Henry Clay

Henry Clay

“”I'd rather be right than be president.

—Henry Clay

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Henry Clay (1777–1852) was a United States politician and three-time Presidential Candidate from the state of Kentucky. Clay was unsuccessful in all three bids for presidency in the 1824, 1832 and 1844 elections. He also had a long career in the House and Senate, even becoming Speaker of the House at one point, and he was responsible for drafting the Compromise of 1850 that admitted California to the union but also passed the Fugitive Slave Act. He also served as Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams, but that part was a bit controversial (see below).

1824 and the corrupt bargain

1824 Presidential Election results

The 1824 Presidential Election was a race between four people; Clay, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and William H. Crawford, all of whom ran under the Democratic-Republican Party. Clay had expected that nobody would get a majority, which would result in the election going to the House of Representatives with the top three candidates being eligible for the presidency. Clay was also the Speaker of the House at the time, meaning he had a large amount of power over who the House would choose.

From this, it is obvious what Clay assumed would happen next: Nobody would get enough Electoral Votes to become President, and as long as Clay remained in the top three he could use his power in such a way as to come out on top. However, that is not what occurred because, as David Stephen Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler noted in his biography on Clay:

The 7 votes Clay should have received from New York with the 5 from Louisiana would have pushed Crawford to a relatively distant fourth, and Clay could have worked his magic in the House, the plan he had long envisioned as the only way to become president in the 1824 election.

Realizing he was not going to become President, Clay lobbied the House to vote for Adams, although exactly why is up for debate. Jackson alleged Clay offered to do the same with him if he was made Secretary of State, a position Adams later nominated him for. Clay denied these charges, and instead said that he merely did not feel that Jackson was qualified enough for the position of President, albeit primarily because Adams more closely aligned with his ideology as opposed to anything objective. Jackson and his supporters, who felt that Clay had overturned the will of the electorate and instead handed the White House to one of his political buddies, began to call this deal the "corrupt bargain" and campaigned heavily on it in 1828.

American system

Another one of Clay's most famous achievements is his creation of what he called the "American System." Basically, it was a highly nationalist program that included support for a national bank and high tariffs in hopes of allowing the nation to exist in peace. This notion that the industrial and agrarian systems of the United States could exist together was actually rather radical at the time, especially given one of the first debates among the Founding Fathers was if the United States was going to be industrial or agricultural.

The Great Compromiser

Clay was considered, alongside Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, to be a part of the "Great Triumvirate", the three most important Senators of their era. He started out his Senate career as a "war hawk" supporting the War of 1812, and he was generally a supporter of American expansionism. However, his most famous accomplishments would be those that led to him being labeled as the "Great Compromiser": the Missouri Compromise, which added Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state to not upset the balance between slave and free states in the Senate; the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which gradually lowered tariff duties in exchange for giving Andrew Jackson the authority to use force to prevent the secession of South Carolina (this dealt with the Nullification Crisis); and the aforementioned Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state, allowed the remainder of the southwest to vote on whether or not to allow slavery, banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and most infamously passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which forced northern states to enforce slavery and made it a crime to help escaped slaves. Henry Clay's own relationship to slavery was complicated, to say the least. He called slavery "this great evil… the darkest spot in the map of our country", yet he owned sixty slaves and his attitude apparently didn't stop him from fervently fighting a lawsuit from Charlotte Dupuy, one of his slaves who sued for her freedom. He ultimately opposed any attempt by Congress to get rid of slavery, and his only real "solution" to the issue was the creation of colonies like Liberia to send freed blacks to.

Abraham Lincoln

Clay was said to have been one of Abraham Lincoln's political inspirations. Indeed, Lincoln delivered a eulogy after Clay's death, saying:

Mr. Clay's predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty -- a strong sympathy with the oppressed everywhere, and an ardent wish for their elevation. With him, this was a primary and all controlling passion. Subsidiary to this was the conduct of his whole life. He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.

This was perhaps a much more glowing view of Clay than what is reflected by his actual record. However, there was a brilliant political strategy behind the embellishments. Lincoln's eulogy actually quoted in full a eulogy from a Democratic-run newspaper that not-so-subtly insinuated that Stephen Douglas was Henry Clay's natural successor. However, by exaggerating Clay's anti-slavery credentials, Lincoln's part of the eulogy showed why Douglas was not a good successor to Clay, making it essentially a big "FU" to one of Lincoln's biggest rivals.