by Scott Farris
Astonishing both Clay and Biddle, Jackson’s veto message proved quite popular with the public, who were told by Jackson that the bank benefited only a few hundred wealthy and well-connected shareholders and borrowers. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” Jackson said. Biddle and Clay might have considered the bank essential to facilitating the nation’s commerce and promoting prosperity for all classes and sectors, but Jackson had cleverly framed the argument as being about favoritism. Jackson, historian Henry L. Watson observed, was arguing for the principle of equality, not by providing government support to the weak but by removing government support from the strong.
Assessing Clay’s electoral chances, Philadelphia mayor B. W. Richards noted, “Attachment to a large moneyed corporation is not a popular attribute.” Even though Clay and Webster had articulated why a sound currency and a thriving economy benefited ordinary people most of all, voters did not understand the subtle economic arguments for central banking. What they certainly did oppose were alleged special privileges for a few. Jackson won nearly 55 percent of the popular vote, and Clay won only 49 of 274 electoral votes.
Clay promised to return to the Senate and work “to check the mad career of the tyrant,” but first was called upon to save the nation from civil war a second time. Tariff policy may seem esoteric today, but it was the primary method of generating federal revenue in the 1820s and 1830s, and as great a wedge between the North and South as slavery. Clay’s American System relied on protective tariffs to help America’s fledgling industries grow on a scale that would be competitive with Europe and also to raise revenue that he hoped would fund his program of internal improvements. Clay saw this program as strengthening the entire Union, but the South deeply resented protectionism that benefited Northern manufacturers, which in turn increased the cost of manufactured goods purchased by Southern planters while also reducing the prices planters could receive for their export of raw materials, most especially cotton.
Oddly enough, Jackson supporters led by Van Buren had pushed even higher tariffs on some goods in 1828. The strategy was to improve Jackson’s electoral support in the North in the belief that the South would never desert him for Adams. This so-called Tariff of Abominations had pushed South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun—then serving as Jackson’s vice president!—to refine a theory first articulated by Jefferson a generation earlier. Because the Constitution was no more than a voluntary compact among the states, Calhoun concluded, states could nullify federal laws they did not like, and if the federal government attempted to force states to observe laws they did not support, then a state was justified in seceding from the Union. In late November 1832, a South Carolina legislative convention adopted an Ordinance of Nullification that declared the tariff laws null and void in South Carolina with the attendant promise of secession if the federal government attempted to coerce South Carolina into obeying the law.
Jackson was livid. Instead of focusing on tariff reduction as a conciliatory gesture to defuse the crisis, he gave his primary attention to a bill asking Congress to authorize him to use federal troops and ships, if necessary, to force South Carolina’s compliance with federal law. He ordered his secretary of war Lewis Cass to prepare three artillery divisions for dispatch to South Carolina along with one hundred thousand soldiers. Clay supported this so-called force bill, but given his already low opinion of Jackson, he had no confidence that Jackson would use force judiciously. He was certain the president’s “vengeful passions” would plunge the nation into civil war.
Clay had a special horror of civil war. “God alone knows where such a war would end,” he told the Senate. “In what state will our institutions be left? In what state our liberties?” To defuse the crisis, Clay hit upon an ingenious idea whereby all protectionist tariffs would be abolished—but not for nearly another decade. He thought this would appease the North because another ten years of protective tariffs would buy Northern industries time to grow and strengthen their position against foreign competition. He thought this would appease the South because it acknowledged the justness of their grievances and made the end of protectionist policies by a specific date certain. It took an enormous amount of work to lobby the two sides, including Clay’s dramatic offer (not accepted) to resign permanently from public life if only Congress would adopt his compromise, but Clay’s proposal was adopted and the crisis averted.
Jackson then instigated another crisis. His successful veto of the re-charter of the Second Bank of the United States still left four more years to go on its existing charter. The president wanted its death to come quickly. He directed his secretary of the treasury William Duane to remove United States government deposits from the bank and to put them in state banks operated by men who supported Jackson. Duane refused, so Jackson sacked him and replaced him with longtime aide Roger Taney, who had helped author the re-charter veto and who now began the process of deposit removal. In retaliation, Biddle tightened credit and called in loans in hopes of creating an economic crisis that would force Jackson to back off. Business conditions were awful in much of the country, but Jackson would not relent. “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me. But I will kill it!” he told his new vice president.
Clay and his allies were apoplectic. “We are in the midst of a revolution,” Clay told the Senate, “hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the Government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man.” Jackson countered with his belief that the president should have more authority than Congress because only the president was “the direct representative of the American people” and because only the president was voted on by all voters.
Clay and his allies in the Senate were unable to stop Jackson’s deposit removal plan, but they were successful in approving a censure motion of Jackson’s conduct by a vote of 26-20. Clay pursued censure because impeachment must originate in the House, where Jackson’s supporters held a majority. No president had ever been censured by the Senate before and none have been since. Jackson was furious and said of Clay, “Oh, if I live to get these robes of office off me, I will bring that rascal to a dear account!” Two years later, Jackson’s supporters were successful in expunging the censure from the Senate record. Clay and Jackson never did fight a duel.
It was during debate on deposit removal that Clay borrowed a phrase he had heard used in local elections in the South and in New York to describe all those opposed to the concentration of power in the hands of the president: “patriotic whigs.” In Britain, “Whig” had described those opposed to the Restoration of the monarchy by Charles II, so it seemed an especially appropriate label for those who expressed concern that Jackson intended to become “King Andrew the First.” Such was Clay’s influence that within weeks Whig replaced National Republican as the common term nationally for those allied in opposition to Jackson.
Democrats immediately sought to label the Whigs as elite, unreconstructed Federalists. The Richmond Whig newspaper complained that Democrats “have classified the rich and intelligent and denounced them as aristocrats,” when in reality Whigs came from all classes of society and all areas of the country. Reflecting Clay’s call for a new definition of freedom that included freedom of opportunity, Whigs challenged the branding of their party by Democrats as the party of the rich by asserting that the rich could be anyone of intelligence who worked hard. “Who are the rich men of our country?” the New York American editorialized. “They are the enterprising mechanic, who raises himself by his ingenious labours from the dust and turmoil of his workshop, to an abode of ease and elegance; the industrious tradesman, whose patient frugality enables him at last to accumulate enough to forego duties of the counter and indulge a well-earned leisure.”
The Whigs, then, became the name of the national party of opposition to the Democrats and would remain so until supplanted in 1856
by the Republicans. The scope of the Whigs’ appeal is demonstrated by the fact that in the five presidential elections held from 1836 through 1852, Whigs averaged 48.3 percent of the popular vote while Democrats averaged 48.2 percent. Without Clay’s nationalist vision, the variety of sectional and special interest parties that rose and fell in America during the antebellum period in opposition to Jackson—the Anti-Masons, Free Soil, Native American (Know-Nothings), or Liberty Parties, to name a few—might have set a very different precedent for the American political system.
The Whig Party, while short lived, was important because it was a truly national party that drew support from every section of the Union. It helped hold the Union together at a time when the republic was young enough that a sectional split might have been irrevocable. Having Whig support in the North, South, and West helped postpone the dissolution of the Union until 1860, when a divided nation was no longer acceptable to the North and West. As long as a Whig in Alabama felt he had more in common with a Whig in Connecticut than he did a Democrat in Mississippi, then that provided a little more glue to hold the nation together. When the Whig Party imploded before the war, largely over the issue of slavery, one of the most important checks on fervent sectionalism failed.
Clay’s Whigs were also largely the foundation upon which the Republican Party was built. Most of those who formed the Republican Party had been Whigs, particularly Northern “Conscience Whigs” who embraced Clay’s economic program, but who were also aggressively anti-slavery. Lincoln described himself as “an old-line Henry Clay Whig,” and to prove the point Lincoln quoted Clay more than forty times during his debates with Stephen Douglas. Lincoln’s views on slavery (at least until well into the Civil War) and his economic program were nearly identical to Clay’s. Various observers have compared Clay’s influence on Lincoln with Jefferson’s on Madison or Franklin Roosevelt’s on Lyndon Johnson. It might even be said that when Lincoln and the Republicans who followed him implemented a good deal of Clay’s American System, they created a true Whig regime at last.
Finally, in considering the Whigs’ legacy, more and more historians are concluding that the Whigs, not Jackson’s Democrats, are the real ideological forerunner of modern American liberalism. Some still argue that Jackson spurred modern liberalism by broadening the suffrage to include all adult white males, by antipathy toward elites, and by the Democratic Party’s embrace of immigrants. But broadening democratic participation is only one measure of liberalism. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose epic study, The Age of Jackson, set the tone for much modern Jackson scholarship, has since acknowledged that he gave Clay and the Whigs “a good deal less than justice” in using Jackson’s precedent as the rationale for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whig policies that were designed to broaden economic prosperity “had a sounder conception of the role of government and a more constructive policy of economic development than the anti-statist Jacksonians,” Schlesinger wrote in his memoirs.
But Clay, the very “embodiment and polar star of Whig principles,” did more than outline a new conception of the purpose of government; he expanded the definition of freedom in America. From Revolutionary times, liberty had been defined simply as freedom from an oppressive government; Clay, who coined the phrase “the self-made man,” expanded the definition to include freedom of opportunity. Clay argued that the federal government had a duty to supply what was necessary for the “safety, convenience and prosperity” of the American people. This was a sharp break with Jeffersonian orthodoxy, yet it captures one of the most appealing aspects of America, which is the opportunity to make a better life than you or your parents enjoyed before—often with the help of the government.
It is easy to imagine Clay championing such twentieth-century innovations as the GI Bill, student loans, or the creation of the Internet. Clay, for example, proposed government regulation of the telegraph so information could not be monopolized. For Clay, the American experiment was about more than just political equality, it was also the equality of opportunity to do well and prosper. It was Clay’s great intellectual achievement, said renowned historian Richard Hofstadter, to broaden the appeal of what was essentially a Hamiltonian economic program by infusing it with a “Jeffersonian spirit.”
Clay’s extraordinary influence was due in large part to his immensely appealing personality. He was a witty conversationalist who loved parties, brandy, and cards. Once, he reportedly lost and won eight thousand dollars in a single night, and many who knew him said the most important thing to understand about Clay was that he was by nature a gambler—a trait that did not always serve him well in politics. Hearing contemporaries describe Clay brings to mind President Bill Clinton, another brilliant politician capable of forging imaginative political compromises. Like Clinton, Clay was known to be able to win over enemies with his charm if given a chance. When a new congressman from Georgia, General Thomas Glascock, was offered the opportunity to meet Clay, he refused, saying, “No, sir! I am his adversary, and choose not to subject myself to his fascination.”
Also like Clinton, Clay was repeatedly accused of having lax morals. When Clay and John Quincy Adams were in Europe to negotiate the treaty to end the War of 1812, the dour and proper Adams would complain that Clay was usually just going to bed when Adams was rising. While cards and brandy were the main staples of his amusements, Clay also liked to flirt and make playful and, for the time, risqué remarks. During a speaking tour in New England, for example, he shocked some in the audience by insisting on calling Virginia “the dominion of the virgin queen.”
Perhaps it was this reputation for being a bit of a bad boy that made Clay especially attractive to women. Even in his old age female admirers mobbed him, sometimes snipping a lock of his hair as a souvenir. Clay joyfully returned their affection with kisses, joking that kissing was like the presidency, “it was not to be sought and not to be declined.” Despite such behavior, there is no evidence that he was ever unfaithful to his wife, Lucretia, a plain, kindly woman who abhorred Washington society and preferred to remain in Kentucky to manage Ashland, the family estate near Lexington.
Clay was tall, at six feet in height, and bony, with long arms and legs. He had a narrow face with a high forehead, small blue eyes, and a mouth so wide and so thin it was said he could not whistle and had trouble spitting tobacco. No portrait ever did him justice, those who knew him said, because he was at his most attractive when in motion. “There was not a look of his eye, not a movement of his long, graceful right arm, not a swaying of his body, that was not full of grace and effect,” one admirer gushed.
And then there was his voice, a “majestic” bass that “filled the room as the organ fills a great cathedral.” It was “music itself,” one enraptured observer recalled, “and yet penetrating and far-reaching, enchanting the listener; his words flowed rapidly, without sing-song or mannerism, in a clear and steady stream.” Another said of Clay’s voice, “Whoever heard one more melodious? There was a depth of tone to it, a volume, a compass, a rich and tender harmony, which invested all he said with majesty.”
Clay possessed the soul of a thespian. In this golden age of American political oratory, when entertainment options were limited, a short Clay speech might last two hours while an important speech might be continued over several days. To hold his audience, Clay would speak as an orchestra performs a symphony, with a wide range of tones, gestures, and movements. During one emotional assault on Jackson’s Indian removal policy, the British author Harriet Martineau said, “I saw tears, of which I am sure he [Clay] was wholly unconscious, falling on his papers as he vividly described the woes and injuries of the aborigines.”
Despite these performances, Clay often lamented that in popular politics emotion trumped reason, and he had trouble connecting with the common voter. Clay’s speeches were generally sophisticated in content, and those lucky enough to be present when Clay was at his best claimed that hearing him speak was “a noble intellectual treat
.” Clay seldom used humorous anecdotes to make a point, as Lincoln did, but he was quick with a quip. When one long-winded congressman insisted that he spoke for posterity, Clay sighed, “Yes, and you seem resolved to speak until the arrival of your audience.” Another time, while campaigning back in Kentucky, Clay asked the audience where an old friend and rival attorney was. Told the man was out stumping for President Van Buren’s election, Clay replied, “Ah! At his old occupation, defending criminals.”
But like any live performance, Clay’s speeches were best experienced in the moment. Clay was considered by many contemporaries to be the greatest orator of his time, yet his popular reputation has been surpassed by that of his colleague and rival, Daniel Webster, primarily because Webster’s logical and powerful prose reads so well even today. Clay’s words do not jump off the page because, as his best biographer, Robert V. Remini, says, “Even his surviving speeches do not adequately carry the power and brilliance of his performances.” Clay’s performances were so enthralling that many of his speeches are lost to posterity because enraptured reporters forgot to take notes.
The House and Senate galleries were almost always full to overflowing any day it was known that Clay would speak. On his several national speaking tours, Clay routinely drew crowds in the tens of thousands, including one memorable Whig barbecue in Dayton, Ohio, in 1842 that drew more than one hundred thousand people. During his astonishing forty-plus years as a major national political figure, it is likely that Clay spoke before more Americans than any person of his time. It was his misfortune to run for president at a time when convention required that candidates not actively campaign for themselves. Had Clay been able to actively campaign during elections, the results of those elections would likely have been different.