Bonus Content
Henry Clay
In the year 1777 the United States was less than a year old and at war. It was also deeply divided over the wisdom of that war and doubtful in the main about its conclusion. And yet for much of the country the war was a distant event. Britain chose to focus on what it regarded as the hotbeds of pro-war sentiment, which were in the Northeast. The strategic decision to isolate New England kept the war centered on New York and made it remote for the rest of the thirteen erstwhile colonies, at least for a time. Now styling themselves as sovereign states united for the purpose of fighting this war and not much else, the new United States confronted the complicated and divisive nature of their enemy. The rebellion that had become the Revolution also became a civil war. Little wonder that many did not hold out much hope for success.
This was the world that greeted Henry Clay on April 12, 1777, two years almost to the day after the shedding of first blood at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts that marked the beginning of the shooting war with Britain. In that respect, he and his country were intertwined in both origin and destiny.
Henry Clay was a member of the sixth generation of a family that had been in colonial Virginia for more than a hundred and fifty years. John Clay was the first of that line, emigrating from England around 1612. Descendants maintained that John was the son of a Welsh aristocrat, but there is no definitive proof of the claim. If John’s pedigree was unremarkable, though, his industry once he arrived in the New World was admirable. Hard work and two good marriages brought him property and prominence. His marriage to Elizabeth--his second, her third--produced Charles in 1645. Ten years later, when John died, he left a considerable estate. Charles married Hannah Wilson and commenced something of a Clay tradition for producing large families. He and Hannah had seven children, three of them girls, though the female children had a distressing way of dying young, a peculiarity that tragically repeated itself in subsequent generations. Charles’s boys, however, were not only hale, two of them were well-nigh immortal. Charles Jr., born in 1676, lived to see ninety, and his older brother, Henry, born in 1672, nearly matched that endurance, dying in 1760 at age eighty-eight. Such longevity was rare anywhere in the world, let alone in hardscrabble colonial Virginia.
Excerpted from Henry Clay by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler Copyright © 2010 by David S. Heidler. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Henry Clay
Review by Lucas A. Powe, Jr.
Henry Clay was part of the Great Triumvirate of Senators along with John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, all of the same age and ambition (and dying within two years of each other). In 1957 a Senate select committee named them as three of the five greatest senators in American history. Yet as David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler in their new biography, Henry Clay: The Essential American, demonstrate, Clay would have been a major figure in American history even if he had not returned to the Senate in 1831 for the second half of his public career (after serving parts of two very abbreviated terms prior to 1811).
Elected to the House of Representatives in 1810 and quickly becoming its Speaker, Clay was (along with Calhoun) one of the leading War Hawks that pushed the United States into its second war against Great Britain. Clay’s most famous act as Speaker was creating the Missouri Compromise whereby Missouri and Maine were admitted respectively as slave and free states (keeping the Senate in balance) and slavery was banned north and west of Missouri. Thomas Jefferson saw the debate over Missouri’s statehood as a “fire bell in the night,” but the Missouri Compromise kept slavery on the backburner for almost three decades while Clay, a slave holder (who eventually freed his slaves), was anti-slavery.
During those decades Clay ran for the presidency as the Whig candidate, losing three times, championed the “American System” of internal improvements and high tariffs to protect American manufacturing, helped with the compromise that ended the Nullification Controversy with South Carolina and made one of the great political mistakes in American history.
The mistake was what Andrew Jackson (and his supporters) labeled the “corrupt bargain.” The 1824 presidential election went to the House of Representatives where Clay (as Speaker) threw his support to John Quincy Adams over Jackson (who had the most popular and electoral votes). Adams appointed Clay secretary of state (which had been the unofficial stepping stone to the presidency). Jackson asserted there had been a deal. Clay, understanding that he never should have accepted Adams’ offer, could never live down Jackson’s charge. Tragedy never escaped him either; all six of his daughters predeceased him as did a son (killed in the Mexican War Clay opposed). Two other sons were institutionalized.
Clay ended his career with yet a final legislative feat (with help from others), the Compromise of 1850 featuring California’s admission as a free state, a new fugitive slave law, ending the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and organizing Utah and New Mexico territories without mention of slavery.
There are few lives in American history as politically rich as Clay’s and almost none comparable of men who did not reach the presidency. The Heidlers' (they are married) big new biography Henry Clay brings his career and era—one where the stakes were high but a statesman could broker a compromise—into relief.
Hardcover: 624 pages
Publisher: Random House Inc. ( May 18, 2010 )
Item #: 77-5790
ISBN: 9781400067268
Product Dimensions: 6.25 x 9.25 x 0.98 inches
Product Weight: 34.0 ounces
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