Henry Clay was born in Hanover County in eastern Virginia. Between the ages of 16 and 20, he worked as private secretary for George Wythe, a judge and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Wythe acted as a mentor to Clay, educating him in the law. Upon passing the bar exam Clay moved to Lexington, Kentucky. In 1799 he married eighteen-year-old Lucretia Hart, with whom he would have eleven children. Six years later Clay began work on Ashland, a plantation outside Lexington. Over time, the estate would grow to 500 acres with a population of more than 100 enslaved people.
Clay entered politics in 1803, when he was elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives. From 1806 until his death in 1852, Clay would represent the state intermittently as either a congressman or a senator, becoming one of the most prominent and powerful politicians in the country. By the US-Mexico War he had run unsuccessfully ran for president three times: in 1824, 1832 and in 1844.
In the 1844 presidential contest, the Texas question took center stage. The presumptive Whig nominee, Clay sought to lay out his position in a way that would not alienate voters in the South, where annexation was popular. In what would become known as the Raleigh Letter, published in April 1844, Clay argued that the country needed “union, peace, and patience,” and warned that annexation would lead to war with Mexico, and possibly Great Britain. Taking a similar stance, Martin Van Buren, widely regarded as the presumptive Democratic nominee, came out against annexation at the same time. Supporters of annexation in both parties objected loudly to the position taken by the two-party standard bearers. Soon after, Clay published two letters attempting to clarify his position on the Texas question, hinting that he might support annexation under certain circumstances. The Democrats, meanwhile, rejected Van Buren’s nomination in favor of “dark horse” candidate James K. Polk, an ardent expansionist. The Raleigh letter (as well as subsequent efforts to modify his stand on annexation) cost Clay support in the South, while some Northern Whigs, especially in New York, turned to James G. Birney, nominee of the newly formed Liberty Party. Clay would lose the election by 40,000 votes out of 2.7 million cast, the closest presidential election up to that time.
Clay’s loss did not diminish his presidential ambitions. Initially reluctant to oppose Polk’s war with Mexico, he voted for a series of resolutions to support Taylor’s army when the fighting began. Although his son, Henry Clay Jr., raised a regiment, the 2nd Kentucky Volunteers, and served under Taylor as a lieutenant colonel, Clay privately complained that the conflict was unjust and unnecessary. When Henry Clay Jr. died in the Battle of Buena Vista, Henry Clay decided to publicly oppose the war. On November 13, 1847, now seventy years old, he delivered a two-and-a-half-hour speech at a Whig party rally in Lexington in which he condemned the Polk administration for starting the war and urged the rejection of any peace treaty that added new slave territory to the United States. The Lexington Address infuriated southern Whigs but emboldened Abraham Lincoln, then a little-known Illinois congressman who attended the rally, to take a more aggressive stance against slavery and the war.
Deciding to run again for president the following year, Clay lost the nomination to Zachary Taylor, in part because of the controversy surrounding his Lexington address. Angered by the fact that Taylor, a war hero, had no party affiliation prior to his nomination, Clay refused to endorse Taylor or vote for him for president.
Clay returned to the Senate in 1849, as leaders in Congress debated over whether the new territories acquired from Mexico would be admitted as free or slave states. Alarmed by talk of secession in the South, Clay forged the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state; allowed voters in New Mexico and Utah to decide whether their states would enter the Union as free or slave states; enacted the Fugitive Slave Act requiring federal officials in every state to return escaped slaves to their owners; settled the Texas boundary dispute; and outlawed the slave trade in the nation’s capital. Some scholars have argued that the Compromise of 1850 postponed the Civil War by a decade.
On June 29, 1852, Henry Clay died of tuberculosis surrounded by family at Ashland. Lincoln delivered a eulogy at his funeral, praising him for his “devotion to human liberty.”
Bibliography
Greenberg, Amy S. A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Klotter, James C. Henry Clay: The Man Who Would Be President, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Remini, Robert Vincent. At the Edge of the Precipice Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union New York: Basic Books, 2010.
Speech of Henry Clay, Delivered at Lexington, Kentucky, June 9, 1842: with the Address of Chief Justice Robertson, Also Mr. Clay’s Farewell Speech in the Senate of the United States. New-York, 1842.
Image Details
Title: Henry Clay
Date: ca. 1847 (1856)
Description: Portrait of Henry Clay, engraving on paper, 1856, by Alfred Sealey after a daguerreotype by Marcus Root taken probably, ca. 1847, in D. Rice and A. N. Hart, The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans. (4 vols.; Philadelphia: D. Rice & A. N. Hart, 1856), vol. 1, n. p. 27.5 cm. The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries Special Collections; Call number: E176 .H564 1856 vol. 1
