CHAPTER TWELVE

Four Letters

HENRY CLAY INSANE!” screamed the headline. “We should not be surprised to hear that he should attempt the assassination of Tyler, and all who oppose a Bank.” “Like a whale stranded on a mudflat,” Clay “lashed and spouted filth all around.”¹ One Democrat newspaper in Ohio reported that rancor against Tyler had turned murderous. Clay’s brother Porter—“a preacher of the gospel,” it sniffed—had exclaimed on learning of the second veto, “I wish somebody would assassinate him.” And another Whig was said to have pledged “one hundred specie dollars to any one who will kill him.”² Not much of this was true, of course. Clay was not crazy, and Porter Clay most certainly had not wished Tyler dead. Yet some people apparently did. The president had in fact received death threats.

Even with all the acrimony during the extra session, some things had been accomplished. A new bankruptcy law was a sound measure, but in trying to help debtors, it incongruously seemed to favor wealthy spendthrifts. It was so unpopular that Whigs and Democrats alike began lobbying for its repeal the following year. A loan for $12 million to cover an anticipated budget deficit simply continued the Van Buren administration’s practice of floating the Treasury with bond issues, but nobody much trusted the government’s solvency after the quarrel over the Bank, and the loan did not begin to solve the revenue crisis. Raising the tariff proved equally difficult and in the end yielded disappointing and ineffective rates that produced insufficient returns.³

Land policy suffered as well, mainly because it became inextricably linked to the tariff. Without high duties, the government needed revenue from its only other asset, the public lands, a situation that required maintaining relatively high land prices, which the East favored but the West protested. Democrats had always opposed the distribution of land sale proceeds, favoring instead low land prices resulting from graduation (the gradual lowering of land prices) and preemption (preferential treatment for squatters). Clay could not persuade western members of his party to take the political risk of disowning preemption, because the policy was popular with their land-hungry constituents.

The compromise necessary to pass a Whig land law consequently produced a most unsatisfactory bill from Clay’s perspective. By including a preemption policy, the legislation became a clear Democrat triumph. Preemption also diminished the funds available for distribution and, if that were not enough, Democrats peeled away enough Whigs to tack on an amendment tying distribution to the tariff as well. The instant that tariff duties climbed above 20 percent, distribution would cease. The irony was that Clay, with a Whig majority and an ostensible Whig president, had been able to realize only a fraction of the Whig program, while Democrats, in the minority for the first time in over a decade, were scoring gains that had eluded them during all the years they controlled Congress and occupied the White House.

In sum, the extra session dealt a serious blow to the Whigs. Despite having “passed in Congress all our great measures,” as Clay somewhat inaccurately put it, lingering bad feelings about the Bank cast a pall over everything. Having repealed the Subtreasury, the Whigs put nothing in its place, leaving the Treasury to operate much as it had under Van Buren. More in sorrow than anger, Clay lamented, “If the President had been cordial with us, what a glorious summer this of 1841 would be!”⁴

Too late in moving toward conciliation, Tyler’s second veto message was relatively timorous in tone compared to his first, and he plaintively inventoried the loan, the bankruptcy law, the tariff, and land policy as evidence that he could work with congressional Whigs. He even promised to reconsider a new fiscal agent when Congress met in regular session at the end of the year. But these were, after all, just words, and Tyler’s actions spoke much louder. Before the second veto, Clay had been certain that the president would never join the Locofocos: “The soil of Virginia is too pure to produce traitors.” By mid-September, he was not so sure. “Tyler is on his way to the Democratic camp,” he predicted to the Whig caucus. “They may give him lodgings in some outhouse, but they will never trust him.”⁵

It appeared that Tyler had wanted his cabinet to resign all along, for he was obviously ready with replacements when it did. His new cabinet contained several men whose primary qualifications were their allegiance to states’ rights or their opposition to Henry Clay. At least they were all Whigs, although they were also, like Tyler, former Democrats. Clay described them warily as “a curious” lot. “If they work well together,” he said, “it will be against all the laws of union and harmony; for a more incongruous collection of gentlemen could hardly have been got together.”⁶

And then there was Daniel Webster. Tyler’s jubilant exclamation to Webster that the two of them would doom Clay laid bare his belief that an alliance with the New Englander was imperative to salvaging his presidency, not to mention sustaining his quest to establish dominance in the party. Webster’s motives for staying in the cabinet and risking his standing among Whigs were mixed. He plausibly explained to Massachusetts Whigs that duty required him to continue at the State Department while relations with Britain remained unsettled. New York had indicted one of the men allegedly responsible for torching the Caroline and was trying him for arson and murder, a proceeding that London warned would mean war if the trial ended with a conviction and death sentence. Weighing Webster’s responsibilities, Clay accepted his reasoning, but he also gave Webster fair warning that if he were staying on to take Tyler’s part, Whigs would condemn him.⁷

Clay’s warning in the fall of 1841 did not sit well with Webster. He seems to have sincerely believed that Clay was behind the cabinet resignations, suspecting that the episode was engineered to injure him as much as to embarrass Tyler. Perceptive observers believed that Webster’s decision to stay in the cabinet stemmed from his plans for 1844. Yet Clay found Webster’s strategy hard to follow, especially if he thought he could exert any influence over Tyler. Clay knew that the president’s intimates habitually spoke of Webster with contempt while flattering Tyler with visions of a third party and a second term. As for Webster’s credibility with fellow Whigs, it had been seriously damaged when he acted as liaison on the second bank bill, assuring Congress that Tyler was on board. It was difficult to see how he could recover from the taint of Tyler’s bad faith.⁸

Congress adjourned on September 13, a rainy Monday, and that night, the Whig caucus gathered for its farewell meeting. Everyone was somber, “like the weather and the night, dark and gloomy.” Chairman Nathan F. Dixon, a Rhode Islander, had a puckish sense of humor despite his imposing appearance. At sixty-seven, he was “of the old school of gentlemen” and dressed accordingly, his snow-white hair in a cue that almost reached his waist. His gray eyes peered from behind spectacles at the doleful tableau the Whigs presented, but then he saw Clay, “tall and majestic,” rising from his chair, beaming a broad smile, a cheerful lilt to his voice that perked everyone up.

“This is a dark night,” Clay said, but he urged his fellow Whigs to take heart. “We, Senators, will soon pass away, but our principles will live while our glorious Union shall exist. Let our hearts be cheerful.”⁹ And as Clay continued, they did become cheerful in spite of themselves, in spite of John Tyler. Clay outlined the ordeals of the session and spoke in specifics about a program all knew by heart—bank, tariff, currency—but his insistence that those principles would not perish made them feel they were hearing it all fresh and for the first time. Like Dixon, they were looking intently at Henry Clay as he spoke. As they listened to his confident speech, they knew they were looking at the future of their party, and as their glimmering optimism grew, they saw the future of their country as well, at least if they had anything to say about it.

Clay castigated Tyler, of course. That sort of flourish had become automatic with all of them. But his close was a lighthearted tribute to Dixon’s “manner … which … by a single look, kept order at our meetings.” To a growing chorus of chuckles, Clay said that “the most excited, the most boisterous, has been quieted at once, and brought into lamb-like docility.” He concluded by wishing that “the whole civilized world” had seen such a deft and good-natured chairman at work.

Dixon rose to the occasion. He said he considered himself Clay’s superior as a presiding officer for he had kept “order among the most disorderly body that was ever assembled.” By now, everyone was laughing, both surprised and relieved that the wake had been unexpectedly transformed into a celebration. Dixon continued: some might have suspected that Clay “was not in full earnest” in his praise of the chair’s parliamentary skills, he solemnly intoned. But they should always “give [Clay] full credit for sincerity, for any remarks he may make before ten o’clock at night”—Dixon theatrically paused—“after that there may be some doubts.”¹⁰ The room erupted into applause and roars of laughter.

It was almost midnight before everyone parted, and the next day they began their journeys home. They left Washington buoyed by the cheerful words, jovial banter, and infectious optimism of Clay. “Remember,” he would say throughout an otherwise depressing autumn, “that we have a fine Country.”¹¹

They intended to make him the future of it.

BACK IN LEXINGTON, Clay attended to Ashland’s enterprises, including the financial health of the farm, the care and feeding of his horses, and producing that year’s brood of pigs. Clay preferred Berkshires. He bred them in the first week of December in order to have piglets in April. In the second week of May, when the pigs could crack corn, the boars were neutered and the sows spayed for meat in the fall. He held out enough boars and sows for reproduction, segregating them until early December to begin the process anew. He always fed them well. Clay believed that “starving never succeeds with man or beast.”¹²

He saw that mules were delivered to a buyer and arranged for an auction of some forty blooded cattle, selected horses, several asses, and about thirty additional mules. Clay was not merely winnowing his inventory of livestock. He needed money as the economic emergency afflicting the country finally began to hit close to home. James Erwin’s finances remained a worry, not just because of the grandchildren but also because Erwin’s business was in part linked to Clay through endorsed notes and loans.¹³

Clay’s primary source of anxiety was Thomas’s rope and bagging business that had been founded in partnership with Mary’s brother Waldemar Mentelle. James Brown Clay participated briefly in the venture, though only in a limited way, and Clay was always its primary backer. Begun with high hopes in 1839, the business was troubled from the start by fluctuating prices, unexpected expenses, bad weather, and the normal difficulties of starting up any venture in hard times. Thomas turned out to be at best a marginal businessman, and Waldemar wasn’t appreciably better. Bad reports followed upon bad reports with distressing frequency, and that fall, matters began to unravel. To keep Thomas afloat, Clay endorsed notes and dispatched bank drafts. Despite his encouragement and advice, he suspected the Clay-Mentelle rope and bagging venture was sinking.¹⁴

As for himself, he felt he had little choice, quite literally throwing good money after bad as he doggedly continued his assistance, indebting himself and pledging to cover Thomas’s debts for tens of thousands of dollars. The business lasted only into the following summer, but by then Clay had sunk almost $30,000 into it, a massive liability that forced him to pledge Ashland as collateral. He began the unpleasant task of calling in loans with minor success, as he scrupulously avoided dunning debtors. He also sold off assets it had taken him a lifetime to accumulate. Unless his fortunes improved, Clay confronted the possibility of losing everything, including Ashland. He put on a brave face. “The times are gloomy enough,” he told Lucretia, “but we must all try to preserve our spirits, and not sink beneath their pressure.”¹⁵

While this depressing state of affairs began unfolding, the fall state elections added to the gloom. Skillful patronage appointments kept John Tyler’s political fortunes alive by sacrificing Whig unity and, worse, by confusing voters. The result was, as Clay had predicted, a rout by Democrats in state after state. In just one year, all the gains of 1840 vanished, because Whig voters did. Across the country, they stayed away from the polls in droves. Clay said candidates should have expected it. Tyler had betrayed them all. Why would people remain loyal to a party led by a treacherous man?¹⁶

The catastrophe convinced most Whigs that they had to rally around a leader with unquestioned allegiance to the party’s agenda. Obviously, that was not John Tyler, and because of his continuing association with Tyler, it was not Daniel Webster. Some were touting “that Peacock Genl. Scott,” but his support was at best slight. Only Henry Clay, the man they had cast aside in 1839 for the electable Harrison, now carried the magical prestige described by nodding politicos as “availability.” Southern Whigs came to the conclusion fairly early and were important in boosting Clay’s popularity. To them, Tyler’s first veto had been an understandable, if not agreeable, expression of his constitutional principles, but many regarded his second veto as simply spiteful. One North Carolinian thought that Whigs “should hoist the Clay flag forthwith,” and Willie Mangum was soon exhorting his neighbors in the Old North State to take the lead, “nominate Mr. Clay for the presidency, unconditionally,” and quash all maneuvering and double-dealing at the national convention.¹⁷

With his political fortunes on the rise, Clay arrived in Washington on Sunday, December 5, for the regular session of the Twenty-seventh Congress with a miserable cold. He never completely recovered his health throughout the session. In January, he was diagnosed with a severe case of pleurisy, which laid him low for days. Clay was consequently not the leading cause of Tyler’s continuing problems with the legislature during these weeks. Instead, Whigs on their own made the president’s life miserable. Convinced that reconciliation with the administration was futile, they mounted a full-bore attack to block Tyler’s initiatives in the House while the Senate refused to confirm many of his appointees.¹⁸

In the void left by the repeal of the Subtreasury and his vetoes of a bank, Tyler tried to satisfy both Whigs and Democrats with a fiscal agency he dubbed the Exchequer, but nobody in either party much cared for the ungainly creature. Additional restrictions designed to allay Tyler’s obvious distaste for a real national bank did not help. In fact, the Exchequer bill did not stand a chance of being adopted, and when Tyler stubbornly insisted that the country supported his plan, Clay shook his head: “Poor deluded man!”¹⁹

Finally, in the last week of December, Clay was well enough for a time to resume his Senate seat, and he immediately took up the fight against the Exchequer with parliamentary maneuvers that sent the proposal to a committee that in turn refused to bring it to a vote. Meanwhile, on December 29, he proposed constitutional amendments to curtail executive power. Foremost in his plan was the restriction of the hated veto. He always claimed that it was not Tyler’s behavior that prompted him to oppose the veto power (after all, he had made similar proposals during Jackson’s presidency), but rather, sound principles of republican government led him to do so. Unchecked veto authority, he said, gave the president despotic power to control the course of legislation. He could hamper and usually kill congressional initiatives merely by intimating that he would veto them. At the very least, Clay said, an override should require only a simple majority, and eventually he deprecated every instance of a veto, from the great George Washington to the miserable “Captain” Tyler, as an abuse of power, a thwarting of the people’s apparent will in their elected representatives.²⁰

Clay also wanted to institutionalize Harrison’s pledge to reduce the president’s control over the Treasury by giving Congress authority to appoint its secretary. To prevent patronage abuse bordering on bribery, Clay proposed to bar members of Congress from accepting presidential appointments during their terms. Finally, he declared his support for an amendment to limit the presidency to one term.²¹ Clay’s amendments proposed radical changes, and though he was quite serious about them, he could not even persuade his friendly colleagues to give them any more than passing attention. In the end they became more symbolic than realistic proposals, at best emphasizing the dangers of executive usurpation. None ever came to a vote, and all quietly disappeared in March 1842.

Clay remained ill and irritable, and Senate debates brought out the worst in him as he fell into the habit of lashing out at the slightest provocation. During the debate on repeal of the Bankruptcy Act, Clay butted heads with Thomas Hart Benton when Benton began imperiously hectoring Whigs who held the floor, adding to the insult by haughtily lounging in his chair. When Benton began shouting “False, false” during Nathaniel P. Tallmadge’s remarks, Clay rose to insist that the senator from Missouri was out of order. Benton shouted at him. Clay whirled, his face a thundercloud. “The Senator shall not address me in his seat,” he spat, “and if he does, it shall be followed by language corresponding to such conduct.”²²

Three days after his irate exchange with Benton, Clay suffered a back seizure so severe that he would have fallen if friends had not caught him. He called it “lumbago,” one of those picturesque terms the nineteenth century used for lower back pain, and he soon reported it as a passing malady. Yet it was clear that his work was beginning to impose a high toll on him.²³

To make matters worse, relations with Tyler reached their lowest ebb, for the president gave as bad as he got. Anyone even suspected of supporting Clay was politically punished, and his most distant acquaintances found themselves frozen out of the patronage. The “President is moreover jealous, envious, embittered towards me,” Clay said glumly as he assessed their irretrievable relationship, and he caviled at suggestions he was mainly at fault. “He has power; I have none.”²⁴

That February, Clay’s mail contained a letter from Carter Beverley, the author of the infamous 1827 letter that had given new life to the charges of the Corrupt Bargain by giving Jackson the chance to say that Clay’s friends had put the presidency up for bids. Clay had always regarded Beverley as simply another Jackson pawn and was certain his letter had been prompted by Jackson in the same way and for the same reason George Kremer’s wretched accusation had. Now, Clay had to be surprised as he read Beverley’s lengthy note. The Virginian said he was certain that the timeworn allegations against Clay would be resurrected for the 1844 election, and he therefore wanted to repair the damage he had done in 1827. He recanted his earlier accusations. It had taken fifteen years for him to say so, but Beverley now declared that he had concluded “long ago” that “the very greatest injustice was done you in the charge made.” To allay suspicions that this latest statement was arranged for political effect, Beverley pledged that he and Clay had had no contact for more than a decade.²⁵

From the tone of his response, it seems Clay was scarcely impressed by Beverley’s soul-searching and the confession it produced. The entire affair, he said, “has been of late very rarely thought of by me,” and he claimed that only after rereading the 1827 letter was he reminded of Beverley’s role in the affair. Neither of these statements was truthful, of course, for hardly a day went by that Henry Clay did not smart under the ancient charge that he was a corrupt schemer. All could not be forgotten nor any of his tormentors forgiven for the years of irreparable damage just because they were now willing to admit they were wrong. At most, he could register a cool gratitude. “I am thankful for the justice your letter has done me,” he said, “which is creditable to your heart.” As for the admission, Clay assured Beverley that he did not need it for his conscience but would act on Beverley’s permission to publish it to prove as baseless “the calumny of which I have been the object.” Beverley was exultant, as if Clay’s chilly note were an absolution.²⁶

Carter Beverley’s conscience was clear and his mood lighthearted as a result, but Clay had lived with this cloud over his head for so many years that he knew Beverley’s prediction was unrealistic. Sure enough, in his campaign for governor of Tennessee the following year, James K. Polk began talking about Clay’s “Corrupt Bargain” with references so casual as to indicate they had become a reflexive routine with Democrats, like inquiring about one’s health or mentioning the weather. It had become over the years a kind of verbal tic. As 1844 approached, they again resorted to the charge as if to fill the air while thinking of something else to say. Clay knew that as long as a single supporter of Andrew Jackson walked the earth, the phrase “Corrupt Bargain” would never die.²⁷

OF COURSE OTHER attacks were made. In February, Clay’s role in the 1838 duel between William Graves and Jonathan Cilley again became a point of dispute. Because Tyler partisan Henry A. Wise was at the center of this latest controversy, Clay suspected that dredging up the episode had as much to do with assaulting his character as with getting the facts straight.²⁸

As the regular session of the Twenty-seventh Congress wore on, the government had to address the looming financial crisis caused by the failure of Treasury bonds to attract investors. Making the situation worse, the first of two tariff reductions mandated by the Compromise Tariff of 1833 had already occurred in January, and the second was to take place in the summer. Worried that a strapped Treasury would not be able to fund basic operations, even the military, Tyler and the Whig majority clashed on how best to solve the problem. He wanted to stop distribution, but Whigs wanted to postpone tariff reduction. On February 15, Clay introduced a plan in eleven sprawling resolutions, which he described as a comprehensive project to restore the country’s prosperity and stabilize its economy. Government solvency and the restoration of confidence were crucial. In fact, Washington should lead by example through retrenchment that embraced the strictest economies, cutting departmental budgets in the executive branch as well as the judicial. Nothing, not even the franking privilege, should escape scrutiny. He condemned the recent practice of raising revenue with loans and Treasury notes. Instead, the tariff should be increased, and the linking of distribution to tariff levels repealed. Distribution was a pledge to states already suffering dire financial embarrassments, and breaking that promise would not only mean dishonor but would discourage renewed confidence in the government. Learning that Alabama Democrats had pushed the state to take the lead in refusing on principle to accept its portion of distribution proceeds, Clay was dismayed. Any state’s refusal to do so was resistance to federal law, he said, and merely applied the doctrine of nullification by “sneaking and cowardly” means rather than “the bold and daring ones” of South Carolina in 1832.²⁹

Having spelled out the Whig economic vision in elaborate detail, within twenty-four hours Clay wrote to the Kentucky legislature to resign from the Senate effective March 31. He had accepted the seat with the likelihood that he would not serve the entire six-year term, and as early as the previous fall he had been intimating that he would not remain beyond another session of Congress and was likely to leave before it concluded. Washington, he said, “has ceased or is ceasing to have any charms for me.”³⁰ Doubtless that was true, but two other factors were the leading causes for the decision’s timing. He wanted to quit while the Kentucky legislature was in session and could choose his replacement (the Kentucky General Assembly unanimously selected his friend and lieutenant Crittenden, as it happened), but his presidential plans mostly determined his timing. His stated reason—that he was resigning to remove a source of strain between Congress and the White House—was obviously a pretext and deceived nobody.³¹

Instead, his departure on March 31 would come just prior to the Whig convention in North Carolina, scheduled for April 4 and urged by Mangum and others to nominate Clay. The Tarheel endorsement would consequently occur after his official retirement in order to avoid any suggestion that he was using his place in Congress to politick for the presidency. Freed from that restraint, he could begin consolidating his national support in the third and last of his campaigns, heading off rivals like Webster, who was doing himself in with Tyler, and Winfield Scott, who was attractive at most as a running mate on a Clay ticket. Appearance in these political games was everything, and despite his obvious intentions, Clay was careful to continue the ruse of reluctance, insisting that he had not yet decided “to consent to the use of my name.”³² That sort of statement didn’t fool anybody either.

Clay so wanted a vote on his eleven resolutions before his retirement that he overexerted himself, defending his program in late March with a speech of three hours. Observers noted that his performance was disjointed and rambling, and the next day he suffered “an excrutiating [sic] stricture” on the left side of his chest. His physician cupped and purged him, but the signs pointed to something a great deal more serious than a cold or rheumatism. It is very likely that on March 24, Clay suffered a heart attack. He had ruefully predicted that his retirement would not satisfy his enemies. “Death only can accomplish” that, he said, “or the total loss of public confidence.” As the doctor applied the red-hot glasses to blister out the supposed toxins and dosed him with emetics, Clay almost gave them their first wish.³³

He was on his feet, however, just a week later to deliver his farewell address to the Senate, denying his enemies his death, and with an emotional performance proving that he could still command public confidence. He traced his history with the Senate to laud it as “this noble theatre of my public service,” and he recalled the many friends with whom he had served. He expressed regret over the disappointments of this and the extra session, but he was certain that reflection and time would put matters right. He could not overlook, though, how “a recent epithet … has been applied to me,” that “I have been held up to the country as a dictator!” He bristled:

If I have been a dictator, I think those who apply the epithet to me must at least admit two things: In the first place, that my dictatorship has been distinguished by no cruel executions, stained by no deeds of blood, soiled by no act of dishonor. And they must no less acknowledge, in the second place … that if I have been invested with, or have usurped the dictatorship, I have at least voluntarily surrendered the power within a shorter period than was assigned by the Roman laws for its continuance.

Having gotten that out of his system, he continued in a more reflective, pleasant tone, and finally, after presenting John J. Crittenden’s credentials, he closed:

May the blessings of Heaven rest upon the heads of the whole Senate, and every member of it; and may every member of it advance still more in fame, and when they shall retire to the bosoms of their respective constituencies, may they all meet there that most joyous and grateful of all human rewards, the exclamation of their countrymen, “well done thou good and faithful servants.” Mr. President, and Messieurs Senators, I bid you, one and all, a long, a last, a friendly farewell.³⁴

Crittenden ceremoniously took his seat, and it was done. A prolonged ovation along with whistles, shouts, and even tears greeted Clay as he ambled through the chamber, shaking hands and receiving in that moment sincere, unalloyed affection from both Whigs and Democrats crowding around him. Calhoun made his way through the throng of senators, finally coming face-to-face with the man he had come to call an enemy. They had not spoken socially since 1837, their oblique and sometimes searing references to each other coming exclusively in often angry debates on the Senate floor. They did not speak now in the raucous din that kept on and on as each stood staring into the other’s eyes. They had begun together so many years before, boarding in the War Mess, when the new country was on the verge of challenging Britain over honor as much as commerce. They had stared without blinking at the most powerful empire on earth, the talented boy from the Carolina Upcountry and the magnetic one from the Virginia Slashes, a good team. Then they had been immortal. Now they were old men, sicker than they knew, like the country, and divided over slavery and sectionalism, like the country. Calhoun’s passions, so relentlessly suppressed under his didactic manner, had begun to act as forge and anvil on the rugged good looks of his youth, making everything about this iron man stark, severe, metallic, even his eyes, which he often fixed in an angry stare. But now they stared at Henry Clay to see the end of an era, and even the iron man could not help himself as he welled up. Calhoun extended his hand. Clay opened his arms.³⁵

Their embrace stirred an even greater volume of cheers and applause, but more important for them, it washed away the venom for a brief moment, the best medicine in the world for Henry Clay’s injured heart, more than good for what ailed him.

HENRY CLAY HAD every reason to believe that he had closed a chapter of his life with his retirement from the Senate. His ten years there seemed in symmetry with his career in the national legislature, a fitting counterpart for his groundbreaking service as Speaker of the House, and his achievements in many contentious sessions, while meager in number, were significant. His defeats were profoundly disappointing, but mostly people would remember his victories, especially his successful work to defuse crises that threatened the Union. He had mastered the workaday routines of the Senate and occasionally chided much younger colleagues who found legislative schedules too arduous; but his real talent was in the magic of his personality. Whether he was mesmerizing his colleagues and the gallery from the floor, or producing improbable majorities through casual conversations at parties and careful negotiations in committees, Clay walked the capital as a giant. When he said his farewell to deafening applause and John C. Calhoun’s sad stare, it indeed marked the end of an era. Most such conclusions emerge as important only in retrospect, but all who witnessed Clay retire from the Senate knew they had seen something extraordinary. For the rest of their lives those men and women would tell of that occasion, ending with the simple declaration: “I was there.”

Clay quit the Senate but did not immediately leave for home. Instead, he remained in Washington for most of April to attend a round of parties in his honor. His lingering in Washington was not just social but political, as Democrat newspapers resentfully noted. “Henry Clay is eating and dancing his way to the Presidency,” one grumbled, obviously put off by evidence of his swelling popularity and signs of increasing Whig unity behind him. As expected, North Carolina did its part to launch his presidential bid when the Whig convention in Raleigh gave him a ringing endorsement. A delegate reported that “the very mention of his name appears to brighten the countenance of every member and inspire him with fresh and increased zeal.”³⁶

Feted in Washington and celebrated across the country, Clay triumphantly returned to Kentucky where the mild winter had given way to a glorious spring. Although on the day of his arrival, May 2, the weather had turned gray and drizzly, it didn’t matter. As he approached Lexington, thousands on horseback and mules and ladies in countless carriages streamed out to greet him at the Five Mile Bridge, the procession stretching more than a mile. Lexington’s bells pealed as a band stood outside the Dudley House blasting out favorites such as “Jenny Get Your Hoe Cake Done” and “Rosin the Bow.” In due course, Clay reached Ashland and Lucretia. He had been longing to see both.³⁷

Of all his many callers that spring, Clay was most eager to have Martin Van Buren visit him at Ashland. He extended a hearty invitation for Van Buren to make the house his “headquarters,” and the ex-president gratefully accepted the hospitality. He arrived on May 20 and remained at Ashland for almost a week. Van Buren was in good health, a plump 172 pounds (not such a “little” magician anymore), and thoroughly enjoyed his time with his host. Unlike Jackson and Calhoun, who took political disagreement as a personal affront, these two could put aside differences to share stories, trade jests, gossip, and lay wagers, and they apparently did just that and little else during Van Buren’s stay. In fact, Clay remarked after Van Buren departed that they had spoken about many things but had not discussed political affairs.³⁸

It seems unlikely that these two political animals could spend days together and not talk politics, especially in light of what happened in 1844. Clay would later visit Van Buren’s New York home, “Lindenwald,” where they “talked over old scenes without reserve.” These visits became objects of deep suspicion, suggesting to some cooperation beyond cordiality. Yet possibly their time together was in fact only spent in telling jokes and recalling “old scenes.” Just as everyone expected Clay to be the Whig nominee in 1844, Van Buren became a foregone conclusion for the Democrats. His southern journey was, after all, a political trip thinly disguised as a sightseeing jaunt, the custom of the time. Possibly they both had been cagey, at most feeling each other out with indirect remarks, preserving the good humor that was so elusive for their supporters. “Thus do the sensible leaders of the two parties,” James Gordon Bennett mused, “while away the lovely spring afternoon in Ashland, with a glass of cool claret between them—the birds singing over their heads—the heavens bright and blue above—and their respective partisans throughout the country, abusing, fighting, and disgracing themselves like so many fiends, in the conflict that is about [to take] place.”³⁹

Lexington held a grand barbecue in Clay’s honor on June 9. It was the perfect occasion for him to launch his campaign, and he looked forward to it with “excitement.” On the appointed day, about twenty thousand people gathered outside of town at Maxwell’s Spring, a lush bluegrass pasture hemmed by stately trees. There would have been more people from distant locales, but bad weather during the previous two days had discouraged travel. Great piles of meat and vegetables were put on tables at one o’clock, and after the food and the customary toasts and tributes, Clay rose to speak. For more than two hours before a cheering crowd, he turned in a characteristically masterful performance.⁴⁰

After a brief biographical sketch in which he once more exaggerated the poverty of his youth (a staple of American politics by now) and again explained his actions in 1825 (a staple of Clay’s political life by now), he hit his stride to smite Democrats hip and thigh. He cataloged the financial dislocations of the 1830s and what had caused them, particularly Jackson’s and Van Buren’s mishandling of the currency, land policy, and the banking establishment. That was only the start, though, and he delved deeper to condemn nullification, the admission of territories without proper procedures, and state election frauds perpetrated to secure Democratic majorities.

Where he was lengthy and methodical with his denunciation of Democrats, he dismissed John Tyler as unworthy of notice. Calling Whigs to action in his final paragraph, he shouted at its close, “As for Captain Tyler, he is a mere snap—a flash in the pan—pick your Whig flints and try your Rifles again.”⁴¹ The crowd rollicked and rolled in delight at this sharp, succinct barb, just as Clay knew it would, but others, including his son James, winced over it. “Perhaps your criticism … is just,” Clay later admitted to a friend who gently chided him for the remark, especially its reference to firearms. Clay rather lamely defended himself with humor by reminding critics that he was talking to a Kentucky audience, some of whom, being hunters of Kentucky, were “accustomed to the rifle.” Yet on reflection he was sorry to have been caught up in the moment, a trap that often snared the habitually extemporaneous speaker. “After all,” he finally sighed to a critic, “you may be right.”⁴²

“All our friends here,” wrote Crittenden from Washington, “would be flattered by your correspondence, & you must task yourself a little to please them.” Yet Bob Letcher, who had been impressed by Clay at the barbecue, at least up to a point, was wary of ruining a sure thing. “The old Prince is taking a pretty considerable rise everywhere, I can tell you,” he wrote to Crittenden. “I guess he now begins to see the good of leaving the Senate,—of getting off a while merely to get on better.” Yet Letcher worried about Clay’s tendency to talk himself into trouble, not just in speeches like the one at the barbecue with the imprudent crack about Tyler, but with impolitic letters. “He must hereafter remain a little quiet and hold his jaw,” Black Bob counseled. “In fact, he must be caged––that’s the point, cage him! He swears by all the gods, he will keep cool and stay at home. I think he will be prudent, though I have some occasional fears that he may write too many letters.”⁴³

Nobody could have imagined in that sunny spring of Clay’s western star rising that Letcher was more right than even he knew. He had reason to be worried about Clay’s travels and especially about Clay’s letters. Henry Clay was an indefatigable letter writer and could churn out a half dozen to the hour. More than a few Whigs feared that Clay’s volubility would eventually spoil everything. “If St. Paul had been a candidate for the Presidency,” one fretted, “I should have advised him to cut the Corinthians and not to let the Hebrews even see his autograph.”⁴⁴

DURING THAT SUMMER in 1842, Kentucky’s grand weather produced abundant yields, and Clay was busy with “extensive preparations to Water rot Hemp,” a new process for him because he had always before used the process of dew rotting. Meanwhile, his lieutenants in Washington kept him abreast of events, and taking to heart Crittenden’s advice, he was not timid about counseling them on strategy. A series of deft maneuvers made Willie P. Mangum president pro tem over Tyler’s choice of Richard H. Bayard. The defeat wounded the White House because it was another sign of Tyler’s declining influence in Congress.⁴⁵

Despite that success, Whigs had the same problem in 1842 as in the previous year. Clay’s program was just as certain to invite Tyler’s veto then as before. Whigs delayed passing legislation as a tactic, throwing bills on Tyler’s desk amid the gravest financial distress in the hope that it would make him reluctant to strike them down. Consequently, it was not until late in June that Congress voted to postpone to August 1 the second tariff reduction and distribution. Tyler did not hesitate in the least. He promptly vetoed it on the grounds that distribution was prohibited as long as tariff duties remained above 20 percent.⁴⁶

From one perspective, Tyler could argue that Congress had linked the 20 percent duty rate with distribution, but Whigs could counter that he was no longer applying the maxim that he would veto bills only on constitutional grounds and was now doing so when he simply disagreed with a measure. His insistence that he knew best was alone enough to fan Whig anger. Crittenden looked for the silver lining. With every veto, he told Clay, “Tyler is one of your best friends.” Clay, however, took little pleasure in the continued thwarting of the party’s agenda. Not to stand for anything other than winning elections and holding on to office was repellent. Government under that formula became merely a grubby scramble for power and privilege. Tyler might think he was doing right, but Clay was finding it hard to continue giving him that much credit. “We could get along with a man who was only a fool or knave, or mad,” he muttered, “but the extraordinary occurrence of all three of those qualities combined in one person is intolerable.”⁴⁷

After this latest setback, the Whigs decided to use the tariff to bait a trap. Instead of reducing duties below 20 percent, they raised them so steeply that Tyler would not be able to stomach them. For good measure, they again included distribution in defiance of his most recent veto, clearly to provoke another one. Either the Treasury would dry up or the Whigs would have their tariff. Clay was more direct. The party, he declared, had “bearded the old Lion [Jackson] amidst his loudest roars. Surely it will not give way, or suffer itself to be frightened by the pranks of a Monkey.”⁴⁸

As expected, Tyler vetoed this new bill on August 9, and as planned, Whigs embarked on a determined effort to drive him from the party once and for all. Even though they had already expelled him, Tyler continued to call himself a Whig.

The Whigs finally succeeded in forcing John Tyler to make plain his opposition to almost everything they stood for, and his repeated use of the veto gave validity to their accusations of executive usurpation. Yet Whigs also skewered themselves with this strategy. The country was in no mood for squabbling and symbolism while the government faced default and bankruptcy. Congress had to provide a source of revenue, and that obligation ultimately forced Whigs to strip distribution from a tariff bill. Doing so further divided them because many would not support a tariff without distribution. Only by cracking the whip did Whig managers manage to ram the bill through, and Tyler clenched his teeth to sign it. The government simply had to have the money, distasteful as this was to almost everyone as a means to get it.

By almost every measure the extra and second sessions of the Twenty-seventh Congress were disastrous for the Whig Party. Flush with victory in 1840, two years later all they had to show for it was a petulant president, a retired statesman, a slightly higher tariff obtained only by sacrificing distribution, and an unsatisfactory land policy achieved only by their swallowing preemption. Their legislative program aside, the real catastrophes for the party lay in elections. Just as in 1841, the fall elections of 1842 held grim portents, only this time they included congressional off-year contests that turned out enough Whigs in the House to install a Democrat majority.

The likely prospect of Tyler moving toward the Democrats or stealing away wavering Whigs with a third party movement completed the wretched picture. Only Clay’s growing popularity gave them hope. Perfect strangers not only felt a connection, they did not refrain from telling him so. A man from Clayton, New York, spoke for many: “I have never had the honor of a personal acquaintance with you, but Still I love you,” he told Clay that spring. “Strange as it may seem:—I have communed with your mind, and the name Henry Clay is endeared by 10,000 recollections.” In the bright light of such adulation, his candidacy seemed irresistible, his victory in 1844 inevitable. Georgia Whigs nominated him, and New York Whigs would not hear of any other candidate. “Clay is going ahead like a locomotive,” Crittenden marveled. Tyler could not challenge him, nor, it seemed, could any real Whig. Winfield Scott’s fortunes in Pennsylvania were illustrative. A brief Keystone boomlet for him that summer quickly fizzled. Scott knew the truth of it. “He is a good Whig & a good fellow,” Crittenden nodded, certain that Scott would support Clay when the time came. They all would.⁴⁹

BY THE 1840S, no campaign was complete without heartwarming stories highlighting a candidate’s rapport with ordinary people. One making the rounds about Clay had him stopping at an exclusive hotel in Virginia. The clerk did not recognize Clay and after surveying his dusty clothes concluded he was a farmer who had fetched up far above his place and far beyond his pocketbook. There were no private rooms, the clerk sniffed, but he could allow Clay to bunk in with several other lodgers of his sort. Clay said that would be fine and trudged up four flights of stairs to a room full of snoring tradesmen. The next morning as they all dressed for breakfast he quickly made these fellows his friends with his easygoing manner and wealth of funny stories. Downstairs, they asked who the “funny old cock” was, but the staff did not know. Their roommate soon appeared in the dining room, and a well-dressed, courtly gentleman quickly rose from his chair to greet “Senator Clay.” The tradesmen swallowed hard, and the clerk was in a cold sweat as he quietly ordered the best room in the place prepared, the one reserved for the president of the United States. He then timidly approached Clay to offer a stumbling apology and inform him his room was ready. “Never mind, sir,” Clay said, “your rooms are all occupied, [and] I am perfectly satisfied with my present accommodations.”⁵⁰

Another story told of a blacksmith approaching Clay in Blue Lick Springs, Kentucky, and wanting to shake his hand. Clay heartily took the “honest hand” that forged iron with one that forged laws while chuckling that they both “had to strike while the iron was hot.” The blacksmith said admiringly, “My blows only make the anvil tremble, whilst yours shake empires.” The Louisville Journal nodded approvingly, “This was well said.”⁵¹

Clay actually never pandered to the poor, however, even in election seasons. When Ohio Democrat William Allen tried to abolish the tariff on salt by arguing that it would benefit the poor, Clay called the effort highly offensive because “any attempt to select certain classes for taxation was absurd.” When Thomas Hart Benton also tried to use the poor as a political stalking horse by claiming that blankets should be on the free list because poor people used them, Clay branded the reasoning as twaddle. Such a move, he said, would not warm a single pauper but would instead create a British monopoly on blanket manufacturing.⁵²

Nevertheless, these principled stands could not escape the new political realities imposed by an expanding franchise. Ideally a candidate would be able to claim that he had been born into poverty and had grown up in humble surroundings, the humbler the better, a log cabin the most current fashion thanks to the Whig strategy in 1840 that made Harrison into a cider-swilling, raccoon-skin-capped man of the people. The coonskin symbolism endured, turning Whigs into “Coons” even after the election, and they accordingly became nickname-happy, tagging everyone they could with folksy monikers. In addition to being the Old Chieftain, Harry of the West, and Prince Hal, Clay was now dubbed “the Old Coon,” derisively by Democrats for being a schemer, admiringly by Whigs for being an agile, clever champion. Cartoonists began attaching Clay’s face to raccoon bodies to show him treed by the opposition or outsmarting it, depending on the press.⁵³

Whig strategists set about rewriting Clay’s early years to create a new set of symbols tailored especially for him. “The Mill Boy of the Slashes is to be honored in every Whig procession by a string of the honest yeomen of the country,” predicted the Alexandria Gazette. They would be “mounted on tackeys [ponies] with switch tails, with a meal bag over the shoulder, just as Harry used to ride (when he was a poor fatherless boy) through the slashes of Hanover to carry home to his mother bread for her dinner.”⁵⁴ The writer probably got away with ignoring the presence of Hal Watkins and the relative prosperity of Clay’s Spring, but perceptive readers might have scratched their heads over young Clay not just fetching flour but kneading it into dough and baking it to boot, all while riding home on horseback.

Clay had dabbled in this political art before, working to depict his youth as poor and put upon, but after he retired from the Senate and began his undistracted quest for the presidency, it was time for the professionals to take up the task. Enjoined by one correspondent to trust exclusively in God to deliver the country, Clay said he thought prayer was certainly a creditable idea but not to exempt human exertion: God helped those who helped themselves.⁵⁵ Accordingly, the newspaper editor and successful dramatist Epes Sargent was recruited to write Clay’s campaign biography, and Philadelphia publisher Grigg & Elliott put out an almanac featuring another brief biography of Clay written by Nathan Sargent (no relation to Epes), with laudatory songs, anecdotes, and poems integrated into the calendar pages. Nathan Sargent was careful to include more on Clay’s tribulations as an orphan than had ever before appeared. The print run was significant: fifty thousand copies to sell for $15 or $20 per thousand, whatever the traffic would bear. These pamphlets became so ubiquitous that it was said a vendor approached Daniel Webster as he was leaving the Astor House in New York City to ask, “Take the life of Henry Clay?” Webster was supposed to have replied, “I cannot take the life of so eminent a citizen.”⁵⁶

Epes Sargent took his task seriously and tried to obtain personal information for authenticity. “I never kept a diary,” Clay confessed. “I never thought the events of my life worthy of such a record.” He did send Sargent some memoranda drawn entirely from memory. If they were useful, said Clay, “I can send you more of such trash.”⁵⁷ The Whig editor Calvin Colton, a former clergyman turned journalist, had more luck as he worked on his campaign biography of Clay, and from this kernel came the first full account of his life (published in 1846), a two-volume work informed by personal papers and family letters, some of which Colton never returned, much to the Clay family’s eventual dismay. In any case, putting together these tracts made Clay vaguely uncomfortable. He was not being falsely modest when he wished that Epes Sargent “had a better subject for his pen.” At the same time, Clay thought that Colton was producing something too striking and interesting. After reviewing an early draft, he noted “a few inaccuracies, and too much commendation and panegyric.” A credulous public would indelibly etch the inaccuracies into the historical record.⁵⁸

Harrison had broken the tradition of a candidate’s passivity during the 1840 campaign to overcome Democrats’ disparagement of him as “General Mum,” and Clay soon thought himself impelled by necessity and circumstance to embark on campaign trips far more numerous and extensive than anyone had undertaken before. “Henry Clay is very busy in the west,” the New York Herald observed in the fall of 1842. Indeed he was. The immediate draw was the Ohio Whig convention gathering in Dayton on September 29. With an entourage that included Crittenden, Thomas Metcalfe, and Charles Morehead, Clay headed north for this event through Maysville and Louisville, crossing the Ohio at Cincinnati where twenty thousand people awaited his arrival. Along the way, he delivered seemingly impromptu addresses, but he actually had carefully constructed them to detail the Whig program in precise and unwavering language. He repeated virtually the same address to the thronging masses that descended on Dayton for the Whig convention. Their numbers staggered even those who had seen the enthusiasm of Harrison’s 1840 campaign, with some estimates counting two hundred thousand. Whether the fervor was for Henry Clay or for the ideas he espoused did not matter at this point. If these popular outpourings meant anything, Democrats had reason to be worried.⁵⁹

When Clay left Dayton for a series of appearances in Indiana, however, an incident marred the trip, although at the time many scored it a triumph. It occurred in Richmond on October 1 and pointed to the growing and disruptive role the slavery controversy was to play in elections. Indiana’s antislavery movement was relatively new but vital and animated. A reformist faction of the Quaker community was at its core, and it was finding voice by attracting recruits and organizing into activist groups such as the Liberty Party and the Indiana Anti-Slavery Society. In anticipation of Clay’s visit, the latter organization circulated a petition entreating him to free his slaves. The plan was to force it on him in Richmond. The petition reportedly had about two thousand signatures.

The gesture had the look of a stunt designed to embarrass Richmond’s guest, and local Whigs were quite agitated by the time Clay arrived, but events suggest that his hosts had developed a plan to turn the abolitionists’ ploy against them. That Saturday afternoon, about ten thousand Hoosiers stood in the bright Indiana sun to hear Clay deliver his stock address lauding the Whig program and denouncing Democrat corruption. After he finished and the cheers at last died away, Whig congressman James Rariden did not ignore the abolitionists as they signaled for his attention. Instead, he invited them to approach the dais to present their petition, a peculiar indulgence that at least some of them suspected was a baited trap. Nevertheless, Hiram Mendenhall, a strapping fellow, shouldered his way through the unfriendly crowd, ignoring its muttered growls, and held out the sheaf of papers to Clay, who refused to touch them. Rariden took the petition and read it aloud as the crowd’s mood turned increasingly ugly.

Clay raised his hands to call for calm and implored everyone to show Mendenhall “no disrespect, no indignity, no violence, in word or deed.” Clay had good reason to be sincerely earnest about this. Just seven years before in Alton, Illinois, a confrontation between a raging mob and the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy had ended with his murder. Clay could not have been blind to the risk Mendenhall was taking nor to the considerable harm an incident like the one in Alton could mean for the Whigs’ cause. He therefore walked a very fine line as he proceeded to dissect the unfortunate Quaker who soon found himself shamed, not for being an abolitionist but for being rude.

Clay asked why Mendenhall would present this petition in this way. It was clearly nothing more than a symbolic gesture to embarrass him, and consequently it had made all of Indiana appear churlish. Suppose, Clay asked, that Mendenhall were to visit Kentucky only to be greeted by Clay with a petition demanding that he give up his farm? Clay then turned to his audience and explained slavery’s relation to states’ rights. He made particular reference to the health of his slaves (the obligatory mention of Charles Dupuy occurred here, the sort of thing that irked Buchanan in the Senate) and described the cruelty of liberating the helpless and infirm, which was only one of abolition’s dangers, the most dire being the possibility of race war. He ended by turning back to Mendenhall, who had stood self-consciously frozen during Clay’s remarks. Hiram Mendenhall should mind his own business, Clay declared, and if he were charitably inclined, he should attend to the needs of widows and orphans.⁶⁰

Judging from the reaction of the crowd at the moment and the newspapers in the weeks to come, it was a successful performance, if hardly a laudable one. Aside from the staged spontaneity—shabby political theater that was beneath Clay—at Richmond he laid bare his discomfiting accommodation of slavery’s fundamental immorality, despite his singing the praises of Quaker tenderness. Clay said that slavery was wicked, just as he always did, but he also rationalized it under a blizzard of words that recounted the historical record but actually revealed the limits of his conscience when confronted by the realities of property. Standing off the dais, waiting obediently and silently, Charles Dupuy heard Clay say these words. A visitor to Ashland just weeks later referred to him as “Black ‘Charles’ of Mendenhall Memory” who was “a happy fellow & is a Chesterfieldian in all the rules of etiquette of highlife.”⁶¹ One can only wonder if Charles Dupuy was happy and full of Chesterfieldian equanimity that sunny day in Richmond, Indiana, when he heard Henry Clay compare his worth as a human being to that of a farm.

CLAY COMPLETED HIS western tour by delivering another major address to a teeming audience in Indianapolis, and he had no reason to think that anything untoward awaited him when he arrived at Columbus, Indiana, several days later. Appearing on the steps of the courthouse, he listened in stunned disbelief as former Whig congressman William Herod introduced him. Herod had served under Andrew Jackson and the lingering attachment to Old Hickory got the better of him, prompting him to begin his introduction by shouting “Hurra for Jackson!” Clay was livid, and immediately shouted, “Hurra for Jackson, you say. Where is your country? I say hurra for my country, and the man that says hurra for Jackson, deserves not the name of a freeman, but he ought to be a subject of the autocrat of Russia, and have the yoke of tyranny placed upon his neck till he was bowed down; down to the very dust.”⁶² It was obviously time for Clay to go home.

His outburst was not at all characteristic during these months, because he did his best to keep the peace in the party and mollify all who could lodge any objections against him for past positions and future policies. He patiently explained to one correspondent that he opposed direct taxes except in time of war, favoring instead a tariff sufficient to raise revenue and protect American industry. He opposed free trade because all other countries imposed restrictions on American commerce. Mindful of the ire of Antimasons that had cost him so dearly in 1839, he explained to another query that he had become a Mason many years before because of “youthful curiosity and a social disposition.” He recalled the Masonic goals as “charitable and benevolent,” their work resembling that of a social club. In any case, he saw no reason to support or oppose anyone because he was a Mason but instead looked upon the Constitution and the law as a proper guide for judging a man’s worth to the country.⁶³

Keeping peace in the party was no small task. Ambitious challengers such as Winfield Scott, John McLean, and Daniel Webster disregarded the signs that pointed to Clay’s inevitability and began agitating for a national convention where they hoped to repeat 1839 and broker him out of the nomination. Clay buried any residual bitterness he felt over what had happened at Harrisburg and counseled others to do the same. Sometimes, he said, it was necessary to throw “a veil on the past for the sake of the future.” At the same time, however, he insisted that he would not accept the nomination from a convention unless he was sure that it reflected the people’s will, which was a way for him to oppose a convention without seeming to. When the congressional Whig caucus nevertheless announced in early 1843 that the party would hold a national nominating convention the following year, Clay acceded because he had little choice.⁶⁴

He also realized that a convention could relieve him of the touchy task of selecting a vice-presidential nominee, a decision certain to alienate this or that Whig faction. As it became clearer that Clay would be the nominee, numerous aspirants for the second slot on the ticket began popping up. Clay was prudent in refraining from publicly endorsing anyone in particular, but in private he obliquely inclined toward Millard Fillmore. Others agreed that the New Yorker could best mollify abolitionists and Antimasons and, if Clay died, would not be obnoxious like Tyler. “I think Mr. Fillmore deserves the high estimate in which he was held by the Whigs of the last Congress,” Clay said. “I think him able, faithful, and with uncommon business habits.”⁶⁵ It was the closest he came to supporting anyone.

On the other hand, Clay actively quashed the suggestion that he consider Daniel Webster. On September 30, 1842, Webster delivered an extraordinary speech at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, and though the bulk of it addressed his negotiations with Britain over the Maine boundary, he mounted an ill-judged defense of John Tyler and, in a badly disguised attempt to challenge Clay’s mounting ascendancy in the party, made some roundabout attacks on the Kentuckian. He laid the blame for Whig failures in Congress and at the polls at the feet of those ultras who refused to work with the president (meaning Clay), and he denounced the battles over the Bank and the tariff as unnecessary (meaning they were contrivances of Clay). He criticized the recent Massachusetts Whig convention for having read Tyler out of the party, but it was obvious that his real aim was to condemn its endorsement of Clay.⁶⁶

“Was ever man so fallen as Mr. Webster?” Clay bitterly asked. He never completely trusted “Black Dan” for remaining in the cabinet, and now he was “shocked and afflicted” by his behavior. Webster had dramatically asked in his speech, “Where am I to go?” Clay indignantly commented, “I confess, with pain & regret, that I have not since seen where he has gone.”⁶⁷

The following year, when it was clear Clay would be the nominee, intermediaries urged him and Webster to reconcile, hoping that Webster could land on Clay’s ticket. Clay was adamant in his opposition and fired off a series of letters to his friends and Webster’s advocates explaining why. He pointed out that he had done nothing to alienate Webster. He had defended him during his confirmation as secretary of state. On the contrary, Webster had done the alienating by allying with Tyler. Clay angrily noted how Webster’s latest project seemed to be promoting John McLean for the nomination, and that he had even heard that Webster had considered supporting Calhoun! To suggest reconciliation with a view to Webster’s becoming Clay’s vice president was absurd. Clay did not think there was “the remotest probability” that a national convention would consent to placing Webster on the ticket. In any case, Clay flatly stated he would make no bargain for the presidency—words carefully chosen to resonate. These letters finally satisfied even Webster’s supporters that Clay was serious, and they dropped the bid for the vice presidency.⁶⁸

Clay spent the winter social season of 1842–43 in New Orleans where as many as fifty thousand people awaited his arrival on December 23, and the city held extensive programs to entertain and honor him. The purpose of the visit was more business than politics, however, for Clay was now laboring fully under the shadow of Thomas’s business failure, an unmitigated financial disaster that made the trip rather “cheerless and uncomfortable” despite the nonstop gaiety. He was to argue a case before the Louisiana Supreme Court in late January, but with Ashland mortgaged, he feverishly tried to collect debts and to sell the hemp stacked in warehouses, enjoying little success in either endeavor. Then, as if to cap the clouded nature of his visit, on January 3, as Clay appeared at the Louisiana Supreme Court, a deranged man fired a pistol at the ceiling of the courtroom. “You may hear that it was fired at me,” Clay told Lucretia. “It is possible that my presence may have occasioned it; but I do not believe that the man had any design against any body.”⁶⁹

If not firearms, the weather seemed pitted against him. Clay left New Orleans on January 30 aboard the Creole bound for Mobile. The following day a terrifying storm over the Gulf of Mexico buffeted the boat with towering waves and gale force winds, and when it did not arrive in Mobile on time, the steamer and all on board were presumed lost. At the end of February, a steam packet arrived in Memphis with the news that Henry Clay was dead. Of course, it was not true, as he quickly reported to Lucretia. It had been “a very boisterous passage,” he said, but “we were not in fact in any danger.” Not until early March did reports begin to circulate that the Creole was safe and Clay was “yet in the land of the living.” By then he was also back at Ashland, “like an old stag which has been long coursed by the hunters and the hounds.”

“I am not sure that I shall leave home at all before winter,” he said, and for once, he meant it.⁷⁰

JAMES BROWN CLAY returned permanently to Lexington and at last settled on a career as a lawyer, much to his father’s relief. Clay tracked James at his studies and assured him that at twenty-five he was young enough to gain distinction if he were “industrious & diligent.” Clay repeated to his capricious son, “Very industrious and diligent.” By the time Clay returned from New Orleans, James had opened an office, and Clay set himself up in it with the threefold purpose of helping James get started, taking fees to offset part of his mounting debt, and making himself accessible to political visitors.⁷¹

Most pleasing to him was another sign that the young man was not just settling in but settling down. He met, fell in love with, and married Susan Jacob, daughter of wealthy John J. Jacob of Louisville. While her father did not entirely approve of the match, Susan did not care. Henry and Lucretia could not have been happier, though, and Susan returned their affection with warm devotion. She never lost her awe of the master of Ashland. Her seventeen-year-old brother likely described her feelings best when he wrote to her, “It is said by persons when first treading upon the classic shores of Greece and Rome,” that “they feel a turn of mind of a very romantic and poetic nature …. You are standing upon the same soil and breathing the same air in which Homer & Virgil lived. Why should not a similar sensation be experienced by one when arriving at Ashland, it too has a great and illustrious possessor.”⁷²

United behind Ashland’s illustrious owner, Whigs reached a zenith of confidence in the fall of 1843, though considering their persistently uninspiring showing at the polls, it was hard to see why. From their commanding majority in the House of Representatives during 1841 (133 Whigs to 102 Democrats), they suffered a significant reverse in the 1842 elections to give the Democrats a majority of 142 to 79. Surveying this development, Clay worried that Whig certainty was not so much deluded as it was breeding overconfidence and complacency. State elections over the summer of 1843 were mixed at best and included some unpleasant surprises. Indiana’s palpable enthusiasm for Clay during his visit earlier in the year made the result of the state’s August 7 election as unexpected as it was shattering. Democrats emerged with majorities in both houses of the state legislature. These trends alarmed Clay, and he renewed his calls for the Whigs to establish a system of general organization with a central committee for the nation, subsidiary ones for each state, and local ones for counties and towns, all of them to mount an active correspondence. His counsel in this regard had become a repetitive refrain, but there was no certainty that Whigs would ever cast off the tendency to trust that their program alone was attractive enough to persuade the people, making extraordinary exertions by the party organization unnecessary.⁷³

It was in the midst of these unfolding events that Clay decided to plan an extended trip for the spring of 1844, this time through the southern states. He had an invitation from a North Carolina committee in Raleigh that reminded him of his 1842 promise to visit the state, and it seemed fitting that he would go to the place that had been the first to endorse his presidential bid. Getting to Raleigh would give him the excuse for a circuitous path through Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. He could continue from North Carolina into Virginia and finally arrive in Washington. Clay loved to travel. He confessed as if in a reverie that there were two places in the country he wanted to see more than any other, Nantucket Island and the Eastern Shore of Virginia, because in those isolated locales one could observe the perfectly preserved manners and customs of old Europe as they existed from the days of the earliest immigrants. Much of his planned southern tour, he noted with a kind of boyish enthusiasm, would take him “on ground which I never trod before.” In addition to the exciting prospect of seeing new places, undertaking the journey in the spring of 1844 seemed an ideal way to show himself to a part of the country indispensable to his victory the following November. He weighed the risks. “Will these Southern trips create any jealousy at the North?” he asked Peter Porter. In the end, wanderlust won out. “You know,” he said, “I have never been in those States.”⁷⁴

WHILE WHIGS WERE growing in confidence despite their election setbacks, the Democrats sank into malaise despite their successes. Philosophical and personal divisions were pulling Democrats in various directions, and the added stress of sectional differences threatened to pull their party apart at the seams. Van Buren’s candidacy had a measure of fervent support, but it also revived equally passionate complaints about his lackluster showing in 1840, although nobody could agree on the reasons. Some said his economic policies had made him the victim of soft-money conservative Democrats like Tallmadge and Rives, while others insisted that relentlessly repeated Whig lies had simply smeared him into defeat. John C. Calhoun briefly sought to supplant the Little Magician, and Clay relished the prospect of running against a man who would “theorize” the country “to death.” Calhoun’s individual effort sputtered from the start, though, and in 1844 was replaced with a general sectional demand that the Democrat nominee be proslavery, ideally a southerner.⁷⁵

John Tyler might have been just the man to satisfy the Calhoun wing. He certainly wanted to be, and his aggressive use of patronage ultimately revealed a bold and radical plan to rearrange the political landscape by forming an entirely new party out of Democrats disgruntled with Van Buren and Whigs alienated by Clay. If Tyler’s third party gambit were dynamic enough, it might even subsume the Democrat Party and give him its nomination. In any case, Tylerites planned to hold a convention at the same time the Democrats did in May 1844. The prospect that everything could blow up because of these two conflicting, simultaneous meetings was quite real. Van Buren’s people were more than troubled by the possibility.⁷⁶

These developments naturally delighted Whigs. They were certain that Captain Tyler’s audacious plan would founder, but not before doing Van Buren considerable harm. They looked forward to putting Clay’s vision as well as Clay’s person against Sweet Sandy Whiskers and his failed economic policies. They were certain that the contrast would again awaken voters to the sensible course just as it had in 1840. Only this time, death and betrayal would not force the Whigs to stray from the sensible course. They would beat Van Buren again, and they cheerfully dusted off the complaints and revved up the attacks from four years earlier.

As the serious campaign season began, Whigs committed themselves to strategic emphasis on their best issues, the tariff foremost among them. The party tended to divide along sectional lines on the wisdom of a new bank, but it showed remarkable unity in insisting that the Tariff of 1842 had been successful in resuscitating the country’s melancholy financial state. True enough, the duties that Tyler had grudgingly accepted in 1842 had made the Treasury flush while retiring the deficit. That happy condition had encouraged agricultural and manufacturing markets to perk up. As 1844 dawned, the Whig press and Whig candidates hailed the protective tariff as the country’s savior, and with the economy on the verge of achieving a satisfying hum, everyone, Democrats included, expected Whigs to show up at the polls in force in November.⁷⁷

If the Whigs had been able to hold on to that issue and otherwise limit the election to economic concerns, they likely would have won. They were alert to the dangers posed by the country’s growing nativist movement, a reaction to surging immigration, especially an influx of Irish Catholics in northern cities. Wages already depressed by hard times fell further as immigrants were willing to work for almost nothing. In addition, the belief that Catholicism was an alien culture controlled by Rome and subversive to American values was beginning to find expression in political organizations such as the American Republican Party in New York, the forerunner of the Native American Party that appeared shortly after the election of 1844.

These antiforeign elements troubled Clay even more than the Antimasons. Their attempt to gain credibility and influence by allying with Whigs was most disturbing. The electoral implications were significant because Irish Catholics gravitated toward a welcoming Democrat Party that organized them into voting blocs rather than trying to reform them with temperance lectures. In the three weeks before the election of 1844, as many as five thousand immigrants in New York City alone were naturalized so they could vote. Whigs, with their reform policies and reliance on a strong Protestant base, found it all but impossible to attract these new arrivals, and complaints that many immigrants were hastily naturalized or were allowed to vote even when not citizens further cemented their bond with Democrats. Clay consequently approached the issues of immigration and naturalization gingerly. Neither he nor the Whig Party opposed immigration and naturalization, he insisted, especially that of Irish Catholics. He pointed to his long record of supporting Spanish American independence and voting for land grants to French and Polish immigrants. Yet he also insisted that the government should enforce naturalization. Otherwise voter fraud would make elections meaningless and destroy the people’s faith in democracy. There was a reason, after all, that felons who were citizens were not allowed to vote. Like felons, residents who were not citizens were more likely to sell their votes to the highest bidder, polluting the franchise and soiling the very concept of civic virtue. “I am in favor of American industry, American institutions, American order, American liberty,” Clay proclaimed, but he added, “I wish our Country, forever, to remain a sacred asylum for all unfortunate and oppressed men whether from religious or political causes.”⁷⁸

Most damaging for Whigs was the Texas question that came to the forefront in late 1843 and 1844, because it would prove Clay’s undoing. Texas quickly displaced the economy as the primary concern of the voters, in part because the improving economy made it a less compelling point of dispute, but primarily because it intermingled that generation’s two greatest points of political contention: territorial expansion and slavery.⁷⁹

Ever since gaining its independence in 1836, Texas had been wobbly, stalked by debt and threatened by hazards. Mexico regarded the Lone Star Republic as a rebellious province that one day would be repatriated, through conquest if necessary. The Mexican government made menacing gestures at the mere suggestion that the United States might become involved in this dispute, but the prospect of Texas reviving arguments over slavery expansion stayed Washington’s hand more than did the threat of Mexican hostilities. Jackson and Van Buren had accordingly rebuffed Texan overtures to join the Union.

Meanwhile, Texas had to maintain an expensive army in the expectation that a much larger Mexico would strike again. Peril rather than choice prompted Texas to open negotiations with England and France with the aim of possibly becoming a protectorate. The best Texas could manage by 1840, however, was commercial treaties with France, Holland, and Belgium.

That did not mean Britain was indifferent about Texas. On the contrary, the British government was more than eager to see Texas remain independent in order to block American expansion into the Southwest. Ideally, Texas would become a marionette with London pulling the strings, possibly even contriving a disagreement that would give the Royal Navy and Redcoats a chance to dismantle Monroe’s impudent doctrine. British merchants also saw in Texas a large market that would allow them to bypass the American tariff and promote free trade. British textile manufacturers eyed Texas cotton that would lessen their dependence on exports from the American South. The French were no less calculating, hopeful that Texas could be the key to their colonial resurgence in the western hemisphere.

For the United States, these were troubling aspects of the Texas problem, to be sure, but it was the noise being made by British abolitionists that most alarmed southerners. The British antislavery movement was industriously trying to establish a grip on Texas in the hope that abolition there might ignite abolition in America’s Cotton Kingdom. The prospect terrified slave-owning southerners.

Clay was slow to realize the explosive potential of this issue, but he was aware of the sectional passions it was sure to arouse. As early as the spring of 1843, he refused to issue a public statement opposing Texas annexation. The pronouncement would have improved his image in New England, but it was also certain to injure him in the South. It was an intensely sectional issue, with almost all support for annexation coming from the South and almost all in opposition coming from the North. Clay danced around this conundrum by saying he did not think a significant number of citizens favored annexation, and he claimed that he had heard no mention of it during his recent visit to New Orleans. Even if that were true, which was doubtful, and even if he believed it, which was also doubtful, he unwisely disregarded a looming storm on slim fragments of personal experience and anecdotal evidence. In contrast, he was much more forthcoming when queried about American expansion into Oregon. The move risked a confrontation with the British, who were on the ground there, and promised to rile southerners, who bristled at the prospect of so much nonslave territory coming into the Union. Clay, however, carefully worded his reason for opposing Oregon. In addition to the region’s being too remote and thus too expensive to protect, he said, time and demographics were on America’s side. Oregon was, after all, even more remote and costly for the British. In both instances, though for different reasons, Clay counseled prudence and delay.⁸⁰

In the months that followed, because of John Tyler, it became more difficult to dismiss the issue. Unlike his predecessors, Tyler was more than ready to risk a sectional firestorm over Texas annexation. For him, Texas became a cudgel to use against his enemies and a cause with which to attract southern friends. The president’s plans became more apparent after Webster resigned in May 1843. Tyler’s fellow Virginian Abel Upshur became secretary of state. Upshur shared Tyler’s enthusiasm for annexation and was equally heedless of its consequences. The two worked behind the scenes to persuade Texas to sign a treaty, a task made more difficult because Washington’s previous snubs made the Lone Star government wary. Meanwhile, Tyler sent Duff Green to London as a special envoy, and Green reported to the administration that the British planned to fund compensated emancipation in Texas, a story later proved false. At the time, though, it sent Tyler into a mild panic.

In December, Clay’s friends warned him that Tyler’s exertions were making Texas annexation a controversial issue in the North, but he remained outwardly unconcerned. Tyler could plan all he wanted, and the world, including the North, could judge his motives accordingly. The president was only revealing his impotence, Clay said, for annexation could occur only through a treaty, and the administration could not muster the two-thirds of the Senate necessary to ratify it. In fact, Clay was certain that “such a recommendation would be the last desperate move of a despicable traitor.”⁸¹

Nevertheless, Texas began to cause Clay twinges of worry. He recalled a letter he had written confidentially to William Ellery Channing years earlier, a letter in which he had adamantly opposed annexation. Channing was dead now, but Clay asked friends, if possible, to obtain the letter from Channing’s heirs. He remained cagey about his reasons. “I do not wish to make or encourage new issues, as I regard this to be,” he explained, “but, and in the progress of events, it may become necessary for me to make some public expression of my opinions on this project, in which case I should prefer availing myself of that letter.”⁸²

Yet it was hardly a new issue by the end of 1843, and he was well aware of that, as a letter he wrote the following day to Crittenden shows. He had been giving Texas a great deal of thought, and he was framing up a response to the annexation controversy to test on his friends. Clay believed that the United States should concentrate on developing what it already owned, especially when any new territory would cause unhealthy arguments. Any annexation treaty, he said, could not be ratified, and the southern hope that Texas would make the slave states dominant in national politics was misguided. The North would simply offset the South’s gain, possibly by annexing Canada. (He was wrong only about the place, which actually would be Oregon.) In addition, annexation would dishonor the United States in the eyes of the civilized world by revealing that the country intended to spread slavery rather than pursue a sensible plan to end it.

Tyler’s annual message provided indirect notice of the administration’s intent to enter into negotiations with Texas for annexation. Although Clay was convinced that Tyler’s aggressive stance on annexation was designed to create discord among Whigs and distract the nation from his failures, he still maintained for the time being that silence was best. Yet he also intended to be ready with an answer should the time come for the question. By the end of February, Upshur almost had a treaty. Clay was just beginning his southern tour. For months, he had insisted that the question of what to do about Texas was irrelevant. Thanks to John Tyler, that question was suddenly to be on the entire country’s lips.⁸³

CLAY ARRIVED IN New Orleans on December 23 with plans to remain in the area for two months before embarking on his southern tour. He was again feted at numerous events in the city. The simple fact of the trip and all the activity surrounding it filled Democrats with suspicion and resentment, and their public prints commenced a sniping attack on almost every aspect of Clay’s doings that continued unabated through the spring and summer. Amos Kendall revived stories about Clay’s excessive gambling and drinking, and others took up the refrain. Most of these attacks he wisely ignored, but when Democrats began a vigorous effort to breathe new life into the Corrupt Bargain story, he could not remain silent. Andrew Jackson wrote to the editors of the Nashville Union on May 3, 1844, to declare that he still firmly believed Adams and Clay had befouled the presidency with their arrangement in 1825. Blair reprinted the letter in the Washington Globe of May 18. Clay said he could hardly believe this ancient history was again in currency, and he responded as he always did, by amassing testimony to refute the charge, a strategy that his enemies smiled at and his friends, rightly judging it ineffective, had come to find tedious.⁸⁴

Nothing Clay did was exempt from scrutiny or criticism. In New Orleans, when he participated in the Eighth of January parade commemorating the Battle of New Orleans, Democrats branded him a hypocrite for denigrating Jackson’s achievement while trying to claim for himself its luster. He electioneered in several Louisiana parishes where beautiful weather, parties, and balls marked his progress. Someone Clay had met almost twenty years earlier called on him that February in New Orleans and thought him much changed: “He seems to have shrunk in size, and his manners, though most kind, urbane, and cheerful, have no longer the vivacity and great animal spirits that then accompanied them.” Age was clearly reshaping Clay physically, but his acquaintance likely misjudged the cause of Clay’s subdued manner. He was suffering from another of his chronic colds.⁸⁵

Clay left New Orleans for Mobile on February 24. The Alabama port greeted him warmly, and he visited friends Henry and Octavia LeVert for about a week. John joined him as he traveled north through the Alabama Black Belt to Montgomery and then east to Columbus, Georgia, all new sights for him. Large and appreciative crowds turned out along the way, and many cheered his stock campaign address touting Whig programs and blaming Democrats for the country’s predicaments, although just as many fell silent when he talked of a protective tariff. By the time he reached Milledgeville on March 19, he had adjusted the message. He delivered his speech from a large platform built especially for the occasion. Seats for dignitaries were arranged on it, and Clay’s place had him facing directly into the sun, a situation an organizer tried to correct by suggesting that he move to the south side of the platform. Clay quipped that he “wished to be on all sides,” and there was a burst of laughter. Possibly nobody remembered the remark when he later claimed in his speech that what he really favored was a revenue tariff that would provide merely incidental protection to manufacturers as it supplied the government with sufficient money to allow the distribution of land revenues to the states. That seemed to sit better, and he was able afterward to say truthfully that the tariff, as he now framed it, excited no great animosity in the South. He did not say that judging from the deplorable state of Georgia’s roads, the state could use all the distribution it could get.⁸⁶

A deft old master at the give-and-take of such appearances, Clay was having fun. He was leaving Milledgeville when a spring thunderstorm opened up the skies and a farmer ran after his coach in the pouring rain. The farmer implored Clay to come up the hill to his house. His wife wanted to meet Clay but was too ill to come out. Clay paused and then said that he was too old to risk traipsing about in a soaking rain. The farmer was offering Clay his coat when a boy appeared running down the hill and shouting, “Daddy, daddy, Mammy says you must get Mr. Clay to name the b-a-b-y! if he won’t come!”

That he could do, said Clay, asking whether it was a girl or a boy. A girl, said the farmer. “Then tell your good lady to call it Lucretia, after my wife.” The farmer beamed. Clay asked the name of the farmer’s wife. “Louisa.” Clay beamed. He promised that he would return the honor by naming his next daughter after her. The farmer stared before cackling and repeatedly slapping his knee as Clay’s carriage pulled away.⁸⁷

Much of the trip was like that, a mixture of serious politics and silly fun, a combination Clay liked best. His reputation for jokes as well as his considerable celebrity preceded him, and people turned out to see a famous, likable personage as much as to hear a political speech. In Augusta, a newspaper correspondent studied him closely as he mingled among the crowd gathered at the Masonic Hall. “There’s something about him that draws one to him, and makes one feel perfectly familiar,” said the reporter. Clay began his speech, and the reporter noted how he was “monstrous ugly if you go to siferin’ out his features like yould common people’s.” Then as the voice filled the hall, Henry Clay became “the best looking man I ever saw. His mouth is like an overseer’s wages, extending from one year’s end to tother, but when he speaks, you wouldn’t have it any smaller if you could.”⁸⁸

Traveling by way of Savannah, Columbia, and Charleston, Clay finally reached Raleigh on April 12, his birthday. He sustained the pretense that this was not a political trip but a sightseeing tour, though he had made enough speeches to become hoarse. His friend Benjamin Watkins Leigh traveled down from Virginia to see Clay’s reception and found him “in fine spirits, and in the best humour.” Clay made “an excellent speech,” Leigh told Mangum, all the better because the old master had learned not to attack Tyler too energetically in the Deep South and continued the tack as he headed north. “The very slightness of the allusion marked his contempt more strongly than the most laboured invective could have done.”⁸⁹

On the very day that Clay arrived in Raleigh, John Tyler’s administration concluded a treaty with the republic of Texas consenting to its annexation by the United States. It was the work of Calhoun, ironically enough, as though the fates were determined to unite Clay’s most implacable foes against him. In late February, an accidental cannon explosion aboard a warship during a gathering of Washington politicos had killed Abel Upshur, and Tyler appointed the South Carolinian to head the State Department. Calhoun pursued Texas annexation just as tirelessly as his deceased predecessor had but with the added motive of emphasizing its expansion of slavery. He hoped to force Van Buren’s hand on the matter, provoking open opposition to annexation that would cause southern Democrats to abandon the New Yorker. To remove any doubt about the proslavery aspect of Texas, Calhoun wrote an inflammatory letter to British minister Richard Pakenham praising slavery as a positive good and casting annexation as a way to thwart British abolitionism. Calhoun meant to be provocative, and the political conflagration that resulted fulfilled his wishes. Tyler sent the treaty and accompanying documents, including the Pakenham letter, to the Senate on April 22 with a request for closed deliberations, but antislavery senators refused to keep anything confidential. Benjamin Tappan of Ohio gave everything to the press on April 27.

While these events were occurring in Washington, Clay made a fateful decision in Raleigh. The news of the treaty convinced him that he could no longer delay his statement and that in fact he might have waited too long. If Van Buren preceded him in opposing annexation, Clay’s following suit would make him appear expedient rather than principled. Consequently, on April 17 he wrote a lengthy letter for publication in the National Intelligencer opposing immediate annexation generally and Tyler’s treaty particularly. Several of his friends agreed it was his duty to make his views public, so Clay sent the letter to Crittenden. He was confident that it was a sound declaration, but he wanted Crittenden and others to review it as well. He also left it to his friend in consultation with other Whigs to determine the timing of its publication.⁹⁰

Later known as the Raleigh Letter, this communication filled Crittenden with considerable foreboding. Apprehensive that Clay had seriously misjudged southern sentiment, he strongly advised against its publication, but Clay’s worries over losing the North to Van Buren made him insist. Crittenden finally relented. The Raleigh letter appeared in the National Intelligencer on April 27, the same day as Tappan’s release of Tyler’s treaty. Nor was this all, for on that same day, a statement from Martin Van Buren opposing annexation also appeared in the Democrat Washington Globe. Clay had been correct at least in the presumption that he and Van Buren were on “common ground” and that something on the issue was imminent from the Little Magician. The timing, however, amounted to a coincidence so incredible and spectacular that almost nobody believed it to be a coincidence at all. Instead, many jumped to the conclusion that Van Buren and Clay had cynically colluded to avoid a controversial issue that could disrupt their respective campaigns.⁹¹

That most certainly was not the case. For years, Clay and Van Buren had opposed annexation on principle, and for much the same reason: slavery expansion endangered the Union. By 1844, the rapid push for Texas annexation directly threatened it, forcing the two men to break their silence. That they had done so simultaneously was an accident that had everything to do with their friends and nothing to do with them. Van Buren wrote his letter on April 20, three days after Clay’s. It was a response to Mississippi congressman William H. Hammett in which Van Buren simply showed that he was no longer willing to placate the South by avoiding Texas. In the days that followed, Silas Wright gauged northern anger over Tyler’s treaty among his Senate colleagues and became worried that Van Buren supporters might alienate the North by unwittingly supporting annexation. Wright decided on April 27 to publish Van Buren’s response to Hammett in the Globe to set the record straight. Only by chance did Crittenden on that same day at last yield to Clay’s demands that the Raleigh letter be published. Speculation that Clay and Van Buren had struck a deal, possibly during Van Buren’s visit to Ashland two years earlier, is groundless for at least two reasons. The Texas controversy was not the foremost issue in 1842, nor did anybody conceive that it would be in 1844; and even if they had been gifted with such foresight, both Clay and Van Buren were too prudent to make such a bargain two years before the election.⁹²

Just as Crittenden feared, southerners squinted at Clay’s statement and grumbled. For the time being, though, they did nothing more. The Whig convention met in Baltimore just days after the appearance of the Raleigh letter, and Clay’s stand on Texas did not injure his standing among the delegates. Many southern Whigs agreed with Alexander Stephens that Texas annexation was “a miserable humbug” that Tyler and Calhoun had contrived “to divide and distract the Whig party at the South.” The convention unanimously committed to Henry Clay, ignored Texas altogether, and bickered only about the best candidate for vice president, a decision that Clay left to the delegates. They finally chose Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey.⁹³

Van Buren became an immediate victim of his opposition to annexation. “The southern portion of the Democracy are furious at Van Buren’s letter,” noted the abolitionist Liberator. “There is considerable chance that he will be dropped, and Tyler, Cass, or Calhoun, taken up.” Southern Democrats flatly declared that they would not abide Van Buren as their nominee, giving other Democrats opposed to Van Buren the excuse to push him aside and ultimately nominate Tennessean James K. Polk, a choice that showed Andrew Jackson’s continuing and weighty influence in the party. Livid over Van Buren’s opposition to Tyler’s treaty, Jackson essentially read his former protégé out of the party, threw his support to his fellow Tennessean, and linked annexation with patriotism. Jackson reflected mainstream Democrat attitudes about territorial expansion that saw sectional disharmony as a surmountable obstacle, a mere matter of horse-trading to remove northern objections. The Democrats consequently adopted an unequivocally expansionist platform that placated antislavery objections over Texas with a promise to balance it by acquiring a free “All Oregon” from Britain.⁹⁴

In stark contrast, the Whigs did not even mention Texas in their platform.

CLAY ARRIVED BACK at Ashland only days before the Democrats discarded Van Buren at Baltimore. A torchlight parade greeted him, “music filled the air, and ever and anon the boom of the ‘big gun’ wound up the chorus.” An observer claimed to see on Clay’s face a solemn expression as “he thought of the high office he will soon accept from the hands of an admiring people. Let him have it.” Democrats, however, were soon spreading a story describing how he received the news of their nomination. One of his sons, it was said, burst in on him at Ashland and asked him to guess the Democrat nominee. “Why Matty, of course,” Clay was reported as saying. Told no, he seemed puzzled. He guessed Lewis Cass, then Buchanan. Finally informed that it was Polk, Clay purportedly jumped from his chair and exclaimed, “Beat again, by God!” The opposition took great delight in this preposterous fabrication. They soon were tweaking it a bit to have Clay shout, “Beat again, by hell!” which struck many as better. Its colorful nature got the story repeated even by people who did not believe it. Then gradually, as is the case with any recurring lie, the story began to seem possible, then plausible, and finally it acquired the trappings of truth. By September, Clay was hearing from correspondents wanting him to refute it, a sure sign that doing so was pointless.⁹⁵

Clay was surprised that the Democrats had dumped Van Buren, but actually his opinion about Democrat disarray was strengthened when they did so. “I do not think I ever witnessed such a state of utter disorder, confusion and decomposition as that which the Democratic Party now presents,” he had observed in early May, and as far as he could see, nothing had changed. He was confident that he would defeat Polk. The Tylerite convention in Baltimore nominated the president and adopted a pro-annexation platform, thus putting forth a candidate unlikely to succeed but liable to hurt Polk by splintering the annexationist vote. Whigs seemingly had nothing to worry about.⁹⁶

Yet over the summer, Clay’s grand advantage gradually disappeared. James K. Polk was responsible for some of that. Whigs mocked him as an undistinguished nonentity, but he had been in national politics for years, including a stint as Speaker of the House. In fact, he was a better candidate than even the Democrats at first believed. They had nominated him as a “dark horse,” a racing term here used for the first time in politics to denote a winner that comes out of nowhere. Once the standard-bearer, he proved effective in wooing back disgruntled Van Burenites and cementing the loyalties of Calhoun’s faction. Democrats called him “Young Hickory” and chortled over the return of their glory days. They also courted John Tyler with pledges that the new administration would protect his appointments, promote his expansionist policies, and cease attacks on him in the Democrat press, especially Blair’s Globe. By late August, the promise of a diplomatic post abroad, possibly an appointment by Polk as minister to Great Britain, clinched the deal. “So Tyler has withdrawn!” Clay exclaimed. “And that upon the promise of a Mission, made by our opponents!” He could console himself that “there were suitable equivalents in that bargain; for nothing was given and nothing will be received,” and indeed, no appointment occurred, but that would be cold comfort later. As the election loomed, the implications of Tyler’s joining forces with the Democrats were simply profound.⁹⁷

Democrats were also able to make the Whig convention’s selection of Theodore Frelinghuysen as the vice-presidential nominee seem a serious mistake. Whig versifiers licked their pencils to come up with such gems as “Hurrah, Hurrah, the country’s risin’ / for Harry Clay and Frelinghuysen” (sung to the tune of the all-purpose “Dan Tucker”), but Democrats licked their chops at the prospect of branding Clay’s running mate a bigot. The charge was a contemptible smear, for Theodore Frelinghuysen was a fine man, even extraordinary, with impeccable credentials that included service in the United States Senate and work with benevolent moral reform movements. Yet these admirable civic activities proved his Achilles’ heel, for his religious work had put him in the orbit of anti-Catholic elements in Protestant churches. All the moral advantage of Frelinghuysen’s spotless and spiritual life evaporated as Democrats roared that his nomination revealed a secret Whig plan to erect a Protestant theocracy. They whispered to Catholics, especially Irish immigrants teeming in urban wards, that Frelinghuysen’s work with the American Missionary Society and the American Tract Society proved not just his prejudice but the intolerance of all Whigs. These tactics were effective and, for Whigs, maddening. The Democrats had it both ways, excoriating Clay for being a libertine and tarring Frelinghuysen for being devout.⁹⁸

As Democrat attacks became more vicious, Whig unity began to fray at the edges. Instead of defending Frelinghuysen against the outrages, they blamed him for hurting the ticket. The most troubling fissures in Whig unity, however, had to do with Texas annexation. The Democrats began aggressively promoting their plan to extend America into both Oregon and Texas, linking immediate annexation to patriotism and tarring its opponents as abolitionists. As that strategy gained ground in the South, the Whig stand on Texas as defined by Clay’s Raleigh letter became increasingly difficult to defend. Clay watched his strength in the South ebb and Polk’s grow. At the end of June, the Whig situation had become critical. Georgia Whigs, for example, were confident that Clay could still win, except “the only difficulty we have, is the Texas question.”⁹⁹

On July 1, Clay sent a letter to Stephen Miller for publication in Miller’s Tuscaloosa Monitor. It was a relatively brief note that later became known as the First Alabama Letter (Clay would unfortunately feel the need to write another later in the month). His purpose, he said, was to deny in the plainest terms that his Raleigh letter had been a ploy to court the abolitionist vote. Instead, he opposed immediate annexation because he thought it sure to arouse sufficient northern anger to endanger the Union. Saying that much, at least, gave no grounds for a charge of inconsistency. That Clay also felt obliged to say “Personally, I could have no objection to the annexation of Texas” did not even indicate a shift in his thinking, for he had told Alexander Stephens before writing the Raleigh letter that he would not oppose annexation if it could be accomplished without harming the Union.¹⁰⁰

More troubling, the first Alabama letter indicated a potentially disastrous shift in his political approach to the issue, one he recklessly completed on July 27 with another letter, this time to the editors of the Tuscumbia North Alabamian. The Second Alabama Letter committed the serious mistakes of insisting that slavery did not really enter into the question of Texas annexation, which made him look foolish, and of intimating that as president he might find it advantageous to annex Texas himself, which made his Raleigh letter appear craven. One could cite his insistence that he would only accept Texas if it could be done without dishonoring the nation, risking war, or disturbing sectional harmony as evidence that Clay had indeed sustained a principled consistency over the course of the Raleigh and Alabama letters; but political inferences in the midst of a campaign are never so subtle. Instead, the Alabama letters were nothing short of devastating.¹⁰¹

The Democrats focused unremittingly on the supposed inconsistencies and concessions, and Clay was finally compelled to write yet another letter because, as he said in a massive understatement, “my two Alabama letters have created some unfavorable impressions in particular localities.” Posted to the National Intelligencer on September 23, his lengthy explanation was closely argued and perfectly sensible in pointing out his unfailing caveat that only if it did not hurt the Union could he support Texas annexation. Yet the very fact that he had felt it necessary to write this lengthy clarification showed that it was unlikely to do any good. In sum, his letters about Texas annexation had totaled three, another proof of the maxim about trouble. Clay tried to break the hex with a fourth. It did not work.¹⁰²

Meanwhile, Democrats pursued other avenues of attack, leaving no stone unturned. They unearthed the ancient charge that Clay had been too young to serve in the Senate in 1806 and that he had perjured himself in taking the oath, a way to launch additional attacks that irregularities had always mottled his career. Clay clubs throughout the nation nervously sought evidence to clear him of the Corrupt Bargain charge, while Democrat campaigns in the North painted him as a staunch defender of slavery and in the South as an abolitionist. These tactics received exasperating help from Clay’s cousin Cassius, who published an impolitic letter at this crucial stage of the contest describing Clay as friendly to abolition. The gesture further hurt him in the South and did him little good in the North, and Clay had to renounce it, which then hurt him in the North and began his estrangement from his kinsman.¹⁰³

As the decision approached, excitement mounted, newspapers became more frenzied in their attacks and defenses, and voters laid wagers and made plans. Many Whigs were still so certain of Clay’s triumph that they were scheduling journeys to Washington for the inauguration. In Lexington, people were already calling him “the ‘President.’” And finally, the prolonged tensions of the lengthy campaign began to wear thin, and more than a few people wanted to see the thing done. “Of politics, that all absorbing theme,” said one Whig, “I am heartily sick and tired, yet here it is the only topic of conversation—business—pleasure everything yields to it.”¹⁰⁴

It is customary to speak of the elections during this period in the singular, as in “the election of 1844,” but actually what occurred in the fall of 1844 was a series of elections that decided state contests as well as national ones, including the presidency. These were not held on the same day throughout the nation but were scattered events, and state elections that fell during the late summer were always taken as portents. As those state returns came in, Clay was outwardly confident but privately worried. Democrat turnout was surprisingly high in his home state of Kentucky and his strongholds of Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. In addition to the Democrats’ throwing everything they could lay hands on at him, he had injured himself in the North with his stand on Texas and the late repudiation of Cassius Clay’s statements. The smearing of Frelinghuysen had driven immigrants into the Democrat fold while diminishing his grand moral standing as a counter to questions about Clay’s character. Clay’s stand on slavery had been misrepresented in such ways as to alienate northerners while making southerners suspicious.

Thus in the first two weeks of November, the issue played out in the shadow of Whig disadvantages that combined to become ultimately inescapable. On November 13, Clay knew the result. “The intelligence brought to us this morning has terminated all our hopes, our suspense & our anxieties in respect to the Presidential election,” Crittenden wrote him. “We now know the worst—Polk is elected, & your friends have sustained the heaviest blow that could have befallen them.” The defeat was all the more excruciating because victory had been so close. Polk defeated Clay in the popular vote by a margin of only 38,000 (1,339,368 to 1,300,687) out of the extraordinarily high turnout of 2.7 million (including Liberty Party votes), a number representing 78.9 percent of eligible voters. The count in the Electoral College was similarly close, with Polk at 170 and Clay at 105, New York’s 36 votes being the difference.

Analyses of this result have pointed to myriad causes ranging from the fateful mistake of the Alabama letters to the emergence of the vital Liberty Party in New York that siphoned significant antislavery votes from Clay, votes that would not have gone to Polk but that Clay needed to overcome Polk’s advantage on annexation. As stunned Whigs surveyed the wreckage, they quickly saw that the key to the election had in fact been New York, where the Liberty Party’s impact, combined with an extraordinary amount of voter fraud in the immigrant population, had tilted the scale and given Polk the prize.¹⁰⁵

Clay, the savvy head counter, had known all along that New York was the key to the contest, and when he received the news about the state returns, he knew their significance. Some reports had him in tears throwing himself into Lucretia’s arms, and Cassius Clay would later describe Clay in a blistering tantrum, but the former stories were apparently fabrications, and Cousin Cassius’s account came after their rift. Susan Jacob Clay always insisted that nothing frantic or highly emotional occurred at Ashland the day Clay learned of his defeat, but rather that her father-in-law accepted it sadly but with resignation. Frelinghuysen wrote to recommend that they both take succor in “the promises & consolations of the Gospel of our Saviour,” but whatever his demeanor at the time, Clay remained profoundly troubled by the outcome of this election. He quietly admitted that he had “fearful forebodings” about the fate of the country. He could only hope that they “may, in the sequel, be found to be groundless.”¹⁰⁶

Everyone had believed that 1844 was to be Clay’s time. He had believed that too, and for most of the campaign season, his certainty of victory had been an unshakable expectation, akin to certainty that the sun would rise at dawn or the stars would run their nightly courses. It was supposed to be a triumph that would vindicate him as well as Whig policies. Even as the chance for victory slipped away over the summer, the reality of Clay’s inevitable victory gradually transforming into Clay’s inescapable defeat had been impossible to grasp, and even the jarring fact, finally laid bare in the second week of November, that 1844 was to be yet another missed opportunity was difficult to absorb. As Clay slowly did so, however, the blow was certainly crushing, but it was also strangely cathartic.

Ashland’s routines were restorative, and Clay now had time to reflect on many matters beyond the quest that had consumed virtually every particle of his attention for the last four years. He wrote more sparingly in the days after the defeat, mainly to answer notes consoling him on the loss. On the morning of December 9, he went to his desk and briefly answered a circular asking him to endorse Reverdy Johnson for the U.S. Senate (Clay declined, saying it would be “indelicate and improper” to meddle in Maryland’s affairs), then turned his attention to drafting another document.¹⁰⁷

On that December morning in 1844, that document’s brevity as well as its legal formality imparted a cold, lifeless character to its words. Yet as Clay framed them, the words were as golden as anything he had ever produced in his loftiest flights of oratory. Clay dipped the fine-pointed nib of his pen and scratched “H. Clay” at the bottom of the paper, a deed of emancipation.

Charles Dupuy was free.¹⁰⁸