by Scott Farris
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.
Holding the nation together with string and gum, the Compromise of 1850 was nonetheless crucial to the eventual outcome of the Civil War, for it gave the North another decade to develop the industrial resources that would ultimately overwhelm the South when the conflict came. It also gave the North another ten years to become increasingly hostile to the existence of slavery, and therefore committed to the cause. And it ensured that the war came when a man equal to the task of keeping the Union together—Lincoln being a Clay man at that!—was in the White House.
Many understood at the time what Clay had accomplished. Van Buren wrote a friend, “Tell Clay for me that he added a crowning grace to his public life . . . more honorable and durable than his election to the Presidency could possibly have been.” There were many who believed that if Clay had lived another decade, he might have been able to postpone the Civil War once more. He was not there to try, of course, but the conflict was likely inevitable given that, as Lincoln would ultimately conclude, no nation could survive forever half slave and half free.
After his death in 1852, Clay was the first American accorded the honor of having his body lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Presaging Lincoln’s death thirteen years later, tens of thousands of mourners lined the route of Clay’s funeral train back to Lexington.
A few months after Clay died, the Whigs ran their last candidate for president, General Winfield Scott. After that, the Whigs were no more. There were many factors contributing to the party’s dissolution, of course, but the party essentially died when Clay died. He had wanted a party rooted in principles, but his own personality dominated the party, perhaps to an extent that ultimately suffocated it.
Ten years after Clay’s death, with the Civil War raging in full fury, his great admirer Lincoln wrote a note to one of Clay’s surviving sons to thank him for the memento of a snuff box once owned by Clay. Thinking of the great statesman for the Union, Lincoln wrote, “I recognize his voice, speaking as it ever spoke, for the Union, the Constitution, and the freedom of mankind.”
1 For good measure, Jackson added he also wished he had hanged John C. Calhoun.
CHAPTER THREE
STEPHEN DOUGLAS
1860
There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots—or traitors.
Having lost the 1860 presidential election to his lifelong rival, Abraham Lincoln, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas astonished observers by becoming one of Lincoln’s staunchest defenders and his apparent confidant in devising a strategy to crush the Southern rebellion. Douglas’s Democratic followers were confused. Why had Douglas, who had worked so hard to conciliate the South and avoid war, now become a strident advocate of military coercion to maintain the Union? Why should they now support Republican policies and a president whose candidacy they and Douglas had so vigorously opposed?
Even following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Democrats were uncertain what path to follow. Lesser Democratic leaders in the North, such as outgoing president James Buchanan, had been ready to throw up their hands and let the South secede in peace. Now that war had come, Democrats debated whether the Union cause was only a Republican cause. But Douglas, as the only politician of his day with a truly national following, insisted, “There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots—or traitors.”
He traveled home to Illinois to rally Democratic opinion. “Do not allow the mortification growing out of defeat in a partisan struggle . . . convert you from patriots to traitors against your native land,” Douglas said. Defense of the Union did not require fusion with the Republican Party in a national unity party (as some Republicans demanded), or even deference to Republican policies. It did require repudiation of secessionists. The nation, Douglas explained, needed the Democratic Party to chart an independent course and would be best served by—and strong enough to handle—a loyal opposition party, providing vigorous debate even in the midst of civil war.
“Unite as a band of brothers and rescue your government,” Douglas entreated his followers. It was not only the right thing to do, it was good politics. Already mindful of the Republican taunt, “Every Democrat may not be a traitor but every traitor is a Democrat,” Douglas admonished his followers, “If we hope to regain and perpetuate the ascendancy of our party, we should never forget that a man cannot be a true Democrat unless he is a patriot.”
Protesting that he was exhausted in “strength, and voice, and life” from two years of exertions to prevent civil war, Douglas could happily report that the “ablest and bravest” opponents of secession were now Northern Democrats, who were “firm and unanimous” in their loyalty to the Union. In those few months following his presidential defeat, Douglas had assured the Democratic Party would survive the war as a viable independent political party. Less than a month later, on June 3, 1861, he died at the age of forty-eight.
Douglas’s exhortations had an enormous and lasting impact upon his party. Northern Democrats—and some Southern Democrats, too—did fight for the Union, as Douglas urged. The North American Review, in its July 1886 edition, investigated the question of the partisan makeup of the Union Army and concluded Democrats willingly enlisted and fought for the Union in the same numbers and percentages as Republicans—and with an equal fervor. Many key Union commanders were Democrats, including Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Generals George McClellan, George Thomas, Benjamin Butler, and Winfield Scott Hancock. Even Ulysses S. Grant was a nominal Democrat before and during the war, quoting Douglas’s remark about their being only “traitors and patriots” in a letter to his father that explained why he was accepting a Union officer’s commission.
The value of a loyal opposition party, however, was not limited to the battlefield. Douglas’s insistence that Democrats remain independent from Republicans even as they remained loyal to the Union had enormous ramifications during and after the war. While unity may seem critical in a time of civil war, scholars have concluded that continued partisan bickering was to the Union’s benefit.
A 1967 essay written by historian Eric L. McKitrick outlines the several ways that a vigorous Democratic opposition strengthened the Union war effort. First, Democratic opposition unified Republicans and greatly reduced intraparty squabbling that might have undermined Lincoln’s administration. Second, Democratic critiques sometimes helped correct flawed administration policies. Third, an independent Democratic Party provided those opposed to Lincoln’s polici
es with a peaceful means to express their grievances. Those who criticized the administration could be treated simply as ambitious politicians seeking partisan advantage within the established political system, rather than as traitors.
In contrast, the absence of political parties in the South greatly weakened the Confederacy. Political parties are designed to weave together various and differing constituencies for a larger national purpose. Lacking a national perspective, many Southern political leaders acted parochially. Further, without the system of discipline and rewards that political parties provide their members, Southern politicians suffered little consequence for acting out in petty ways that undermined the Confederate cause. Georgia governor Joseph Brown, for example, expressed his displeasure with Confederate president Jefferson Davis by arbitrarily furloughing ten thousand Georgia troops for thirty days—the week after the fall of Atlanta! In contrast, states with Democratic governors in the North, including New York and New Jersey, always met their Union conscription quotas.
As the war dragged on, and as emancipation of the slaves (an idea unpopular with Democrats) became a key war aim, an element known as the “Peace Democrats” grew in strength, demanding a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. But they remained a minority within the party. While their political activities annoyed the Lincoln administration, there was no “fifth column” of disaffected Northern Democrats undermining the Union war effort. The course Douglas set for the party at the beginning of the war ensured that, in 1864, Democrats nominated “War Democrat” General George McClellan, who, during a heated but peaceful campaign, said only the unconditional reunion of North and South could lead to peace.
