Profiles in Character: Henry Clay Crafts Compromises to Save the Union

Henry Clay, born in Virginia in 1777 as the nation was also being born, would spend his life trying to save it.  Trained in the law by the eminent Virginian George Wythe, he would make his home and career in Kentucky.  He was a candidate for president of the United States – and lost three times. Yet he never lost his passion to preserve the Union. “If any man wants the key to my heart, let him take the key of union,” he said.

Clay had a gift for oratory but was no saint.  He enjoyed gambling, drinking and was not averse to dueling.  No pacifist, he joined the War Hawks leading up to the War of 1812.  Yet its carnage changed him. As James Klotter wrote in Henry Clay: The Man Who Would be President, he henceforth “sought compromise over conflict…territorial expansion by purchase or diplomacy and not war.”

Clay was the architect of the “American System,” his program to bind the states to each other and to the national government through protective tariffs to build American industry, a national financial system, internal improvements (roads, rivers, canals) and selling unoccupied lands to foster westward expansion and raise money for the national treasury.

At 34, he took a seat in the House of Representatives and was immediately elected Speaker.  He stepped down temporarily to become one of five peace commissioners negotiating an end to the War of 1812.  After divisions grew over the potential admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1819, he helped craft the Compromise of 1820.  It defused the crisis by also bringing in Maine as a free state and directing all future states emerging above the line of 36030’ North would be free. He was called the “Great Pacificator.”  He believed any human problem could “be approached by argument and reason.”

His first run for president in 1820 was against John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, the “hero of New Orleans.” Since no one gained an Electoral Vote majority the election was thrown into the House of Representatives.  Sensing defeat, he threw his support to Adams against the instructions of his own legislature because “I love liberty and safety, and I fear military despotism [under Jackson] more.”  When Adams soon appointed Clay Secretary of State, Jackson railed against the “corrupt bargain,” a charge that followed Clay in later presidential campaigns.   

In 1832, now-Senator Clay ran against sitting President Jackson and lost again. He then faced an effort by South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, who railed against high tariffs and claimed the right of a state to nullify federal legislation. Jackson threatened military force to compel the State’s compliance and Clay again forged a compromise. It called for a gradual lowering of tariffs, enabling protection of American industry in the short-term yet meeting South Carolina’s goal over time.  Knowing he’d be criticized, Clay remarked “what is a public man worth who will not sacrifice himself if necessary for the good of his country?”  Virginia’s John Randolph observed “there is one man and one man only, who can save the Union – that man is Henry Clay,”  then called the Great Compromiser. 

His faced more tests over slavery. Though he owned slaves, he understood the evils and believed in the human dignity of all people. Yet, like many of his white contemporaries, he could not envision a society in which blacks and whites could live together.  He supported gradual emancipation and resettlement in Africa.  As talk of Southern secession grew, he warned of the threat from “the ultraism of the South on one hand . . . and the ultraism of Abolition on the other.” He straddled the issue time and again, leading voters to confuse where he really stood.  He remarked that “[T]the abolitionists are denouncing me as a slaveholder, and the slaveholders as an abolitionist.”

After losing the presidency again in 1844, war with Mexico erupted under President Polk and the status of slavery in states emerging from newly acquired territory roiled the nation again. His skills were once more called upon over the potential admission of California as a free state in 1949 after Texas had been admitted as a slave state. He crafted the Compromise of 1850 which admitted California but mollified the South be strengthening the Fugitive Slave Law. 

Clay claimed the Compromise was “founded upon mutual forbearance, originating in a spirit of conciliation and concession.”  Yet it would hold the Union together only until the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 - nine years after Clay died.  He would have been grief-stricken, yet would have supported Lincoln: “I am for maintaining the authority of the Union, by force, if necessary,” he said in 1850.

George Washington owns first place for having the most images of him in the U.S. Capitol.  The man who never gained the presidency and was often scorned as well as celebrated has the second most.

Photo Credit: National Portrait Gallery (painter unknown)

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