Almost President (8 page)

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.

Still, he left an extraordinary legacy. No American legislator had a more distinguished congressional career, and none has achieved such distinction in both houses of Congress. While Clay, like politicians of any period, tended to exaggerate the humbleness of his origins, his was an extraordinary rise to power and influence for one not born to wealth or privilege. Margaret Bayard Smith, author, diarist, and grande dame of Washington society from 1800 to 1841, suggested that in some respects Clay was a superior man to Jefferson and Madison because he did not enjoy their aristocratic upbringing. Clay's “own, inherent power, [was] bestowed by nature and not derivative from cultivation or fortune,” Smith wrote. “He has an elasticity and buoyancy of spirit, that no pressure of external circumstances can confine or keep down. He is a very great man.”

The pity of Clay is that such a great man could not see a way to resolve the issue of slavery in the United States. Clay was himself a slave owner from childhood, when he inherited two slaves from his father's estate at the age of four. Later in life, he owned as many as fifty slaves at one time. He freed several of his slaves during his lifetime, and his will made provisions for the gradual emancipation of all his slaves after his death.

Clay maintained all his life that slavery was “a great evil.” Ruminating on the condition of slaves in Kentucky, Clay wrote empathetically:

Can any humane man be happy and contented when he sees near thirty thousand of his fellow beings around him, deprived of all the rights which make life desirable, transferred like cattle from the possession of one to another; when he sees the trembling slave, under the hammer, surrounded by a number of eager purchasers, and feeling all the emotions which arise when one is uncertain into whose tyrannic hands he must next fall; when he beholds the anguish and hears the piercing cries of husbands separated from wives and children from parents; when, in a word, all the tender and endearing ties of human nature are broken asunder and disregarded . . .

To abolitionists, it was the worst sort of hypocrisy to expound on the evil of slavery while not only owning slaves but forging legislative compromises that protected its existence in the South. Because they thought he should know better, abolitionists held a special antipathy toward Clay, and their enmity was key in depriving Clay of the presidency in 1844.

Clay felt constrained by the fact that while slavery might run counter to the basic tenet of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” slavery was nonetheless legal under the Constitution. Further, while Clay acknowledged that blacks could, with proper education, reach great intellectual potential, he was equally convinced that blacks could never be the social equals of whites. Immediate emancipation would only bring misery, Clay thought, for uneducated slaves would be unprepared to survive as free men, and the natural tensions between the white and black races would lead to bloody conflict. Clay insisted the only practical “solution” to ending slavery was gradual emancipation coupled with colonization of willing blacks back to Africa. Clay helped form and served a long tenure as president of the American Colonization Society, which was dedicated to resettling free blacks in Africa. The effort, of course, made hardly a dent; the society's efforts resulted in the settlement of only about thirteen thousand African Americans in the American colony that became the nation of Liberia.

Late in life, when his presidential ambitions finally cooled, Clay became more outspoken on the need for the nation to adopt a plan of emancipation, but still cautioned, “Public opinion alone can bring about the abolition of slavery, and public opinion is on the march. We should wait in patience for its operation without attempting measures which might throw it back. It is, I admit, a slow remedy, but it is to be remembered that slavery is a chronic disease, and I believe that in such maladies speedy recovery is not expected . . . it will not happen in our time.”

Recognizing that the Whigs had a superb chance to win the 1840 presidential election following the financial “Panic of 1837,” Clay had expected to be the Whig nominee, but he was rejected because of abolitionist hostility. “I am the most unfortunate man in the history of parties,” Clay moaned, “always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for a nomination when I, or any one, would be sure of an election.” Clay's misfortune (or poor judgment) continued when he declined to run as the vice presidential nominee—not knowing, of course, that the first Whig president, William Henry Harrison, would die less than a month into office, which would have made Clay president.

Harrison's death also thwarted Clay's more general plans for a Whig government. The only Whig principle held by Harrison's vice president, John Tyler, was his personal dislike of Jackson. When Tyler refused to establish a new national bank, Clay excommunicated Tyler from the Whig Party and set up a shadow government in Congress. Clay was able to ram a few Whig proposals into law, including bankruptcy protection and using some tariff revenue for internal improvements, but it was an unsatisfying outcome given the hopes that Harrison's election had aroused.

A national speaking tour through the Midwest and the North in 1842 drew such extraordinary crowds that it greatly reinvigorated Clay's presidential ambitions. But he had missed a major change in public opinion. Despite the recent recession, voters cared little about Whig economic polices; instead voters in 1844 wanted to talk about territorial expansion, slavery, and how the two meshed.

Clay opposed annexation of slave-holding Texas because it would upset the political balance between free and slave states, and because he was certain annexation would lead to war with Mexico unless Mexico agreed to voluntarily sell its claims to Texas. Clay also gambled on what he thought was a sure bet; he was convinced Martin Van Buren would again be the Democratic nominee, and Van Buren also opposed annexation, making it a non-issue. But Van Buren had also misread public opinion, and his opposition to annexation cost him the Democratic nomination. Democrats instead turned to Jackson protégé and Tennessee senator James K. Polk, who turned out to be a gifted politician.

Clay won the Whig nomination by acclamation but soon learned his stand on Texas was destroying his campaign in the South. When he tried to subtly backtrack from his position, saying he would not object to annexing Texas if it did not jeopardize the Union, he only inflamed abolitionists in the North, who again poured out their venom on Clay for his perceived hypocrisy on slavery. Clay lamented, “I believe I have been charged with every crime enumerated in the Decalogue.”

More damaging was the decision of the abolitionists to run James G. Birney for president on the Liberty Party ticket, primarily with the intention of denying Clay the presidency. While Polk and Clay were both slaveholders, Birney said abolitionists should “deprecate” Clay more because he was more intelligent than Polk and therefore could do more harm as president.

The election was extraordinarily close, with Polk winning the popular vote by a margin of about thirty-eight thousand out of 2.7 million ballots cast. More importantly, Clay lost New York by just 5,106 votes when Birney had won 15,812 votes in the state. Had a relatively small fraction of those abolitionist voters supported Clay, he would have won New York, and thereby won the presidency by receiving a majority in the Electoral College. It was Clay's third and final close call with the presidency.

A dispirited Clay supporter concluded, “The result of this election has satisfied me that no such man as Henry Clay can ever be president of the United States. The party leaders, the men who make a president, will never consent to elevate one greatly their superior.” Jackson, who would die the following year, praised God for letting him live long enough to see Clay humiliated one more time. “I thank my god that the Republic is safe and that he had permitted me to live to see it and rejoice,” he said.

An aged and increasingly sympathetic figure, given his many services to the nation, Clay was, following Jackson's death, easily the most popular political figure in the nation. Remarkably, he still thought of running for president again. “Is the fire of ambition never to be extinguished?” Tyler exclaimed. The seventy-one-year-old Clay advised the Whigs he was available if wanted in 1848, but in another slap at one of Clay's core beliefs, the Whigs instead nominated a military hero in the mode of Jackson, Zachary Taylor, who added insult to injury by proclaiming he did not feel bound by any Whig principles. Coincidentally, like the only other Whig to win the presidency, Taylor died in office, elevating a true Whig, Millard Fillmore, to the White House. But it was of little consequence. The Whig Party was slowly dissolving, and the nation was splitting in two.

Clay, with the vital assistance of Stephen Douglas, had the opportunity to postpone that split one more time via the misnamed Compromise of 1850—misnamed because it involved no real compromise, no finding of middle ground. Rather, it was a complicated series of resolutions designed to cool tempers. California was admitted to the Union as a free state but with slavery unmentioned as a condition of admittance; the residents of Utah and New Mexico were left to decide whether their states would be slave or free (Clay was sure the climate in both meant they would be free states); the slave trade was theoretically abolished in the District of Columbia (it continued underground); and the fugitive slave laws were toughened. Since, as with the Missouri Compromise, each resolution was voted on separately, members voted their convictions on each, did not meet their opponents halfway, and ended up hating half of what was passed. The day of reckoning had only been postponed.