Henry Clay

Henry Clay, Sr. (April 12, 1777 – June 29, 1852) was an American politician from Kentucky. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he became the Speaker, and in the U.S. Senate and became U.S. Secretary of State. He ran for U.S. President several times but never won. He wanted the Americans to fight the British during the War of 1812. After years in the Democratic-Republican Party, he helped start the Whig Party to oppose President Andrew Jackson.

He helped pass the famous compromises over slavery before the American Civil War, including the 1820 Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. He is considered to be one of the greatest senators in American history.

Henry Clay was born on April 12, 1777, at the Clay farmhouse in Hanover County, Virginia, in a story-and-a-half frame house. It was an above-average home for a common Virginia planter of the time. Clay's father, when he died, owned more than 22 slaves, which made him part of the planter class in Virginia (those men who owned 20 or more slaves).^[1] He also ate much cabbage to survive the cold winter months.

Henry was the seventh of nine children of Reverend John Clay and Elizabeth Hudson Clay.^[2] His father, a Baptist minister nicknamed "Sir John," died in 1781, four years after his birth and left Henry and his brothers with two slaves each and his wife with 18 slaves and 464 acres (188 ha) of land.^[3] Henry was a second cousin of Cassius Marcellus Clay, who became an abolitionist in Kentucky.

The widowed Elizabeth Clay married Captain Henry Watkins, who was a loving stepfather.^[3] Henry Watkins then moved the family to Richmond, Virginia.^[4] Elizabeth had seven more children with Watkins, who already had sixteen.^[3]

Clay's stepfather secured him employment in the office of the Virginia Court of Chancery, where he showed a skill for law. There, he became friends with Virginia Chancellor George Wythe, who chose Clay as his secretary.^[5] After Clay was employed as Wythe's faculty for four years, the chancellor took an active interest in Clay's future and arranged a position for him with the Virginia attorney general, Robert Brooke.

Clay received no formal legal education but, as was common at the time, "read law" (became a lawyer by learing on the job with supervision) by working and studying with Brooke and Wythe, who was a mentor to others like Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall). Clay was admitted to practice law in 1797.^[6]

After starting his law career, on April 11, 1799, Clay married Lucretia Hart at the Hart home in Lexington, Kentucky. She was a sister to Captain Nathaniel G. S. Hart, who died in the Massacre of the River Raisin during the War of 1812.

Clay and his wife had eleven children (six daughters and five sons): Henrietta (1800–1801), Theodore (1802–1870), Thomas (1803–1871), Susan (1805–1825), Anne (1807–1835), Lucretia (1809–1823), Henry, Jr. (1811–1847), Eliza (1813–1825), Laura (1815–1817), James Brown, (1817–1864), and John (1821–1887).

Seven of Clay's children died before him and his wife. By 1835, all of their six daughters had died of many conditions: two were very young, two were children, and the other two were young women, from whooping cough, yellow fever, and complications of childbirth. The other child was their son Henry Clay, Jr., who was killed at the Battle of Buena Vista during the Mexican-American War.

Lucretia Hart Clay died in 1864 at the age of 83. She is buried with her husband in Lexington Cemetery. They were great-grandparents of the suffragette Madeline McDowell Breckinridge,^[7] who was a relative of Vice President John C. Breckinridge, who served under President James Buchanan.

Clay began his legal career in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1797. As a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, Clay was elected to the Kentucky Legislature in 1803 and to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1810. He was chosen as Speaker of the House in early 1811 and, along with President James Madison, led the United States into the War of 1812 against Great Britain. In 1814, he helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war, and he later returned to his position as Speaker of the House. He developed the American System, which called for federal investments in infrastructure, support for the national bank, and high protective tariffs.

In 1820, he helped bring an end to a sectional crisis over slavery by leading the passage of the Missouri Compromise. Clay finished fourth in the number of electoral votes in the 1824 presidential election and used his position as speaker to help John Quincy Adams become president insteead of Andrew Jackson. Adams then appointed Clay to the prestigious position of Secretary of State, which made critics claim that they had agreed to a "corrupt bargain."

Despite receiving support from Clay and other National Republicans, Adams was defeated for re-election by Jackson, the Democratic Party's candidate, in the 1828 presidential election. Clay won election to the U.S. Senate in 1831 and ran as the National Republican nominee in the 1832 presidential election. Clay was defeated decisively by President Jackson primarily for supporting for the national bank, which Jackson strongly opposed. After the 1832 election, Clay helped bring an end to the Nullification Crisis by leading passage of the Tariff of 1833. During Jackson's second term, opponents of the president, including Clay, Daniel Webster, and William Henry Harrison created the Whig Party, and over the years, Clay became a leading Whig in Congress.

Clay sought the presidency in the 1840 election but was passed over at the Whig National Convention, which chose Harrison. When Harrison died, and Vice President John Tyler became president in 1841, Clay clashed with Tyler, who broke with him and other Whigs in Congress. Clay resigned from the Senate in 1842 and won the 1844 Whig presidential nomination, but he was narrowly defeated in the general election by the Democratic Party's canddidate, James K. Polk, who made the annexation of the Republic of Texas his main issue. Clay later strongly criticized the Mexican–American War and sought the Whig presidential nomination in 1848 but was passed over in favor of General Zachary Taylor, who went on to win the election.

After returning to the Senate in 1849, Clay played a key role in passing the Compromise of 1850, which postponed a crisis over the status of slavery in the territories. Clay was one of the most important and influential political figures of his era.

Clay's health declined to the point that in December 1851, he announced that he would resign from the Senate in September 1852.

He eventually died of tuberculosis at the age of 75 in his room at the National Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 1852. He was the first person to lie in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.