1828, which for a time returned Clay to private life. Everyone, including Clay, expected it to be a temporary condition. He returned to Washington, D.C., in 1831 as Kentucky’s junior senator, a subordinate designation that was a mere formality for the man who immediately became the leader of otherwise disparate forces opposing President Jackson. The Senate was to be Clay’s political home for the rest of his career. Clay, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina constituted what contemporaries called “the Great Triumvirate.” It marked their contribution to the Senate’s intellectual power and oratory in ways that may never be equaled. In 1957 a special committee headed by Sen. John F. Kennedy solidified the triumvirate’s reputation when it named Clay, Webster, and Calhoun as among the five greatest senators in U.S. history.

Animated by Clay’s dynamic presence and infectious optimism, his followers risked their political fortunes in a fight to secure the early recharter of the Second Bank of the United States, confident that its success in stabilizing the currency and controlling credit would compel Jackson to consent. They were wrong. Clay suffered one of the most-stinging defeats of his political career when Jackson vetoed the bill that would have rechartered the bank, the primary pillar of Clay’s American System, which was designed to stabilize currency and credit (via the bank), promote American manufactures (through a protective tariff), and create a transportation system to stimulate internal commerce for both agricultural produce and manufactured goods. The defeat of the bank bill was a prelude to Clay’s loss in the presidential election of 1832, in which he ran as a National Republican. That outcome continued the pattern of triumph for Jackson and defeat for Clay, which went unbroken until Jackson retired from public life at the end of his second term as president in 1837.

Clay did have his successes, however. After he lost both the fight over the bank and his second bid for the presidency, Clay addressed the South Carolina Nullification Crisis with his compromise tariff of 1833, which gradually lowered tariffs over the following 10 years. Although the controversy was ostensibly about South Carolina’s refusal to collect federal tariffs, many historians believe it was actually rooted in growing Southern fears over the North’s abolition movement. Clay was able to prevent a serious confrontation as defiant South Carolinians were taking up arms and Jackson was threatening force.