Henry Clay

...He was brought up in a slave-owning society, and as a boy he inherited two slaves from his father and one from his grandfather...

...Left to his own devices, he womanized, though Remini does not produce specific instances...

...Whenever he chose to stand, he was always voted into the speakership by large majorities...

...Clay, you forget that I am President...

...He sometimes played for high stakes—on one occasion, Remini records, he wagered a hotel he owned—and ran into debt (his admirers eventually banded together and raised over $25,000 to get him out of trouble...

...Two years later the first "modern" presidential election, distinguished by gimmickry and buffoonery, gave Jackson the White House by a decisive margin...

...As he put it, "Kissing is like the presidency, it is not to be sought and not to be declined...

...And most did forgive...

...He thought, likewise, that the United States should secure its economic independence from Europe by creating its own manufacturing sector...

...These snubs and exclusions deepened the shadows as Clay grew older...

...His family life was a series of hammer blows...

...In Richmond he was office boy to the great chancellor George Wythe, who had taught Jefferson, Monroe, and Chief Justice Marshall...

...Robert Remini, whose three-volume life of Andrew Jackson is one of the monuments of modern American biography, has now completed his panorama of the age by writing the life of Jackson's greatest opponent...

...He continued to innovate...

...But he could also put on, when required, his Richmond manners and soon showed himself a master of conciliation...

...There was, to be sure, a large element of self-interest...

...With Clay as its unofficial leader, it could win the businessmen in the northeast and the growing Midwest...

...He even served two brief terms in the U.S...

...And on that occasion, Clay was swindled out of the nomination by manipulation of the convention system he had himself invented...

...After some ineffectual attempts to heal the breach, Clay returned the abuse with interest...

...He campaigned a third time in 1840, when he would almost certainly have won, but was cheated out of the Whig nomination...

...Clay was by no means hesitant in going after the General on Adams's behalf...

...It was this success that gave him the notion that he ought to be secretary of state to the new President, Monroe...

...But, as Remini shows, once Clay found his feet in Washington he developed a body of public doctrine that, whatever his original motives in adopting it, became increasingly coherent and consistent...

...HarClay was elected to the Senate in November 1831 and immediately became one of its stars: with Calhoun and Daniel Webster he formed "the great triumvirate" who made the 1830s and 1840s what is often termed the golden age of Senate oratory...

...So help me God, I shall do mine at this end of it as I shall think proper...

...In any event, once Clay made Adams President and was duly appointed secretary of state, the Jackson camp, led by the General himself, sent up an outcry about what they termed a "Corrupt Bargain...

...Senator Foote, who took part in this historic debate, perhaps the most remarkable ever staged in the Capitol, later argued that, if Clay had sat in the 1860-61 Congress, there would have been no Civil War...

...Clay suffered these Job-like sorrows with agonized fortitude: one cannot but think that his intense political involvement, maintained until old age, was in some way an escape from his stricken home...

...He was extraordinarily fertile in resolving deadlocks, reconciling opponents, drafting compromises, getting what was in many ways a flawed system of government to work...

...There were other charges against Clay, monotonously repeated for the rest of his political life, all the more damaging because they were often true...

...One thinks of William Jennings Bryan, of Robert A. Taft, of Hubert Humphrey, men who longed for the office with all their soul and sought it year after year, sometimes decade after decade, in vain...

...I wouldn't speak to him but, by God, I love him...

...Clay may not have had a hand in the notorious "Coffin Handbill," accusing Jackson of numerous killings by duels and unlawful executions, but he made no effort to stop the Gazette from spreading such smears as "General Jackson's mother was a Common Prostitute brought to this country by the British soldiers...

...Clay, retire to your end of the avenue, where stands the Capitol, and there perform your duty as you shall think proper...

...Clay did both, foolishly producing constant and often inconsistent defenses of his conduct in getting Adams into the White House...

...Until late in life he belonged to no church, a position he (again foolishly) tried to explain...

...His eldest son spent most of his life in an insane asylum, his second became an alcoholic, his third—the most promising—was bayoneted to death in the Mexican War, and the youngest joined the eldest in confinement...

...So, of course, had been Washington and Jefferson, Madison and Monroe—so, for that matter, were Jackson and Polk—but by the 1830s there existed an anti-Masonic party, founded in New York but rapidly spreading west, and the charge was made to weigh heavily against Clay...

...But long before the House met to make its choice on February 9, 1825, rumors spread that Clay proposed to make Adams President in return for being appointed secretary of state...

...Exasperated by his lack of tact, they did not even defer to his judgment...

...At all events, he lost to Polk by the narrow plurarity of 1.4 percent...

...As he put it, "Even the aged and virtuous female is not free from his secrete [sic] combinations of base slander...

...As the leading senator, he systematically got Jackson's appointments voted down, and persuaded his colleagues to pass a motion of censure on the President in March 1834...

...Was he unprincipled...

...The next month he used the term "the patriotic Whigs" to invent the Whig party...

...He knew more about its nuts and bolts than any of his predecessors...

...He thought the administration tardy in recognizing the independence of the Latin republics created by Bolivar's revolution and argued the case that eventually found expression in the Monroe Doctrine...

...to northern abolitionists he was a slave-owner, to Southerners a traitor...

...In 1819-20, he was the architect of the two-part deal known to history as the Missouri Compromise, which settled, or at any rate dampened, the slavery issue for a generation...

...The abuse was barbarous: those who called the Bush campaign's tricks in 1988 "dirty" and "unprecedented" clearly do not know their history...

...In the first instance he led the anti-British War Hawks, and was the man most responsible—much more so than the indecisive Madison, or even his secretary of state, Monroe—for taking America into the War of 1812...

...While capable of dissimulating when politically convenient, he never allowed his inner rages to abate and he pursued his enemies with unrelenting ferocity...

...The real reason he was against it, I suspect, was that his old enemy, Jackson, then almost on his deathbed but still thirsting for Clay's blood, was so passionately for it...

...Clay had other political handicaps, relentlessly stressed by his many enemies...

...Clay came from the Slashes, the low-lying marshlands of Virginia, and as a lad he learned his oratory at the Hanover Court House, made famous by Patrick Henry...

...And finally, brushing aside all his disappointments and setbacks, and employing all the matchless resources of his persuasive oratory, he pushed through the Compromise of 1850, which again defused the conflict between North and South...

...Men skilled at political manipulation rarely know how to make good use of the power they obtain through it...

...He joined the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States, founded in 1816, and in 1836 became its president...

...To politicians under attack, Disraeli would later advise: "Never complain and never explain...

...He first felt the presidential itch strongly in 1816, when he was 39...

...He played the fiddle, even on the hustings, which was fine in Kentucky but less acceptable further east...

...But it is odd that Adams's normally copious diary comes to an abrupt end in the middle of the key meeting, as if the upright and self-righteous Adams simply could not bring himself to record what they had agreed upon...

...It explains the thumbs-down given Clay by the party bosses of New York and Pennsylvania, the two key states...

...Nonetheless, Clay escaped blame for the many disasters of that avoidable conflict, and was a natural choice for the U.S...

...But Clay's hopes of branding Jackson, and his successors Van Buren and Polk, as "Tories" failed: with their strident populism, their belief that all offices, including judges of the Supreme Court, should be elected by virtually universal male suffrage, they were so tremendously and obviously un-Tory as to make the analogy ridiculous...

...The House had until that time followed the English tradition, whereby the speaker presided impartially and represented the collective viewpoint...

...But he detested slavery and regarded it as a great moral evil...

...foreign policy...

...The truth is that Clay was by nature convivial to the point of recklessness, in an age when decorum was rapidly becoming a prerequisite for public officials...

...He argued the case for a second Bank of the United States, as the custodian of a sound currency and the promoter of well-financed enterprise...

...For some, White House hunger has been a huge, insatiable, enduring appetite, which neither time nor failure could appease...

...I have always paid peculiar homage to the fickle goddess...

...He had nothing against Jackson the man...

...Indeed, in a sense Clay laid the foundations of the future Republican party, not only in its economic aims but in its moderate approach to slavery: Lincoln, in his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, was to quote Clay's arguments no less than forty-one times...

...Although it merely restored the status quo ante bellum, the treaty was such a relief to burned and bankrupt Washington that Clay returned in triumph...

...On his deathbed Jackson is alleged to have said that one of his two greatest regrets in life was that "I didn't shoot Henry Clay...

...Of his eleven children, two daughters died in infancy, a third aged 12, a fourth at 14, a fifth at 20...

...Thurlow Weed, the New York City boss, said he preferred Clay to any other candidate, but added that Clay was seen as an abolitionist in the South, a slaveholder in the North, and a Mason in both—there was no way he could win...

...When John Quincy Adams was picked instead, Clay used his enormous power in the House to form a systematic opposition to the Monroe administration...

...These were set up by the Jackson entourage, among whom experts in the embryo science of public relations were prominent...

...As it was, he turned him into a mortal foe...

...The episode was a watershed, for the 1828 election campaign began almost immediately, with the formation of the new Democratic party around Jackson...

...n 1797, at age 20, Clay moved west to Kentucky, a former colony of Virginia that had become a state five years before...

...Yes and no...

...No, Sir, I am his adversary and choose not to subject myself to his fascination...

...He was an inveterate gambler at whist and poker, as he admitted...

...With the largest number of both popular and elecThe American Spectator February 1992 55 toral votes, Jackson was the moral victor...

...The alternative was to move north, as did the Virginian Edward Coles, who became the second governor of Illinois...

...But it is clear that, with a gigantic piece of democratic machinery like the U.S...

...In fact, in some ways he was lucky...

...Clay transformed this essentially non-political post into one of leadership, drilling and controlling a partisan majority and, in the process, making himself the most powerful man in the country after the President...

...There was no real animosity in his personal abuse and, once the speech was over, he would hold out the hand of friendship to his targets, pour forth words of generous apology if need be, and expect to be forgiven...

...Harrison more or less told him that his unsolicited advice was not welcome...

...his remaining daughter Anne—his favorite child—was killed by a post-natal infection, leaving the Clays with seven small children to bring up...

...In 1833—despite his strong personal views—he devised the compromise tariff that almost certainly prevented the development of American political parties on sectional lines...

...The critical moment came in the 1824 election, when Jackson and Clay were among four candidates, none of whom secured a majority...

...But he had been outmaneuvered in New York, a notorious nest of electoral fraud, and finished fourth...

...Like many politicians, Clay tended to confuse his personal advancement with the national interest...

...He got it in 1844, but was, beaten by a whisker...

...More serious still was Clay's 56 The American Spectator February 1992 ambivalent position on slavery...

...If women had had the vote, Clay would have found no difficulty in becoming President...

...He drank, often heavily and all through the night, and could become abusive in his cups...

...Had he come in third, he undoubtedly would have arranged the presidency for himself...

...He wasalready deeply versed in the skullduggery of the politics of Kentucky, "that dark and bloody ground," and used to playing it rough with its leading inhabitants, described by one contemporary as "blue beards, rugged, dirty, brawling, browbeating monsters, six feet high, whose vocation is robbing, drinking, fighting and terrifying every peaceable man in the community...

...His ability to work the system was not matched until the coming of Lyndon B. Johnson...

...His opponents complained that his prodigiously wide mouth gave him an unfair advantage: "The ample dimensions of his kissing apparatus enabled him completely to rest one side of it while the other was on active duty...

...his record as an innovator will never be equaled...

...When Clay, as part of his vengeful campaign against the Monroe administration, attacked its leniency toward Jackson's outrageous conduct in Florida—in the process accusing him of behaving like a would-be Napoleon—the General took it as a declaration of war...

...He was still, however, the arbiter, and chose to back John Quincy Adams, the runner-up...

...For this reason, he enacted in 1816 the first American protective tariff and pressed for what he termed the "American System," under which state and federal governments would build roads, canals, and harbors to hasten industrialization, speed westward expansion, and bind the union together...

...It makes a fascinating and cautionary tale...

...team that negotiated the peace treaty at Ghent...

...The Whig party was thus fundamentally flawed...

...Adams, by contrast, was well qualified and, coming from the Northeast, fitted in with Clay's "American System...

...But the office of chief executive eluded him...

...Clay's estate grew hemp, a Kentucky staple, and needed both protection from European hemp imports and good roads to take it east...

...The idea was to oppose "King Andrew" as the English Whigs had once opposed George HI...

...Clay, so skilled and successful at operating the old elitist system, wined and dined by the entrepreneurial classes wherever he went, had to accept the bitter truth that, in a dawning era of democracy, he had insufficient mass appeal...

...Like other passionate patriots of the hemisphere—Simon Bolivar is an outstanding example—he loved to dance...

...He was a great kisser...

...Clay was six feet high himself, and could swear, drink, and fight with the best of them...

...He is a bad man, an imposter, a creator of wicked schemes...

...Such tales were widely told and grew in the telling...

...Like Jackson he had fought duels, and was held responsible for others, without the excuse of being a military man...

...An eyewitness quoted by Remini describes Clay in "a grand Terpsichorean performance .. . executing a pas seul from head to foot of the dining table, sixty feet in length . . . to the crashing accompaniment of shivered glass and china"—the next morning he was presented with a bill for $120, which he paid "with a flourish...

...But Clay, as speaker, indeed as virtual dictator of the House, was in a position to determine the result...

...Clay's old Bostonfriend, Senator Otis, put it another way: General Harrison, who was nominated instead, was by no means "brilliant," but he "possesses above all that essential requisite . . . the favor and good will of the mass of the people, in other words popularity...

...Andrew Jackson became increasingly the dominant figure in American politics in the 1820s, and remained so throughout the 1830s, even after he left the White House in 1837...

...Like his great contemporary Daniel O'Connell, "Liberator" of Ireland and another lawyer-politician, he worked up his indignation, pathos, wit, solemnity, and vituperation as the occasion demanded...

...He was a Mason...

...He evidently treated his own slaves well: his black valet, enticed to New York by abolitionists with a $500 bribe, insisted on paying it back and returned to his master...

...in other circumstances Clay might well have endorsed the Florida annexation...

...The party won the Senate in 1842, the House in 1846, and the presidency in 1848...

...His wife Lucretia, a much-suffering sourpuss who disliked Washington, rarely accompanied him there and, Remini says, never once wrote him a letter...

...He ran for President in 1824, and came in fourth...

...Here, too, he was an innovator...

...it just so happened he was paid the huge retainer of $6,000 a year to fight the Bank's cases in Kentucky, and borrowed from it when necessary—indeed, he was also loaned large sums by J. J. Astor, another beneficiary of the "American System...

...He still hankered to run in 1848, when he was over 70, and at the least encouragement would have done so...

...I doubt it...

...The American Spectator February 1992 57 risson's successor, Tyler, lost his temper and told him, "Go you now, then, Mr...

...n a sense, he was too good for the job, and had to endure seeing lesser men hold it...

...Clay was the orphan son of a Baptist preacher and tobacco farmer, and once in politics quickly learned to make the most of his early hard times—he actually invented the phrase "self-made man...

...He shows Clay for what he was: opportunist and man of principle, statesman and scoundrel, hedonist and man of sorrows, hot-tempered, abusive, warm-hearted, forgiving, hateful and lovable, a politician of extraordinary contrasts and superlative abilities...

...But for immigrants pouring in from Europe, whom the new political machines could get into the registers within three months, the Whigs had little appeal...

...Wythe liked the clever lad and not only made him learned in the law but also taught him the manners of a gentleman and introduced him into society, where he was quickly at home, especially with the ladies...

...Opinionated, partisan, and impetuous throughout his life, Clay was nonetheless pragmatic when it came to getting things done, presiding over both House and Senate, when the national interest demanded, in an ecumenical spirit: his three principal achievements were all irenic...

...Again, though his colleagues in the House, and later in the Senate, saw him as dictatorial and sometimes resented the way he used his authority to advance his views or ambitions, they respected his patriotism and saw the advantages of the strong leadership he provided...

...Jackson particularly resented the allegations against his wife: she died at the end of the campaign and he held Clay responsible...

...A friend said to Thomas Glascock of Georgia: "General, may I introduce you to Henry Clay...

...later, in the Senate, the bulk of his fellows always looked to him to take the lead...

...His choice was not entirely self-seeking...

...He achieved everything else he wanted, serving as speaker of the House, leader of the Senate, and secretary of state, and acquiring demotic titles galore, among them "Star of the West," "Prince Hal," and "The Great Compromiser...

...Unfortunately for Clay, Jackson was in a position to do far more damage...

...Jackson's newspapers, more numerous and on the whole more proficient, hit at least as hard, and in the "Corrupt Bargain" they had a masterful theme...

...In fact, both men, as westerners, agreed on much, although they were on opposite sides on the Bank issue...

...Clay tried repeatedly to get Kentucky to change its constitution and ban slavery...

...Paul Johnson's Modern Times has just been published in a revised, updated edition by HarperCollins...

...The leading Clay editor, Charles Hammond of the Cincinnati Gazette, dwelt lovingly on the rumor that Jackson had never been lawfully married to his wife, asking: "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land...

...He created, summoned, and was nominated by the earliest national convention, which met in Washington in December 1831...

...Only his death in 1852 killed the ravening desire in his heart...

...A year after entering the House, he was elected its speaker...

...Of these, the greatest by far was Henry Clay of Kentucky...

...His attitude toward the problem put him in a good position to mediate between North and South, but it hurt him as a presidential candidate...

...Clay, however, combined a genius for politics with imagination and creativity...

...The term Whig stuck, for a decade or so...

...Senate, but it was not until he was elected to the House in August 1810 that his national career began...

...He had much else to endure...

...He was the first to realize that Jackson was transforming his office, and waged a vigorous campaign against what he called "the imperial presidency...

...They convinced few, and their effect was to keep the issue alive andto play straight into the hands of the Jacksonians...

...but his style was essentially that of an advocate...

...His unremitting hostility was fatal to Clay's presidential chances...

...They mattered little in 1824, still an uproarious age, but more and more in the 1830s and 1840s, as what we now call Victorian morality strengthened its grip on society...

...He ran again in 1832, and failed miserably...

...federal system operating according to a written but often ambiguous Constitution, the kind of lubricating skills Clay possessed in such plenitude are well-nigh indispensable...

...Within a few years he was the leading member of the state legislature, the highest paid criminal lawyer in Kentucky, a director of its main bank, professor of law and politics at Transylvania University, and the owner of a handsome property, Ashland, which would be his home and solace for the rest of his life...

...This led to the first of his political innovations...

...But, as long as it was lawful, he felt he could not run his estate competitively without slave labor...

...To Jackson, Clay became, and remained for thirty years, "the Judas of the West," the "profligate demagogue," "the basest, meanest scoundrel that ever disgraced the image of his God...

...His mortal opponent John C. Calhoun, protagonist in oratorical duels of the most brutal savagery, admitted through clenched teeth: "I don't like Clay...

...But Clay plainly believed with every fiber of his being that America could and must become a leading industrial power, and that such expansion would eventually make it the greatest nation on earth...

...He believed that the liberty and sovereign indeHENRY CLAY: STATESMAN FOR THE UNION Robert V. Remini W. W. Norton/818 pages/$35 reviewed by PAUL JOHNSON 54 The American Spectator February 1992 pendence of the hemisphere should be the prime object of U.S...

...Instead, Clay adopted the attitude of the old Virginian moderates, which went back to the 1690s, and advocated the freeing of slaves and their repatriation to Africa...

...He joined uproariously in any cavorting going on...

...The Democrats, imitating Clay's tactics against Monroe, began systematic opposition and, after they captured Congress in 1826, effectively destroyed the Adams administration, frustrating in the process all of Clay's imaginative ventures in foreign and trading policy...

...He dismissed Jackson on the grounds that "I cannot believe that killing 2,500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Chief Magistry...

...As a boy he had helped a runaway slave to escape...

...Just as John Marshall laid down the legal basis of U.S...

...The party's appeal was consciously demotic and broadened by a network of newspapers operated by the new steam presses...

...On barge, riverboat, and stagecoach, above all in Washington drawing rooms, he always sought out the ladies, abounding in jokes and small talk...

...Men who hated him by repute were overwhelmed when they met him face to face...

...Expecting to be President Monroe's secretary of state and thus (as was usual then) his heir apparent, he was instead offered the secretaryship of war, which he turned down in disgust...

...capitalism, so did Clay supply its political foundations...

...The 1840 Whig convention introduced a new concept to American politics: that of unelectability...

...and Clay consolidated his chances by marrying into the Kentucky establishment...

...This was demonstrated in 1844 when he failed to attract enough immigrant votes to carry New York and Pennsylvania, and lost the South by refusing to back the annexation of Texas, inexplicably in view of his general support for westward expansion...

...They have never been more requisite now, and that gives the story of his career, so well told by Professor Remini, relevance and importance...

...He owned slaves virtually all his life, usually about twenty...

...Its one big victory, when it carried all three, was in 1840, in the aftermath of the 1837 panic...

...Clay was a great congressional orator, one of the few in American history whose technique served equally well in the House and the Senate...

...BOOK REVIEWS S ince the end of the 1820s, the presidency of the United States has been the greatest popularly elected office in the world, the most precious of the glittering prizes open to a professional politician...

...Clay delighted wives and daughters even more...

...The two men were closeted alone for three hours on the evening of Sunday, January 9. As Remini says, Adams certainly made deals to get the support of Missouri, Maryland, and possibly other states, though he discounts a specific exchange of votes for office...

...For an ambitious young man it was the ideal time to arrive, with all avenues open...

...Moreover, he had charm...

...However, one tall, emaciated, bullet-scarred, pain-racked figure remained totally impervious to the Clay charisma...

...That sent the election to the House, where the voting was by states...

...But Jackson, one of the outstanding haters in American history, was not like that...

...When he was in charge, the House functioned efficiently and fairly...

...She afterwards married a Mulatto Man, by whom she had several children, of which General Jackson is one...