Known as “The Great Compromiser,” Henry Clay would use his stellar public-speaking skills to rise through the political ranks and influence many major decisions of our country. Although never president, despite several tries, Clay would make a name for himself as a senator and speaker of the House of Representatives. He was named one of the country’s best senators of all time in a 1957 Kennedy special selection committee.
When Clay spoke, he would draw large crowds who leaned toward every word he said. His oratory skills enabled him to succeed in several attempts to come to a compromise. Clay tried hard to hold the Union together in the decades before the Civil War, and some have even said that the war would not have happened had Clay lived another 10 years.
Clay was born in 1777 in Virginia to a Baptist minister. British soldiers raided and ransacked his family home in the midst of the Revolutionary War. In 1791 the family moved to Kentucky, but Clay stayed in Virginia to continue his studies.
Opposition to Slavery
Clay often spoke out against slavery and in the late 1790s tried unsuccessfully to get it abolished in Kentucky. He believed that the gradual abolishment of slavery in the whole country was essential to hold the Union together.Clay got his first chance at politics when he was elected to the Kentucky legislature in 1803. In 1806, he was appointed to the U.S. Senate at just 29 years old, even though the minimum age to become a senator was 30.
His influence as a member of Congress would become apparent early in his career. In 1812, with the help of President James Madison, Clay, who was then the Speaker of the House, pushed the nation to declare war on Britain to start the War of 1812.
Key Compromises
His skill at compromise would be a key part when he helped to draft and pass the Missouri Compromise of 1820. As a part of the compromise, Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state so as not to change the balance of free versus slave states in the country.The compromise also outlawed slavery north of the 36º 30' latitude line for the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. Although short-lived, the Missouri Compromise served as a temporary solution to the rising national uproar over slavery.
In 1833, Clay again took charge as lead negotiator to save the Union when South Carolina was close to seceding due to high export tariffs. Clay proposed the Compromise Tariff that eased tensions between President Andrew Jackson and the South.
Clay’s skills would be called into action once again when the nation further divided in 1850. At this time, the expansion of the nation was discussed. The Compromise of 1850 drafted by Clay kept the Union together before the Civil War would occur over a decade later.
Clay was a political adversary of Democratic President Andrew Jackson, and he was an early leader of the Whig Party. President Abraham Lincoln highly respected Clay and would quote him in several of his speeches.
Clay loved horses, built a large ranch, and named it Ashland for the many blue ash trees on the property. He operated and lived at the ranch when he wasn’t in Washington.
From 1806 until his death in 1852, Clay served off and on as either a congressman or a senator. He ran unsuccessfully for president in 1824, 1832, and 1844, and failed to get his party’s nomination in 1840 and 1848. “I’d rather be right than be president,” Clay famously said in a Senate debate in 1838 after he had lost his first two bids for the presidency.
After Clay died from tuberculosis in 1852, President Abraham Lincoln gave a heartfelt eulogy: “He loved his country, partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature.”
