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Henry Clay, U.S. senator under
several presidents who is remembered for his devotion to the Union, was born
in the Slashes section of Hanover County, Virginia, on April 12, 1777. He was
the son of John and Elizabeth (Hudson) Clay. His father, a Baptist minister and farmer, died when the child was four years
old, and his mother later married Henry Watkins. Clay had a rudimentary
education at local schools. When he was fifteen, Clay's mother and stepfather
moved to Versailles, Kentucky, leaving him in Virginia. Watkins had secured a
place for his stepson as deputy clerk in Virginia's High Court of Chancery,
where Clay attracted the attention of the chancellor, George Wythe, a
classical scholar and law professor. Clay served as Wythe's copyist for four
years while the chancellor directed his studies, giving Clay his mastery of
the English language.
In 1796 Clay entered the law
office of Robert Brooke, former Virginia governor, and after a year of study
was licensed to practice law. In November 1797, Clay moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he soon became a successful lawyer. On
April 11, 1799, he married Lucretia Hart, daughter of Thomas Hart, a prominent Lexington merchant. The couple had eleven children: Henrietta,
Theodore Wythe, Thomas Hart, Susan Hart, Anne Brown, Lucretia, Henry, Jr.,
Eliza, Laura, James Brown, and John Morrison.
In 1799, in the campaign for
election for delegates to the Kentucky constitutional convention, Clay
championed the cause of gradual emancipation of the state's slaves. In 1803
he was elected to the Kentucky legislature as a Jeffersonian Republican,
serving there until 1806, when he was appointed to fill the unexpired term of
John
Adair in the U.S. Senate. During his
short time in the Senate, from November 19, 1806, to March 3, 1807, Clay
emerged as a spokesman for a system of federally funded internal improvements
such as roads and canals. In 1807 he was again elected to the lower house of
the Kentucky legislature and was chosen Speaker of the House on January 11,
1808, following the resignation of William Logan from that post.
Despite the Anglophobia aroused by
British attacks on U.S. shipping, Clay successfully fought a bill that would
have destroyed Kentucky's common law by forbidding the citation of any
British legal decision in the state's courts. Clay devised a compromise by
which only British decisions rendered after July 4, 1776, were excluded. In
1809 he introduced a resolution to require members of the state legislature
to wear garments of domestic manufacture. A heated debate on this measure
with Humphrey
Marshall , a leading Federalist, led to a
duel in which both men were wounded.
Clay was chosen in 1810 to fill
the unexpired term of Buckner Thruston in the U.S. Senate, serving from January 4, 1810, to
March 3, 1811. In the next Congress, he won a seat in the U.S. House of
Representatives and was elected Speaker in 1811, a position he held for most
of the next fourteen years. He quickly became known as a spokesman for the
West and leader of the "war hawks" -- a group of young men in the
House who advocated war with Great Britain. Believing that the British were
inciting Indian attacks on the frontier and outraged by their violations of
neutral shipping, Clay strongly supported the declaration of war against
Britain on June 18, 1812.
President James Madison named Clay
as one of five U.S. peace commissioners sent to Ghent in 1814 to negotiate an
end to the war. When Clay returned to Kentucky, he was reelected to the U.S.
House and the speakership. A more confirmed nationalist as a result of the
war and his European travels, he began to formulate the program known as the American
System, which included federal aid for internal improvements, a
protective tariff for industry, and a national bank. In fact, reversing his
1811 vote against a national bank, Clay in 1816 voted for a bill creating the
Second Bank of the United States. The following year he attacked Andrew
Jackson for his invasion of Florida, thereby making a lifelong enemy. When
Missouri's application for statehood pointed up the question of the extension
of slavery, Clay supported a compromise: allowing slavery to continue in Missouri
but otherwise prohibiting it north of the 36 degree 30 minute latitude. When
the controversy again erupted over Missouri's attempt to prohibit the
movement of free blacks into the state, Clay emerged in 1821 as the leader of
the second Missouri Compromise, whereby the legislature of Missouri
agreed not to deprive a citizen from another state of equal rights and
privileges.
In 1821 Clay resigned from the
House and returned to Kentucky to recoup financial losses caused by the
bankruptcy of a brother-in-law whose notes Clay had endorsed. In 1823 Clay
was returned to the House and was again chosen Speaker. His early successes
in law, politics, and diplomacy had aroused an ambition to be president of
the United States, and the Kentucky legislature, along with the legislatures
of several other states, nominated him for that office. In the 1824
presidential contest, Clay ran fourth, after Andrew Jackson, John Quincy
Adams, and William H. Crawford. Since no one received a majority, the
election was decided by the House of Representatives, where Clay helped elect
Adams.
Adams appointed Clay secretary of
state, an office that often led to the presidency. Jackson and Crawford
supporters immediately charged Clay and Adams with having made a
"corrupt bargain," an accusation that dogged Clay for the rest of
his political life. Despite their previous dislike of each other at the Ghent
peace treaty negotiations, Adams and Clay worked well together. The U.S.
State Department had few noted accomplishments under Clay, but he was proud
of the commercial treaties negotiated and especially of his instructions to
delegates to the 1826 Pan-American Congress.
In 1828 Clay worked actively for
Adams's reelection to the presidency; he returned to Kentucky shortly after
Andrew Jackson's victory. During the short retirement that followed, Clay
maintained a vast political correspondence, with the expectation of being a
presidential candidate in 1832. The Kentucky legislature nominated him for
that office in 1830 and in 1831 elected him to the U.S. Senate, where his
term began on November 10, 1831; reelected, he served to March 31, 1842. Clay
led the opposition to the Jackson administration. Knowing the president's
opposition to a national bank, he pushed through a bill to recharter the Bank
of the United States. Jackson's veto of the measure became one of the main
issues in the 1832 presidential campaign, in which Clay lost to his opponent
by an electoral vote of 219 to 49.
Clay supported the highly
protective tariff of 1832, which precipitated a nullification ordinance by
South Carolina. Faced with the possibility of civil war, Clay in February
1833 led the passage of a compromise tariff that gradually lowered the tariff
rates in exchange for South Carolina's repeal of the nullification ordinance.
As the various opponents of
Jackson coalesced into the Whig party , Clay became their leader. He was able to block Senate
ratification of many of the president's nominations for government office; he
secured the passage of a bill to distribute to the states the surplus revenue
from the sales of public lands, only to have the president pocket-veto it; he
led a successful move in the Senate to censure Jackson for his removal of the
government's deposits from the Bank of the United States; he opposed,
unsuccessfully, the administration's Indian removal policy; and he was able
to block congressional authorization for Jackson to make reprisals against
the French for nonpayment of indemnities. When petitions to Congress for the
abolition of slavery were being tabled without being referred to a committee,
Clay eloquently defended the right of petition, and he opposed a bill to
forbid the dissemination of abolitionist literature in the U.S. mail.
The issue of slavery posed the
greatest quandary in Clay's personal and political life. A slaveholder, he
urged gradual emancipation and colonization in Africa, and he helped found
and served for twenty-six years as president of the American Colonization
Society. Yet Clay consistently argued that Congress had no right to interfere
with slavery in the states where it already existed; his famous words "I
had rather be right than be president" were uttered in 1839 in defense
of a speech he was about to make in the Senate, attacking abolitionists. That
speech and the political maneuvers of Thurlow Weed, editor of New York's Albany
Evening Journal, cost Clay the presidential nomination at the Whig national convention in 1839. Though angered by this
rejection, Clay campaigned for the successful Whig ticket of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler.
Apparently expecting to guide the
new Whig administration from the Senate, Clay declined Harrison's
offer of the office of secretary of state. He soon found himself in conflict
with the president over patronage matters and the question of calling a
special session of Congress. When Harrison died a month after taking office
and Tyler became president, Clay was fearful of the reception the Whig party's program would receive from Tyler. Although Clay and
Tyler had long been friendly, Clay recognized Tyler as a states' rights
Democrat rather than a Whig. Clay was able to obtain repeal of the subtreasury
system, a higher protective tariff, and a land distribution bill, but
collided head-on with the president when Tyler twice vetoed national bank
bills. Long before the election of 1844, it was generally conceded that Clay
would be the Whig nominee. On March 31, 1842, he retired from the Senate
and returned to Kentucky to begin his campaign. The Democratic nominee was James K. Polk, an ardent proponent of the
annexation of Texas, a popular cause in the South and West; the North opposed
annexation of Texas, where slaveholding was legal. Clay explained his
position in three letters that differed in emphasis, one appearing to oppose
annexation and the other two seeming to favor the addition of Texas to the
Union if it could be done without dishonor or war and with the general
consent of the states. The latter viewpoint alienated many opposed to slavery
and cost Clay critical support in the North. In a campaign filled with
slander and voting fraud, Polk won 170 electoral votes to Clay's 105 but had
only a 38,000-vote popular majority.
In retirement, Clay opposed the
declaration of war against Mexico that came soon after the annexation of
Texas. His son Henry Clay, Jr., was one of the war's casualties. Although
Clay still hoped for the presidency in 1848, he was defeated at the Whig nominating convention by Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor. In the crisis over the extension of slavery into the
areas of California and New Mexico acquired from Mexico, Clay was returned to
the Senate on March 4, 1849. To settle the controversy, he introduced a
series of resolutions that became law as the Compromise of 1850,
thanks to the efforts of Stephen A. Douglas. It made California a free state,
opened the new territories of Utah and New Mexico to popular sovereignty, and
redrew the Texas boundary. His health deteriorating, Clay returned to
Washington, D.C. in December 1851, but made only one appearance in the Senate
before his death in the city on June 29, 1852. He was buried in the Lexington Cemetery.
MELBA
PORTER HAY, Entry Author
Selected Sources from UK Libraries:
Shankman, K. (1999). Compromise and the
Constitution : The political thought of Henry Clay. Lanham, Md.: Lexington
Books.
Young
Library Books - 4th Floor E340.C6 S427 1999
Bean, R. (1960). A history of the Henry
Clay family properties : Ashland, Ashland-on-the-Tates-Creek Pike, Mansfield,
Woodlands, Clay Villa, Maplewood. S.L.: S.n.].
Special
Collections Research Center - Research Room F457.F2 B440 1960
Clay, H. (1854). Sketch of the life and
some of the principal speeches of Henry Clay (Beyond the shelf, serving
historic Kentuckiana through virtual access (IMLS LG-03-02-0012-02) ;
B92-84-27376103). Cincinnati: U.P. James.
Special Collections Research Center - Biography Collection copy 2 B C578sk |
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