Almost President (5 page)

Dewey noted the similarity between the end of a campaign and a funeral, with his own role as that of the corpse, in 1948, shortly after losing to Truman. In a speech to the Gridiron Club a few days after the election, Dewey, who had also lost the presidency in 1944, said he felt like the drunk who had passed out during a wake. “If I am alive,” he said to himself, “what am I doing in this coffin? If I am dead, why do I have to go to the bathroom?”

CHAPTER TWO

HENRY CLAY

1824, 1832, 1844

Sir, I had rather be right than be president.

One irony of contemporary politics is that the annual celebration of the Democratic Party is still known as “Jefferson-Jackson Day” when it is Andrew Jackson's arch-nemesis, Henry Clay, who helped lay the foundation of modern liberalism. If alive today, small government advocate Jackson (and probably Thomas Jefferson, too) would more likely be considered a conservative Republican, while Clay and his political disciple, Abraham Lincoln, would be Democrats in their shared belief in the necessity of an assertive national government to act positively for the economic, social, and moral well-being of the nation.

But Clay, the greatest legislator in American history, has no national political dinners named for him, nor is his face chiseled on Mount Rushmore. His is the greatest example of how failing to become president obscures a candidate's place in history. At his death, Clay was eulogized by the
New York Times
as “too great to be president,” and given the several mediocrities who have occupied the White House, this may be a fair comment. Clay himself despised our national fixation with the presidency to the exclusion of the other branches of government, though, Lord knows, he sought the office often enough himself.

Three times Clay was nominated for the presidency and came within a whisker of election. On two other occasions he actively sought nomination. This exceptional man known to his admirers as “Prince Hal” and the “Western Star” failed again and again through an extraordinary combination of poor judgment, rotten timing, and bad luck. Yet, these losses did not prevent Clay—Kentucky senator, Speaker of the House, secretary of state—from shaping American history far more profoundly than most presidents.

Clay once said, perhaps a bit disingenuously, “Sir, I had rather be right than be president.” He was never president, but he was often right. To a degree far beyond his contemporaries, Clay had an accurate vision of the nation the United States was to become. Where Jackson was stuck in the Jeffersonian fantasy of a country populated only by yeoman farmers, Clay foresaw the industrial potential of America and understood its destiny as a great world power.

A Southerner by birth, Clay was a Westerner by choice. Part of his genius was in developing a political program and strategy designed to bind the nation together and reduce the concept of sectionalism, by entwining the interests of each section with those of the others. In arguing in favor of his Compromise of 1850, Clay famously proclaimed, “I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe my allegiance.” His political program, which he called the “American System,” was carefully balanced to meet the needs and aspirations of every section of the country. It included protective tariffs to bolster American manufacturing, primarily in the North, which would in turn create stable, domestic markets for the raw goods produced in the South and West. Revenue from the tariffs would then be used for public works (then called “internal improvements”), such as roads, canals, and later, railways, which would help farmers and planters in the West and South move their goods to market.

Key to Clay's program, and the plank that led to his bitterest battle with Jackson, was a national bank to ensure the nation had sound currency, a safe place to deposit funds, and access to domestic credit in order to facilitate trade and commerce. Clay later tweaked his program to add such far-sighted ideas as using the sale of public lands to finance public universities and establishing an international copyright law to protect American writers and artists. Much of the American System would become law when Lincoln, who called Clay his “beau ideal of a statesman,” became president. Lincoln, according to his relatives, idolized Clay, and a study of Lincoln's writings and speeches clearly shows that much of his political philosophy was directly inherited from Clay.

If Clay was the quintessential American in his ardent nationalism, the services he rendered to the nation were also essential to its survival. Three times our greatest legislator forged compromises that reduced the likelihood of civil war: in 1820, 1832, and 1850. Had war come in any of those years, it goes without saying that American history would be very different. In those years, the North did not enjoy the advantages in population and industry that virtually assured victory when the war did come. Furthermore, while Jackson, a determined foe of secession, was president in 1832, the presidents in 1820 and 1850, James Monroe and Zachary Taylor respectively, would not have provided the caliber of leadership and the determination to save the Union that Lincoln would demonstrate.

But Clay did more than prevent war through legislative compromise and sterling oratory. He helped create our enduring two-party system that features two broad-based, “big tent” national parties. Particularly embittered by his 1832 loss to the hated Jackson, Clay was the leader in then creating the Whig Party, which for a generation was the alternative to Jackson's Democratic Party and which became the foundation of the new Republican Party. Clay's American System concept created a national party, when an alternative history might have led to the creation of multiple narrowly focused or sectional opposition parties and a less stable American democracy.

The split between Clay and Jackson and their dueling Democratic and Whig Parties was a continuation of the historical debate that began between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, and reminds us anew that personalities as much as policies create political unions. Jackson favored Jefferson's view that the best government is the least government, especially for a rural and agricultural nation of yeoman farmers. Clay adopted Hamilton's more prophetic vision of America developing into a powerful industrial and commercial state.

The Founding Fathers had hoped the United States might avoid having political parties, which they called “factions,” but those rallying to Hamilton soon became known as Federalists, while Jefferson's disciples were known as Republicans. Scholars differ as to whether the Federalists and Republicans were true political parties as we understand the term today, for there were no party organizations as such, no nominating conventions, or other similar partisan paraphernalia. In any event, this partisan division did not last. The Federalists disappeared as a viable political faction from a combination of factors, including John Adams's disastrous presidency, the death of George Washington, and the murder of Hamilton in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr.

The last remnants of the Federalists were discredited when some New England Federalists openly discussed secession during the unpopular War of 1812. For nearly a generation after that, there was only one political faction in the United States and the vast majority of Americans considered themselves part of it: Jeffersonian Republicans. When James Monroe was re-elected president in 1820 without opposition, a distinction shared only with Washington, a newspaper mislabeled this period of nonpartisanship the “Era of Good Feelings.” It was hardly that.

Because they were the only game in town, the Jeffersonian Republicans had to accommodate a wide range of views, not to mention competing personal ambitions. The election of 1824, therefore, was a watershed event in American political history. It reflected a generational change in leadership, as Monroe was the last of his Revolutionary War peers to serve as president.

Five men stepped forward to offer themselves as Monroe's successor, though John C. Calhoun withdrew to run for vice president when the two executive offices were still elected separately. That left William Crawford of Georgia, who had served in the Senate and as both secretary of war and treasury, but who was now debilitated by a stroke; John Quincy Adams, son of the second president and America's foremost diplomat; Andrew Jackson; and Henry Clay.

Clay had begun his political career believing himself a Jeffersonian, but when the War of 1812 exposed America's many weaknesses, he became a fierce and tenacious advocate of an active, vital national government. He called his love of the Union “the key to my heart.” Jackson was devoted to the Union, too, but was Jeffersonian in his belief that the national government should be remote from the daily lives of Americans (except, it must be said, when federal power was needed to clear away aboriginal populations to open up new settlement areas for white Americans).

Given that Clay and Jackson were the first two statesmen of national renown to emerge from the frontier West, their rivalry seems inevitable—though Clay, particularly, did his best to exacerbate their mutual animosity. Their early lives had many parallels. Both were born in the Southeast: Clay in Virginia in 1777 and Jackson in South Carolina in 1767. Both lost their fathers at a young age, had childhood memories of abuse at the hands of British soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and later moved west—Clay to Kentucky and Jackson to Tennessee—to seek their fortunes as young attorneys.

Neither man had much formal schooling, but Clay enjoyed two advantages over Jackson in education. First, as a boy in Virginia, he had the opportunity to observe some of the nation's finest orators, including the great Patrick Henry. Second, when his genius was recognized at a young age, his stepfather secured a position for him as a clerk in the Virginia High Court of Chancery. There, at age sixteen, he became secretary to the chancellor himself, George Wythe, who had been the law professor of Jefferson, Monroe, and John Marshall, among others.

Armed with this extraordinary legal education, Clay earned his license to practice law at age twenty-one. He concluded that his ambitions could be more readily realized on the frontier, so he moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and dove into public affairs. Upon arrival, he was part of an effort to revise and liberalize Kentucky's state constitution. Even though he was already a slaveholder, Clay urged in public letters that the constitution include a provision for gradual emancipation. The effort failed, but Clay's obvious political talents and prominence in the legal profession (he was Aaron Burr's defense attorney against charges of sedition) were rewarded with election to the Kentucky Legislature at the age of twenty-six, temporary appointment to the U.S. Senate at age twenty-nine (a year younger than allowed by the Constitution, though no one complained), and election to the U.S. House in 1810 at age thirty-three.

Remarkably, he was elected Speaker of the House as a freshman congressman—on the first ballot. Before Clay, the duties of the Speaker were largely ceremonial, but Clay transformed the position into what is considered by many the second most powerful office in the country. Generally acknowledged the most effective Speaker in history, Clay asserted wide powers, including determining which congressmen sat on which committees and to which committees bills would be assigned for study and recommendation to the full House. Like other legislative savants, Clay had a near-telepathic ability to understand and motivate his members, and he was already exuding the charm for which he became famous. Said Missouri congressman Edward Bates, “There is an intuitive perception about him, that seems to see and understand at a glance, and a winning fascination in his manners that will suffer none to be his enemies who cooperate with him. When I look upon his manly and bold countenance, and meet his frank and eloquent eye, I feel an emotion little short of enthusiasm in his cause. . . . He is a great man—one of Nature's nobles!”

As Speaker, Clay led a group of young congressmen known as the “War Hawks” who were outraged by Britain's treatment of America as a minor power and its variety of abuses, including pressing American seamen into service in the British navy. President James Madison, who was a mentor to Clay, was not a strong leader, so Clay filled the power vacuum and was, according to Congressman (and later Harvard president) Josiah Quincy, “the man whose influence and power more than that of any other produced the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain.” Clay's bellicosity was remarkable. The man had two duels during his lifetime (in which no one was killed), but generally so abhorred violence that he never went hunting.

The war did not go well for the United States. A series of military disasters on sea and on land, punctuated by the British razing of Washington, led to strong anti-war feelings. Prosecuting the war proved difficult due to the United States' reliance on foreign manufactured goods and foreign credit, a problem that altered Clay's philosophy of government into what would become the American System. Anxious to end the war, Madison made Clay part of the American delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent, an agreement more or less along the status quo. The British had also grown tired of the conflict, as they were simultaneously battling Napoleon's armies. But the greater glory went to Jackson, who led the stunning American victory at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815—weeks after the war had formally ended because word of the treaty had not yet reached America.