The Whig Party years and disappointment of Henry Clay

During the 1830s Clay directed the emerging political coalition that eventually styled itself the Whig Party, its very name an indication of its perennially inchoate nature. Calling themselves Whigs (a name borrowed from the British party opposed to royal prerogatives) was a reaction to “King Andrew” Jackson’s overbearing executive behavior. Beyond their shared hatred of Jackson, however, Whigs rarely agreed on a central governing philosophy and often divided along sectional lines. The election of 1836 illustrated the problem when the party entered its first presidential sweepstakes by running no fewer than three candidates from different parts of the country. Clay was not one of them. The triumph of Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s handpicked successor, was the predictable result. Clay returned to the Senate.

A serious economic panic soon tarnished Van Buren’s victory, and the ensuing depression revived Whig hopes for success in the 1840 election, which Clay understandably expected to be his finest hour. The Whigs, however, nominated former general William Henry Harrison, the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, in an effort to emulate the success that Democrats had found with military icon Jackson. Harrison easily defeated Van Buren, who was discredited by the grim financial situation. Clay set aside his disappointment to promote Harrison’s candidacy as eagerly as any fellow Whig. His behavior defied his enemies’ claims that he was bitter and intent on vindictiveness. On the other hand, those enemies convinced Harrison that Clay was not his friend, which set the stage for a quarrelsome relationship in Congress.

The situation could have been politically calamitous, but Harrison died in April 1841, just a month after his inauguration. It brought to the presidency Virginian John Tyler, who had been made Harrison’s vice president to balance the ticket geographically, overlooking the fact that Tyler had joined the Whig Party because of his distaste for Jackson rather than any affinity with its principles. Tyler was sympathetic to states’ rights Democrats and refused to support the Whig agenda. When Clay shepherded the passage of legislation to reestablish the Bank of the United States, Tyler vetoed it (twice). Frustrated Whigs eventually forced President Tyler out of the party. In 1842, with the Whig program at a standstill, Clay resigned from the Senate and began to lay the groundwork for his presidential candidacy in 1844.

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In that quest Clay left nothing to chance, and Whigs for once were finally committed to his cause. Yet Clay stumbled over the issue of annexing Texas and its implications for the expansion of slavery, the most-troubling political problem of the age. Clay repeatedly acknowledged that slavery was wrong while promoting gradual emancipation as a founder of the American Colonization Society, which established Liberia as a home for freeborn Black people and emancipated enslaved persons. Clay’s sincere promotion of such plans, however, struck Southerners as treacherous and Northerners as hypocritical. The Texas controversy was emblematic of his dilemma, and his efforts to tread the ground between annexation and antislavery satisfied nobody. The Democratic nominee, James K. Polk of Tennessee, openly courted expansionist proponents of Manifest Destiny and won the presidency.

The defeat sent Clay into retirement again, and, because he was 67, it was thought that he had left politics for the final time. The Mexican-American War, however, raised his ire even as it shattered his life. His son Henry Clay, Jr., was killed in 1847 at the Battle of Buena Vista, the clash that ironically made Gen. Zachary Taylor a war hero and that led to Taylor’s nomination as the Whig candidate in the presidential election of 1848. Clay had greatly desired the nomination for president but was denied it because of his age, his record of electoral defeat, and his opposition to slavery, expansion, and the Mexican-American War.

The Compromise of 1850 and final years

As several sectional disagreements edged toward critical mass in 1849, Clay was coping with rapidly advancing tuberculosis. Nevertheless, he returned to the U.S. Senate to stanch what he referred to as “bleeding wounds,” which he feared would destroy the United States. He revealed his plan to the Senate in a lengthy speech that consumed two days in the first week of February 1850. It was audacious in proposing a radical way to eliminate slavery in regions where slavery already existed and resolve sectional discord through compromise. Southerners were wary about this and other elements of the proposal. They insisted on eliminating much of the antislavery initiative and bundling different measures into an “Omnibus” bill. The bundling of Clay’s proposals—which included the creation of an aggressive fugitive slave law—into a single bill doomed his original version of the compromise to failure by evoking more opposition in sum than the separate parts would have. As a consequence, others (most notably Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois) guided the Compromise of 1850 to passage when Clay left the fight, exhausted as well as exasperated. Even so, his reputation and influence were crucial in calming passions and setting the stage for the settlement of 1850 that averted a likely civil war.

The physical demands of this last struggle for the union accelerated Clay’s decline. He had long been confined to his rooms at Washington’s National Hotel when tuberculosis finally killed him in June 1852. His death was sobering for the country. Clay was the second member of the Great Triumvirate to pass (Calhoun had died in March 1850, and Webster would outlive Clay by only a few months), but he alone was the most consistent nationalist of his age and the most durable symbol of the union. He lay in state in the Capitol rotunda, the first American given that honor (Abraham Lincoln would be the second 13 years later), and it is thought that millions of people turned out to view his funeral journey to Lexington by railroad and steamboat. That journey itself was a testament to the success of his American System in modernizing the country’s infrastructure.

Legacy

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Contemporaries dubbed Clay “the Great Compromiser” for his ability to reconcile diametrically opposed positions with irresistible persuasion and appeals to common sense. His work at the start of 1850 sealed an exaggerated reputation of him as a pacificator for whom a brokered political deal was desirable above all other considerations. This designation, however, ignores the fact that Clay refused to compromise on anything affecting the health of the union. He also would not abide Tyler’s desertion of the Whig program, in Clay’s view an act of extreme bad faith in that Tyler had implicitly pledged loyalty to the program as Harrison’s running mate. In that clash Clay earned the contradictory nickname “the Dictator,” suggesting that his opponents as well as his friends were too quick to label him. He is portrayed, on the one hand, as willing to bend his principles to achieve the best political deal and, on the other, as stubbornly clinging to those principles out of nothing more than petty pique and personal vanity. Both images—the inveterate compromiser and the inflexible dictator—miss the measure of the man. The presidency eluded him, but as he famously said, “I would rather be right than be president.” This sentiment inspired many younger politicians, including Lincoln, who regarded Clay the statesman as his “beau ideal.” In the end, many of Clay’s contemporaries had to concede that he had indeed been right more often than not and to regret, for their country’s sake, that he had never achieved his life’s ambition.