Almost President

by Scott Farris

  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.

  Clay joined his fellow citizens in praising Jackson’s triumph but was soon unhappy that newly elected President Monroe did not reward his diplomatic service by naming him secretary of state. He became a constant critic of the Monroe administration, even foolishly trying to dress down Monroe by attacking Jackson for his behavior in Florida during the Seminole War.

  At the conclusion of the Creek War, which was waged concurrently with the war against the British, Jackson had imposed an especially harsh and heartless treaty that forced the Creek Indians to surrender twenty-three million acres of ancestral tribal land in Alabama and Georgia. Many hostile Creeks fled to Spanish-owned Florida where they joined the Seminoles in border attacks on American settlements. In 1818, Monroe ordered Jackson to invade Florida to halt the attacks. In addition to burning Indian villages and slaughtering its inhabitants, Jackson exceeded his authority and seized Florida from the Spanish, while also hanging two British subjects accused and convicted in a military court of aiding the Seminoles.

  Many Americans, especially in the South, praised Jackson’s work. But Clay, who never comprehended Jackson’s popularity with the public, was both legitimately outraged by Jackson’s behavior and also excited about the opportunity to score points against Monroe’s administration. Clay, a fellow congressman observed, was “the most imprudent man in the world.” Clay criticized the “dictatorial spirit” with which Jackson treated the Indians, and claimed the fault of the war with the Creek and Seminoles “was on our side.” He then excoriated Jackson for risking a new war with Britain by hanging two British subjects. While Clay, with the faux politeness exhibited on such occasions in Congress, insisted he had no malice toward Jackson, he nonetheless demanded that Jackson be reprimanded for his “insubordinate” behavior as a way to assert civilian authority over the military. “Remember that Greece had her Alexander, Rome her Caesar, England her Cromwell, France her Bonaparte, and, that if we would escape the rock on which they split, we must avoid their errors,” Clay said.

  Clay considered the speech mere politics and did not expect Jackson to take his words personally, but Jackson took great umbrage at being compared to some of history’s more infamous tyrants. When Clay later tried to call on Jackson to make amends, only to find him not at home, Jackson was all the more outraged by the “hypocracy [sic] and baseness of Clay in pretending friendship to me.” Clay might have tried to reach out to Jackson again, but did not, perhaps in the belief that Jackson, whom he always disparaged as a simple “military chieftain,” would never be a real threat to his political ambitions. And so Clay began the feud that, more than anything else, prevented him from becoming president.

  Shortly after this incident with Jackson, Clay’s reputation as America’s most skilled legislator received a boost when he forged the first of what would be three great legislative compromises during his career, all of which averted the real possibility of civil war for a time. The crisis began when Missouri applied for admittance to the Union as a slave state, upsetting the balance of power between free and slave states. Clay worked out a deal whereby Maine would also be admitted as a free state, and henceforth slavery would be prohibited in any territory north of Missouri’s southern border. Clay used a tactic that he would repeat later. Recognizing that each element of this compromise had enough opponents that collectively they could defeat the entire package, Clay broke the compromise into three separate pieces of legislation, each of which had enough supporters for passage. What could not be swallowed whole “was instead consumed in three smaller bites.” For these efforts, Clay earned the sobriquets “the Great Compromiser” and “the Great Pacificator.”

  With slavery still not the nation’s dominant political issue, Clay campaigned for president in 1824 on his American System—and was mystified that it did not catch fire with voters. He was even more mystified that Jackson was turning into his most formidable opponent. “I cannot believe that killing twenty-five hundred Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy,” Clay complained.

  But when the
balloting was completed, Jackson had won the most popular votes and the most electoral votes. He had not, however, received a majority in the Electoral College and so the Constitution provided that the election would be decided in the U.S. House of Representatives, as it had been once before in the presidential election of 1800. Clay finished a dismal fourth in both popular and electoral voting, while John Quincy Adams finished second and William Crawford third.

  Clay might have finished third and been among the three candidates whose names would be submitted to the House for consideration, but for two misfortunes, one of his own doing and one just bad luck. Had Clay agreed to a suggestion by Adams supporters to run a split ticket and share electors in New York, or had two Louisiana state legislators who supported Clay not been injured in a carriage accident and missed voting on that state’s electors, then Clay would have won enough electors to put him among the top three finishers. Given his enormous prestige in the House, many historians believe Clay would have been elected president. It was his first close call with the office.

  With Clay out of the running, the question was: Who would he support? His influence in the House was such that it was assumed that whoever Clay backed would become president. Supporters of all three candidates made overtures to Clay, but he felt he could not support the stroke-debilitated Crawford. He simply would not support Jackson, even though the Kentucky Legislature instructed him to do so. This process of elimination led him to Adams. When Martin Van Buren heard that Clay was going against the wishes of his home state, he said Clay had signed his own “political death warrant” and predicted he “will never become president be your motives as pure as you claim them to be.”

  Jackson and his supporters did not impute pure motives, but instead charged that Clay had entered into a “corrupt bargain” with Adams because a few days after the House vote made Adams president, he appointed Clay secretary of state. There is no evidence that Clay and Adams ever had an explicit quid pro quo, but Clay would later acknowledge that accepting the appointment as secretary of state was the greatest mistake of his life.

  Why did Clay do it? Besides not being able to support Jackson, he still thought secretary of state was the logical final step to the presidency. No Westerner had ever held an important Cabinet post, so Clay was making history, and he wanted to make more history by influencing Adams’s policies. He was also getting bored in the House, while he found foreign affairs fascinating.

  Clay had grand designs, especially in developing a new American policy in the Western Hemisphere by recognizing and supporting the independence of the new Latin American republics that had broken away from Spanish rule. Anticipating by one hundred years Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America, Clay gave passionate speeches in which he envisioned an alliance of democracies in the Western Hemisphere that would “constitute the rallying point of human freedom against all the despotism of the Old World.” Clay was also the first American official to propose a canal across Panama, a canal that would be operated for the benefit of all nations, not just the United States. For such enlightened views, Clay is still one of the few American statesmen held in high regard in Latin America.

  Jackson and his allies, however, thwarted most of Clay’s plans, making the Great Compromiser’s tenure as secretary of state generally unsuccessful. And even though Adams was president, Jacksonians directed their most bitter attacks against Clay. For those who think politics and elections in our own time are uncivil and negative, it is worth remembering that in the presidential campaign of 1828, Clay was accused of being a regular patron of brothels and embezzling large sums of money from Kentucky’s Transylvania University. Adams was accused of having been a pimp for the czar while he had been minister to Russia. Newspapers friendly to Clay and Adams charged that Jackson’s mother was “a COMMON PROSTITUTE” (showing that using all caps for emphasis predates e-mail by one-and-a-half centuries), and they asked of the Jacksons: “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest office of this free and Christian land?”

  The latter slur referred to the fact that Jackson had married his wife, Rachel, before she was officially divorced from her first husband at a time when legalities on the frontier were still ambiguous. Rachel Jackson died shortly after the 1828 election. Jackson blamed the slanders flung against her during the campaign for her death, and he blamed Clay for those slurs. There is “nothing too mean or low for him to condescend to,” Jackson said. Clay denied spreading rumors about either Jackson’s mother or his wife, but otherwise felt justified in encouraging personal attacks against Jackson. “The course adopted by the Opposition . . . against the Administration and supporting presses leaves to its friends no alternative than that of following their example.”

  While Clay seldom held a grudge, he and Jackson hated each other with a biblical fury. Following the 1824 election, Jackson called Clay the “Judas of the West” and prophesied, “His end will be the same.” Given that he blamed Clay for the death of his beloved wife, it is not surprising that Jackson thought Clay “the basest, meanest scoundrel that ever disgraced the image of his god.” So great was his hatred of Clay, that Jackson later privately exulted in the sudden death of President William Henry Harrison because Clay would have far less influence on the presidency of Harrison’s successor, John Tyler. While Jackson did give a deathbed absolution to his enemies, near the end of his life he was asked if he had any regrets and replied, “Yes. I didn’t shoot Henry Clay.”1

  In turn, Clay was convinced that Jackson was a hotheaded ruffian who intended to implement a military dictatorship in the United States. After Jackson defeated Adams in the 1828 election, Clay publicly characterized Jackson’s administration as a “compound of imbecility, tyranny, and hypocrisy,” and said Jackson’s rule was similar to a cholera epidemic—only worse. “Cholera performs its terrible office and its victims are consigned to the grave, leaving their survivors uncontaminated. But Jacksonism has poisoned the whole Community, the living as well as the dead.”

  The feud between Clay and Jackson had split the Jeffersonian Republicans into two factions. The faction led by Clay, and to a lesser degree by Adams, was initially called the “National Republicans,” while Jackson and his followers assumed the label “Democratic Republicans,” which was soon shortened to the “Democratic Party,” the name it still bears. An exceptionally strong personality, Jackson had many opponents, but only Clay had the genius to coalesce that opposition into a single national entity.

  A political master, Clay initiated a number of innovations to help Adams’s cause in 1828. He urged adoption of a set of principles under which not only Adams, but sympathetic candidates for other offices would run—the forerunner of a party platform. He urged the formation of “committees of vigilance” in each community to distribute newspapers, pamphlets, tracts, and other communications to advance the cause, with these local committees reporting to a state central committee—the framework on which our modern political parties are still organized. Clay and Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster also developed a plan to secure a considerable amount of funds from wealthy Northern businessmen to finance the publication of friendly partisan newspapers.

  But these political innovations, matched in turn by Jackson’s campaign, could not stem the popular tide for Jackson, who captured 56 percent of the popular vote and, to Clay’s embarrassment, even won Kentucky by a large margin. Jackson’s supporters saw the victory as a triumph of the common people over the elites. To Clay’s mind, “The military principle has triumphed, and triumphed in the person of one devoid of all the graces, elegancies, and magnanimity of the accomplished men of the profession.” Jackson had been in office all of two months when Clay began preparing for his own second run at the presidency by attacking Jackson on the issue of federal appointments. Alleging corruption and complacency in the executive branch, Jackson had entered office promising to clean house. Clay understood, correctly, t
hat Jackson primarily intended to remove officials sympathetic to his National Republicans. He claimed the removals echoed Napoleon’s policy of shooting disloyal soldiers and suggested Jackson was trying to establish a political “monopoly.” While Jackson set the unfortunate precedent of the “spoils system” in American government until civil service reform during the Progressive era, the number of federal officeholders turned out was actually quite small—less than 10 percent of the federal workforce—so his policy had little practical effect.

  Reversing some of his own earlier positions, Clay next attacked Jackson’s Indian removal policy. Having returned to the Senate in 1831, Clay delivered a number of speeches that passionately condemned the cruelty of forcing Native Americans to leave their ancestral lands and resettle in the territory that is now Oklahoma, a journey that became known as the “Trail of Tears.” Jackson’s policy, Clay said, “threatens to bring a foul and lasting stain upon the good faith, humanity, and character of the Nation.”

  But the key issue upon which Clay decided to base his planned 1832 campaign against Jackson was the re-charter of the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson claimed to hate all banks, even though he used banks, borrowed money from banks, and even held stock in one Tennessee bank. Jackson even hated paper money and would later push through legislation requiring all public lands be purchased with gold or silver. Yet, on the advice of some members of his Cabinet, he had already considered supporting a limited re-charter of the bank—until Clay threw down the gauntlet and made it clear this would be the issue upon which he would stake his presidential campaign.

  Some historians have portrayed the battle over the bank as a struggle between Jackson and bank president Nicholas Biddle. It makes a nice contrast; “Old Hickory,” the simple tribune of the people, versus the sophisticated Philadelphian. But Biddle took his political cues from Clay, who earned a large portion of his income performing legal work collecting debts owed the bank. The bank’s current charter was not set to expire until 1836, and Clay initially counseled Biddle not to push for an early re-charter. But once Clay was officially nominated by the National Republicans to be their presidential nominee, he decided the bank re-charter would make an outstanding campaign issue and so he now directed Biddle to apply for the re-charter. Told that Jackson would certainly veto the re-charter, Clay bragged, “I will veto him.”