Over the next forty years Kentucky sent him to the House or the Senate more or less whenever he wished (he took time off in the 1820s to be US secretary of state). He was a man of many political talents—a wily parliamentarian and a patient deal-maker—but his hold on the public rested on his skill as a performer. One listener described him in full cry: “He spoke to his audience very much as an ardent lover speaks to his sweetheart. . . . His voice was full, rich, clear, sweet, musical, and as inspiring as a trumpet. . . . His tall form would seem to grow taller and taller with every new statement, until it reached a supernatural height.” He was “the livest man of whom it is possible to conceive.”
Clay was one of the first politicians to note the aging of the founders (not yet their passing, for Jefferson and Madison were still active when he first came to Washington). As early as 1810 he spoke of them thus: “The withered arm and wrinkled brow of the illustrious founders of our freedom are melancholy indications that they will shortly be removed from us. . . . We shall want the presence and living example of a new race of heroes to supply their places.”
Clay intended to be one of those heroes. He showed his mettle by defusing two crises as great as anything Washington had faced as president.
In 1819—when Lincoln was still a child in Indiana—Missouri applied for statehood. It would be the second state carved out of the Louisiana Territory, after Louisiana itself, and the first that was entirely west of the Mississippi. Would the new state in the new American West admit slaves? The House, where the more populous free states commanded a majority, wanted Missouri to be free, but the Senate, where slave states and free states were in balance, would not agree. House and Senate, North and South, became fixed in an acrid deadlock. Clay, who was Speaker as the crisis began, engineered a compromise whereby Missouri would be admitted as a slave state, balanced by Maine (hitherto a part of Massachusetts) as a free state, while in the rest of the Louisiana Territory slavery would be forbidden north of a line running west at latitude 36°30' N—known thereafter as the Missouri line. He had saved the Union, though southern diehards never quite trusted him again.
In 1832 came a second almost-explosion. South Carolina was rich in slaves and cotton but dependent for its necessities on imports. After Congress passed a high tariff to protect northern manufacturers, the state announced that it would nullify the law within its borders. President Jackson threatened, South Carolina blustered. Clay, now a senator, arranged a gradual lessening of the tariff, and the rebellious state withdrew its ordinance of nullification.
The Missouri clash split the country on sectional lines; South Carolina’s nullification ordinance challenged the very structure of the Constitution, where setting tariffs is made the responsibility of the federal government (Article I, Sections 8 and 10). The last of the founders anxiously watched these threats to their handiwork. Jefferson called the Missouri crisis “the knell of the union.” Madison accused the South Carolina nullifiers of fomenting “disgust with the union.” Clay had helped beat back both threats; his handiwork earned him the title of the Great Compromiser.
But he coveted an even greater title. Clay reputedly said he would rather be right than president. His desire to be right must have been very great then, for he desperately wanted to be president. He first ran in 1824, in the four-way race to succeed the last founder president, James Monroe. He came in fourth, with 37 electoral votes. One of the other candidates—all of them, like Clay, Republicans—was Andrew Jackson; their rivalry would polarize the next two-party system. In 1832 Clay ran head to head against Jackson, this time calling himself a National Republican; Jackson buried him, with 219 electoral votes to 49. Clay lost again in 1844, running as a Whig—which made him the first three-time loser in the history of presidential elections. But Clay had wanted two more shots, seeking (and failing) to win the Whig nomination in 1840 and 1848.
What did Lincoln think of this gaudy, capable, egotistical man?
Lincoln never heard Clay speak in Congress, for Clay left the Senate in 1842 to prepare for his next presidential campaign and did not return until 1849, after Lincoln left the House. Lincoln did hear him in November 1847 in Lexington, Kentucky, when the Lincoln family stopped in Mary’s hometown on their way to Washington. Clay denounced the Mexican War as a war of aggression—the very argument Lincoln would make in his “spot” resolutions the following month.
Lincoln never said much about Clay’s oratory; the one time he praised it, after Clay’s death, he did so by quoting a newspaper obituary—praise at arm’s length. Their styles would never be alike. Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed audiences as sweethearts (he hardly addressed his sweethearts as sweethearts). As Lincoln came into his own as a speaker, he strove for the hard glow of literary permanence. Clay’s speeches, as even his admirers admitted, were not meant to be read, but to be absorbed in the rush of the moment. Clay’s compromises were more to Lincoln’s taste, as his letter to the Illinois Liberty Party supporter showed. If you keep your main point, why not surrender subsidiary ones?
Clay was most disappointing to Lincoln as a presidential candidate. Lincoln the Whig stalwart wanted victories—and Clay was unable to supply them. In addition to the talents he actually possessed, Clay fancied himself a clever campaigner. He was ever thinking of the twist, the turn, the quickstep that would carry him over the finish line, but he only managed to stumble. In 1839, he gave a speech attacking abolitionists, because he honestly deplored their criticism of the Constitution, and because he wanted to shore up support in the South. But he went so far that he only offended northern Whig leaders, who swung the party’s nomination to Harrison. As the Whig candidate in 1844, Clay made a similar mistake concerning the annexation of Texas, driving northern voters to the Liberty Party. Despite all his efforts to conciliate the South, supporters of slavery mocked him; one rhymester wrote of Clay and his 1844 running mate, Theodore Frelinghuysen: “De niggar vote am quite surprising, / We’s all for Clay and Frelinghuysing.”
As the 1848 election approached, Clay stirred again (he would be seventy-one years old). A cadre of younger Whigs, called Young Indians, was determined to stop him and nominate a war hero instead. That credential had worked for Harrison in 1840; as it happened, the two best generals of the Mexican War, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, were both Whigs. The party could still blame Polk for waging the war, so long as it was led by one of the men who had won it.
Alexander Stephens, the congressman whose speech Lincoln had so admired, was a Young Indian. So was Lincoln. In June 1848 Lincoln went to the Whig convention in Philadelphia to support Taylor, who was nominated on the first ballot. “We shall have a most overwhelming, glorious triumph,” Lincoln predicted in a letter to Herndon. The Democrats nominated Lewis Cass, a Michigan politician who had served in the War of 1812 (in a speech in the House, Lincoln laughingly compared Cass’s slender war record with his own in the Black Hawk War). There was also a significant third party in this contest, called Free Soil—a coalition of Liberty Party abolitionists and those who would not end slavery outright, but opposed letting it expand into the territories that America had wrung from Mexico. Their nomination went to former president Martin Van Buren, trying to get back into the game.
Lincoln opposed slavery’s expansion, too—if America did not “find new places for it to live in,” he wrote, it would die “a natural death”—but he thought, as he had in 1844, that the Whigs were the best means of achieving that goal. He campaigned for Taylor in Maryland, Massachusetts, and back home in Illinois. Taylor won with 163 electoral votes to Cass’s 127. The Free Soil Party won no electoral votes, though it got 10 percent of the popular vote. Once again the Democrats took Illinois.
Lincoln was not rewarded for backing the winner. He angled for a federal appointment as a land office administrator; the new administration gave it instead to a former Clay backer. He was offered a job in the Oregon Territory as a consolation prize, but decided to stay in Illinois and (for now) in privat
e life.
Lincoln found Clay to be a mixed political leader. But he endorsed Clay’s economic program wholeheartedly.
Clay’s vision, which he called the American System, was an interlocking structure of internal improvements, a national bank, and protective tariffs (though he was willing to cut tariffs when a crisis loomed). As a young politician Lincoln had supported both internal improvements in Illinois and the Second Bank of the United States.
But the purpose of the American System was not just to make infrastructure or make money; it was to make men—to develop the talents of individual Americans and the national character. Clay wanted an economy that was diversified and progressive, which would give his countrymen the chance to move beyond hardscrabble farming. He is credited, wrongly, with inventing the phrase “self-made man.” But he had highlighted it in a long Senate speech expounding his economic views during the 1832 campaign. “In Kentucky,” he said, every factory “known to me is in the hands of enterprising, self-made men, who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor.” Enterprising, self-made, patient, diligent—these words were moral and economic touchstones for Clay.
Who would reject such a vision? Plenty of people. There was already in American politics a long thread of polemic against the wealthy, especially businessmen or bankers—anyone who seemed to have too much money. Madison, cofounder with Jefferson of the first Republican Party, dismissed such folk as “the opulent.” Andrew Jackson’s Democrats carried on the attack in their struggle against the Second Bank of the United States. Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson were wealthy men, but since their wealth came from agriculture, not manufacturing, they and their supporters considered it virtuous.
Clay addressed that point in 1832. Manufacturing, he admitted, was accused of “favoring the growth of aristocracy. . . . But is there more tendency to aristocracy in a . . . factory supporting hundreds of freemen, or in a cotton plantation, with its not less numerous slaves, sustaining, perhaps, only two white families—that of the master and the overseer?” Lincoln might have added another point of comparison to Clay’s—though there was no tendency to aristocracy in a farm like Thomas Lincoln’s, it offered little reward (beyond subsistence) for patient and diligent labor.
Neither party was a monolith. The Democrats of Clay’s and Lincoln’s day, like the first Republican Party, embraced many self-made men—workers, artisans, businessmen—while the Whigs made a successful pitch for the rural poor with the Log Cabin Campaign of 1840. But each party had its favorite stock of tropes, which they strove (inconsistently) to live up to. Clay, Lincoln, and most Whigs believed in economic development leading to self-improvement.
There was a founding father from whom Lincoln could have learned this message. Alexander Hamilton was the self-made man among the founders, even more than Benjamin Franklin (both started poor, but Hamilton, an illegitimate immigrant, started even further back). As first treasury secretary, Hamilton had offered a program of national development, including the first Bank of the United States and a vision of a diverse American economy, with factories as well as farms. His goal was to foster a nation of Hamiltons—economics as soul-craft. “When all the different kinds of industry obtain in a community,” he wrote, “each individual can find his proper element, and can call into activity the whole vigor of his nature.”
Lincoln seems to have been hardly aware of Hamilton (he appears briefly in Weems’s Life of Washington not as treasury secretary but as a heedless duelist, “pursuing the phantom honor up to the pistol’s mouth”). Hamilton’s early death in 1804, and the death of his Federalist Party a dozen years later, left a vacuum where his reputation should have been. Hamilton’s Republican enemies—Jefferson, Madison, Monroe—not only outlived him, they occupied the White House for twenty-four years. The Federalists, meanwhile, were disgraced by their opposition to the War of 1812. In New York, Hamilton’s state, and in New England, where Federalism survived the longest, he was still sometimes remembered. Elsewhere he was an honored cipher—a hero of the Revolution (Weems conceded that he was “gallant”), whose widow was entitled to a seat on the podium when the cornerstone of the Washington Monument was laid, but not a usable political example.
Henry Clay was usable, even though his economic program had suffered as many setbacks as his presidential ambitions. Tariffs had to be cut after the Nullification Crisis, and the Second Bank of the United States had never been resurrected. Yet Clay remained a living advocate of ideas that went beyond his hunger for office. Lincoln tired of him as a presidential candidate, but thought he was right.
When Clay returned to the Senate for the last time in December 1849, the issue before the country was not economics, but the fate of its new Southwest.
California was in the midst of a gold rush and clamoring for immediate statehood. Texas claimed a western border running all the way to Santa Fe. The question of slavery embittered every other question. Would the Missouri line, drawn to resolve a crisis thirty years earlier, be extended all the way to the Pacific, splitting California in half? Would Texas be allowed to carry slavery into New Mexico, where it did not exist? Should slavery be allowed into all of America’s new territories? Into none of them? The answers to these questions would reach beyond the Southwest to touch the balance of power in Congress and the future of American politics.
America’s divisions over slavery seemed to be woven into Clay’s own life. For all his mockery of cotton planters, he was himself a slave owner—the largest in Kentucky (his plantation in Lexington grew hemp, which was made into rope in Louisville factories—so the American System was still upheld). Yet Clay had hoped that his state might take the route of gradual emancipation. Two state constitutional conventions, fifty years apart—in 1799 and 1849—actually considered the question, but failed to act.
Perhaps Clay’s split personality made him the ideal man to settle the question of slavery nationally. In his last compromise—the Compromise of 1850—he tried to offer something to everyone. California would be admitted, whole, as a free state. Utah, home of the persecuted Mormons, and New Mexico, which included present-day Arizona, could be future slave territories if they chose. Texas would accept a restricted boundary in return for having the United States pay off its independence-era debts. In addition, Clay offered to end the slave trade in the District of Columbia—no more Negro livery stables on Capitol Hill—and to impose a tough federal fugitive slave law.
Clay invoked George Washington, displaying on the Senate floor a fragment of his coffin. (Clay was close to the grave himself, age seventy-two going on seventy-three, and coughing from tuberculosis.) A man who was interested in preserving Mount Vernon, Washington’s old estate, had given Clay “the precious relic” while he was working on his speech in support of the compromise. Was it, Clay asked, “a sad presage” of the impending death of the country? He answered his own question: “No, sir, no. It was a warning voice” asking Congress “to beware, to pause, to reflect.”
After six months of reflection, the Senate rejected Clay’s compromise. Free Soil northerners did not want slavery to expand anywhere. Southern diehards could not accept California as a free state, or Texas’s loss of its far western border. These, united with mere obstructionists who had personal quarrels with the old orator, managed to block his last great effort. Clay retired to Newport, Rhode Island, to take care of his ravaged lungs.
But his last effort was salvaged by an acquaintance of Lincoln’s—Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Douglas had risen from clashing with Lincoln in local disputes to winning all the prizes that were open to a talented Democrat in a Democratic state—secretary of state, state supreme court judge, congressman, and, since 1847, US senator. Once he had vaulted onto the national stage, he had assumed a starring role. In midsummer 1850 Douglas split Clay’s compromise into its constituent parts, and by the middle of September he had rounded up enough votes for each proposal to pass all of them.
Lincoln watched from afar but made no comm
ents on the great compromise—except possibly in one exchange with his first law partner, John Stuart. Sometime in 1850, as Stuart remembered it, he and Lincoln were on the road, tending to legal business in Tazewell County, south of Peoria. “As we were coming down [a] hill . . . I said, ‘Lincoln, the time is coming when we shall have to be all either Abolitionists or Democrats.’” Stuart assumed that, in a reshuffling of parties, the Democrats would be the party of slavery. Lincoln, he went on, “thought a moment and then answered, ruefully and emphatically, ‘When that time comes my mind is made up, for I believe the slavery question can never be successfully compromised.’”
Stuart was hazy about the date; possibly he was imputing more foresight to himself and to Lincoln than they had shown. By the end of 1850, thanks to Henry Clay (and Stephen Douglas), the future of slavery in the United States seemed settled—provided everyone kept to the settlement.
Clay died, age seventy-five, at the end of June 1852. The founders were dead, and now so was the new race of heroes to which Clay had nominated himself. Lincoln delivered a eulogy in Springfield a week later. The eulogy showed some reserve, some holding back, especially on the subject of Clay’s oratory. But Lincoln found something important in the dead man’s life and words—a path, back through Clay himself, to the founders and the first principles of America.
Lincoln began with a coincidence. Clay was born in the first year after the United States’ birth (April 1777). “The infant nation, and the infant child began the race of life together. For three quarters of a century they have travelled hand in hand.” Lincoln equated Clay with America—but what about him was particularly American?
Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Page 10