Henry Clay

Henry Clay ran for president five times, never won, and held the United States together for thirty years by arranging the compromises that postponed the civil war. He came from Virginia, read law, moved to Kentucky, and was sent to the Senate before he was legally old enough. As Speaker of the House from 1811 he made the office powerful and pushed the country into the War of 1812. His American System - a national bank, protective tariffs and federal money for roads and canals - is the programme the Whig Party was built on. He negotiated the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free one and barred slavery north of a line; the compromise tariff of 1833 that ended the nullification crisis; and the Compromise of 1850, passed while he was dying. In 1824 he threw his support to John Quincy Adams and was made Secretary of State, which his enemies called a corrupt bargain and which followed him for the rest of his career. He owned slaves throughout his life while calling slavery an evil and presiding over the American Colonization Society, a contradiction he never resolved. Lincoln called him his beau ideal of a statesman. He negotiated the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 that ended the War of 1812 he had helped start, holding out against giving the British navigation of the Mississippi. He fought a duel with John Randolph in 1826 after Randolph insulted him in the Senate; both fired twice and neither was hit. Told that a position on Texas would cost him the presidency, he said he would rather be right than be president, which is the line he is remembered by. A Senate committee chaired by John F. Kennedy named him in 1957 one of the five greatest senators in the country's history.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history