CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MILK WAGON HORSES could never be retired and remain modes of conveyance. Even with their wagons unhitched, they would stubbornly follow their customary routes, pausing at each stop along the way, unable to break habits so deeply ingrained that they had become unconsciously natural. By the 1840s, Henry Clay was such an animal, retired from public life but persistently drawn to it. The quadrennial presidential contest was a scheduled stop along the route of his existence, and he would react accordingly, even if the Whig Party unhitched its wagon from him.
The Whigs came out of the defeat of 1844 deeply divided and despondent. The party was a shattered machine, broken in spirit and falling apart. While some insisted that only a leader of Clay’s stature could take the party to triumph, many were no longer sure. The 1844 results seemed to point to the hopelessness of a Clay candidacy. If he could not win at those odds, he could not win.1
Trounced in local elections, many Whigs became convinced that only an overwhelmingly popular candidate could save their political futures, someone able to draw in untethered voters and disaffected Democrats, an attitude that dimmed Clay’s chances. Young Whigs were especially tired of disappointments and resolutely committed to such a strategy. This youthful movement in the party had a barely concealed contempt for the exhausted banners of Whigdom that proclaimed the Bank, the tariff, and the road and rail network as the reasons to hold office. Everybody who had come of age in the Jacksonian era knew that the reason to hold office was to dispense patronage, ensure incumbency, and build a movement with influence and interest. Upon such pillars, a party could enact its policies from positions of strength.
These hard-eyed, hardheaded young men with lean looks and keen aspirations were perfectly correct, of course. After 1844, they early committed to the principle of Anybody But Clay. At stake, as it turned out, was the soul of the party, its viability as a political creature, its very existence as a sustainable entity. The young Whigs were not going to let Clay ruin the party any longer. They were going to do that themselves.
The pull of practicality was almost irresistible for those Whigs who were tired of losing and eager to put their noses in the patronage trough. A considerable portion of the party, however, insisted that 1848 should again be a contest of principles, and their call was bolstered by Whig victories in the autumn elections of 1846, a reflection of discontent with Democratic economic policies. Suddenly the young Whigs’ disenchantment with their party’s credo seemed overwrought, even wrongheaded. Principles again held sway, and Clay was the one national figure of unquestioned fealty to Whig principles, his closest challenger in that regard being Webster, who was truly detested in the South. All else being equal and unchanged, Clay’s political fortunes were ascendant, at least on the surface. At Ashland, the old dray horse put up his ears.2
Clay’s interest in another run for the presidency had never really abated, despite his seeming farewell to the Kentucky electors in December 1844. Much of the Whig press did not long take seriously his declaration of final retirement either. One story told of his leaving the Lexington market on a Saturday evening in late 1845 when a stout stranger bluntly said, “This must be Henry Clay.” The two shook hands as the stranger stared evenly at Clay and said, “I have never before seen you, sir, but I voted for you; and in ’48 I shall vote for you again: my home is Indiana—God bless you, sir.”3
Despite such encouragement, Clay remained guarded. He watched other aspirants carefully. In addition to Webster, a fixture in these quests, Ohio’s Thomas E. Corwin rode a brief boomlet, and the transparently ambitious Associate Justice John McLean put out feelers and was considered a tempting alternative who could subordinate principles and broaden the party’s appeal. Military heroes were also mentioned, especially Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor.
Meanwhile, Clay criticized all talk of 1848 as premature. He chided Webster for proposing to lower the tariff, a criticism meant to appeal to Pennsylvania’s manufacturing interests. Scott had a following (even Crittenden was leaning toward Scott in light of Clay’s apparent indifference), and between him and Taylor, Clay judged Scott the more serious adversary and consequently described Taylor as the “most sincere and honest man.” Clay, however, reflexively opposed a military-minded man’s aspirations to civic office. He believed that Taylor was the most military-minded man ever considered for the presidency, more so than Jackson or Harrison, really politicians who had once been soldiers.4
Yet events upended Clay’s cautious approach when suddenly in the spring of 1847 the Anybody But Clay movement received an unforeseen boost. Clay was correct about Winfield Scott’s fading star, but he completely misjudged the explosive appeal of Zachary Taylor. In two early engagements of the Mexican War, Taylor had scored victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma that caught the country’s notice. When he crossed the Rio Grande, he began to resemble a war hero on the order of Andrew Jackson. Leading Whigs began a courtship to deprive the Democrats of claiming this popular champion by branding him as one of their own. A political unknown, Taylor was nominally a Whig whose growing enthusiasm for the party stemmed from his anger at James K. Polk. But Taylor’s ties to the Whigs were quite tenuous, and his popularity rested with the waning recollection of his early successes in Mexico, victories that were certain to be superseded by Scott’s exploits on the march to Mexico City. By all the evidence, Zachary Taylor was a spent force in early 1847, his army dwindling as he fell further out of favor with his civilian superiors, men intent on diminishing if not wrecking his reputation. Then he won at Buena Vista and became a popular hero of startling power. “If truth, honesty, and tallents [sic] deserve to be honored,” marveled one Whig, “God knows Taylor does.”5
Buena Vista was the wild card, the unexpected and unforeseen event that elevated Taylor to become Henry Clay’s principal rival for the Whig nomination—an irony in that it was the event that had killed Henry Clay’s son. It immediately became clear as Whigs gravitated toward Taylor that Clay had seriously underestimated him.6 Worse were the even more telling signs that the party was slipping away from its Old Chieftain, despite his shrewd perception and sense of survival. Many people mirrored the attitude of the Alabama Whig who admitted that little was known about Taylor’s principles and that “Mars was not competent to occupy Jupiter’s place,” but that Taylor was the most electable man. “It is with me a rule,” he concluded, “ever if I can not get the best [to] take the next best I can get.”7
The Taylor boom was put together by seasoned professionals scarred by countless campaigns, and it was given energy by young men tired of losing elections. Handlers played up Taylor’s strengths for southern Whigs by emphasizing his fealty to slavery. Taylor’s ties to slavery were a weakness in the North, but supporters diminished the importance of that disadvantage by reminding northern Whigs that Clay was a three-time loser. Taylor was electable, they cooed, because he alone could unify the party and draw in enough non-Whig voters to ensure victory. Even in the absence of a rival like Taylor, with the laurels of Buena Vista on him, Whigs in the Senate had concluded that Clay was “out of the question.” Instead, they believed that Clay should promptly support Taylor or face the prospect of looking small and petulant.8
Calls for uniting behind Taylor were quite seductive. In Kentucky, Clay’s Whig enemies naturally embraced Taylor, but more ominous was the desertion of his friends. Such defections were understandable to a point, for Clay did not seem to be interested in the nomination, and his supporters consequently felt no disloyalty in supporting other candidates. Crittenden had taken Clay at his word about retirement and had become a Scott man, but like other Kentucky Whigs he began actively working for Taylor in early 1847. There were ties between the two beyond political affinity. Taylor had lived many years in Kentucky, Crittenden’s first wife had been a relation, and his son was on Taylor’s staff in Mexico.
Yet Crittenden was troubled by his central role in this episode. His coaxing and encouragement were the deciding factors in Taylor’s resolve to seek the Whig nomination, and Crittenden’s efforts for Taylor became so enthusiastic that he became the general’s unofficial campaign manager. He was also drawn into close concert with Clay’s enemies from the Tyler breach who were naturally supporting Taylor—men like John Pope, Tom Marshall, the Wickliffes, and Ben Hardin.9 Worse, Crittenden was furtive as he worked for Taylor’s candidacy in Kentucky and beyond. It became a worrisome game of who knew what, who had revealed what they knew, and how much such disclosures exposed his desertion of Clay. “All I ever believed,” a fellow Taylor supporter assured him, “was what you said without reserve. Not that you did not prefer Mr. Clay to all other men, but that you did not believe he could be elected, & you did believe Genl. Taylor could.” With such ramblings of negatives piled upon negatives and twisted into soothing rationalizations, Taylor’s men salved the qualms of their Brutus for a decision he had made long before. A higher duty to the party, they said, required disinterested action, and thus personal disloyalty to its aging chief was rationalized. They hoped that Crittenden and Robert P. Letcher, acting as Clay’s friends, would persuade him to step aside for Taylor. Those who urged Clay to do otherwise were dismissed as “sycophants.”10
Clay did not know for many months that his closest friend was covertly working with his bitterest enemies, that he was leading other friends into alliances whose secrecy would, when revealed, make them look treacherous and stain their architect with the appearance of betrayal.11 Clay was aware of the Taylor boom taking shape in Kentucky, a movement that understandably caused him “some mortification,” but he did not have any hard evidence of Crittenden’s role in it until returning to Ashland from a northern trip in September 1847. He received a letter from a New York acquaintance named Joseph L. White who had become aware of disquieting, possibly even treacherous deeds by Clay’s friends. White was especially disappointed by Crittenden’s labors for Taylor, and he asked if Crittenden were acting with Clay’s approval.12 Clay later claimed, given his own prolonged uncertainty about his candidacy, that he could not blame any of his friends for throwing in with Taylor, but the news about Crittenden was different. At first, he answered White to defend his old friend: “I am not aware that Mr. Crittenden has done any thing inconsistent with his friendship for me,” Clay flatly declared.13 But the very next day, Clay also wrote to Crittenden about White’s letter, which he enclosed, suggesting that it probably should be given no more weight than the unfounded rumor it was. “I think it due to our mutual friendship & the candour & confidence which have existed between us,” Clay said, “that it should afford you an opportunity of perusing the enclosed letter.”14 Crittenden’s response is lost to us—Clay sent it to White, who apparently did not keep it—but his old friend evidently confirmed his loyalty for Clay who assured Crittenden that “I thought I understood you.” He added with relief, “I find I did.”15
But Clay did not understand Crittenden at all. Crittenden had every right to support Taylor, of course, and even had good reason to judge Taylor as more electable than Clay, but given the opportunity to reveal those opinions, he flinched.16 Clay’s maneuvers to secure the Whig nomination would not have been fundamentally altered had he known about Crittenden’s actual attitude, but at least he would have known that the long friendship and the personal assurances of a man he counted as unswerving were meaningless. He would have known that Crittenden was in fact going into the camp of the enemy, playing Brutus to Wickliffe’s Cassius, and he would have been spared the foolish gesture of defending his friend to a New York correspondent. Being duped by someone he implicitly trusted most wounded him. When Crittenden’s behavior finally revealed his actual sentiments, Clay’s true friends were dismayed. Leslie Combs bluntly told Crittenden, “I am very—very sorry for your course.”17
ASTUTE OBSERVERS, ESPECIALLY Clay’s foes, began speculating about his intentions as soon as the election of 1844 was over. John Tyler marveled as early as the summer of 1845, “Can it be that he looks to ’48[?] Is the fire of ambition never to be extinguished[?]”18 A year later, Clay’s purpose had become even more obvious, if not overt, and the Wickliffes were certain that “the old hoss Hal is for the Presidency & no mistake.” They scoffed at what they perceived as calculated tactics to improve his image with the voters. Wickliffe dismissed Clay’s entering the Episcopal communion as “his infant Baptism,” and the abolitionist press reckoned it to be a cynical move to dispel “those ugly qualms” about his character.19
Yet Clay remained noncommittal, always insisting that he would be a candidate only if the Whigs united behind him (a caveat made somewhat doubtful by Taylor’s popularity) and if his health remained sound. Even more than Taylor’s high status with Whigs, the question of Clay’s health was a paramount obstacle he had to overcome if he hoped to attract reluctant Whigs as well as convince his friends he was up to the demands of a campaign and of the presidency that would follow. The reality of the matter partially absolved those friends who doubted his viability, for Clay was not altogether candid about the state of his health as 1848 loomed.
His physical condition was sure to be an issue if only because of his advanced age. Wide reports of his lack of stamina during the latter part of the 1844 campaign worked against him. Many people recollected him as aged and stooped, a tired old man who lost elections. “How does Mr. Clay bear his defeat?” asked one concerned Whig. “It was rumored the very day of the decisive bad news was received that he was very ill with scarlet fever. But I am in hopes that it was a mistake.”20 It was an erroneous report, but Clay actually had something else wrong with him. Much of his political effort during the months that followed his defeat in 1844 was devoted to concealing this fact. In that effort, he was remarkably successful, and even careful biographers have been inclined to marvel at the extraordinary, if brief, Indian summer Henry Clay enjoyed in his autumn years. He toured extensively, not just to indulge his love of travel, but to keep himself in the public eye and generate reports in friendly Whig newspapers that described him as the picture of youth and vitality. “Time has laid but a sparing hand upon the great American statesman,” observed one account. “I never saw him look better or happier, his step is elastic, his faculties appear fresh and vigorous, and the chances are that he will live to witness the election of several Presidents.”21
His journey to White Sulphur Springs and then to Cape May in the summer of 1847 took him through Baltimore and Philadelphia, where he repeatedly insisted that he only wanted to escape the painful reminders at Ashland of Henry Jr. and that this was not a political trip, but he attracted large crowds nonetheless and was occasionally induced to speak.22 The newspapers talked of his bounding energy that would be the envy of a man decades younger, and at Cape May he conspicuously took sea baths amid pretty girls who begged for kisses and giggled as though he were a dashing beau instead of a wizened grandpa. “There is a deep feeling still abiding towards me,” he proudly reported to Lucretia, “and a hope in regard to the future, in which I do not allow myself much to indulge.”23
This gadding about created the impression that Clay’s seventy years were of no consequence and hid that he was ill beyond the chronic complaints that had bothered him for years. His dental problems and dyspepsia, even his tendency for nagging respiratory infections like bad colds and bronchitis, differed from what was happening to him now, and he must have known that, for there were glimpses of his real condition scattered among the radiant reports. At White Sulphur Springs in the summer of 1845, John Tyler thought that Clay was “much changed, I think, since I saw him. He is as old as his gait indicates.”24 While traveling the following winter, Clay had a bad cold that was still troubling him more than two months later. During his stay in New Orleans that winter, he tried to book passage to Cuba but was prevented from making the trip because the steamboat was no longer running. Grandson Martin Duralde was at that very instant in Cuba because the warm climate was thought to relieve symptoms of tuberculosis.25
It is difficult to know with certainty just how sick Clay was during these years, for he took considerable pains to conceal his true condition from his family and friends as well as the public. When he traveled to New Orleans that winter of 1846–47, he insisted that it was not to regain his health “but to retain what I have,” which he said was excellent. In the meantime, Clay did not travel to Mobile as he planned, apparently because he did not feel up to it.26 When he dictated a letter, he defensively explained that the handwriting was his son John’s but quickly added that he was not using him as an amanuensis because of ill health.27 He went to Cape May “where I desire to enjoy a Sea bath, which I have never in my life before had the opportunity of doing.” But again he was quick to explain, “you must not however infer that my health is bad. It is on the contrary very good.”28 His repeated avowals of good health were, in short, a case of protesting too much.
The people of Clay’s time called tuberculosis “consumption” because of its wasting assault on the body. By any name the disease was still the same slow but relentless killer, so contagious at certain stages of infection that it was the stuff of epidemics, so lethal as to be the primary cause of death in Europe and North America throughout the nineteenth century. Tuberculosis made no distinctions of age or gender and was just as likely to ravage upper-class households as dreary tenements. It killed Keats, Goethe, and Chopin, and it moved through the Brontë family like a scythe. It would fell John C. Calhoun and is strongly suspected of killing John Breckinridge, Clay’s early Kentucky mentor. Kit Hughes’s wife died of tuberculosis. It tortured and then took off Martin Duralde, who was at Ashland possibly at the height of his contagiousness, though it is impossible to know whether Martin infected his grandfather. Indeed, Clay might already have had the disease, for it was feasible to carry it in a dormant state for years before it began its attack on the body in earnest. As early as the 1830s, he found night sessions in the Senate disagreeable because the lamps fouled the air and made it difficult for him to breathe. He could have contracted it from anyone at any time during his long public career and many associations, for the bacillus was everywhere, an extraordinarily robust organism able to defy all but the most determined disinfection. People in Clay’s time did not know any of this, of course, and only a few eccentrics even speculated that consumption might be contagious. The prevailing opinion placed its cause as heredity or dissolute habits. Clay, for example, had doubted Martin’s initial diagnosis because there was no family history of adult consumption.29
Infection occurred when a victim coughed or sneezed, launching tubercle bacilli into the air where healthy people inhaled them. Usually nothing happened. Healthy people’s immune cells quickly isolated the bacilli by encasing them into hard little knots. Yet some people, compromised by some other illness or simply too young or too old to put up an effective fight, were not so lucky. In these people the bacilli multiplied, as they were only partially encased by immune cells. Respiratory function gradually ebbed, a development that accelerated in the final stages of the disease. Tuberculosis victims lost weight, suffered from increasing exhaustion, and were plagued by a racking cough that eventually brought up blood as well as sputum, evidence that open lesions were forming. In time those lesions promoted infection, high fevers, and soaking perspiration, especially at night, ruining any chance for sleep. Finally, breathing became labored, and exhaustion levied its own physical tax, often the concluding one. The best that could be done in those hopeless final days was to make the patient as comfortable as possible, usually with liberal doses of opiates.
As Clay ended the presidential campaign of 1844, it is probable that he was in an early stage of tuberculosis, either from a recent contraction or from a flare-up of a dormant strain he had previously contracted, possibly years earlier. On occasion he could still summon remarkable reserves of energy, but his bad days would begin to rival in number the good ones, and his already fragile health was bent, not yet to the point of breaking, but to points where rebounds were less heartening and thorough. He knew the symptoms—everyone did—and knew the fate they foretold. He watched Martin suffer and wander, establishing a family history to explain for Clay his own plight, and Martin’s wretched chronicle foreshadowed Clay’s own end, one approaching in only a handful of years at best. Confronting that reality with characteristic optimism, Henry Clay, like Martin, bought a sort of lottery ticket of his own.30 It was his bid for the presidency, one last time.
AFTER BUENA VISTA, Taylor’s popularity gave him an aura of political invincibility, but his boosters actually had their work cut out for them. As “Old Rough and Ready”—the gruff no-nonsense general loved by his troops for his frank, uncomplicated manner—Zachary Taylor was likable. Henry Jr. had found him engaging, even inspiring, during the long weeks at Agua Nueva, but he had also noted Taylor’s ambition regarding the presidency.31 Neither Henry nor his father knew that those ambitions were being stoked by Crittenden and others, and nobody knew that those efforts would summon forth the least attractive aspects of Taylor’s personality.
What emerged was a man both egotistical and obtuse. Although he claimed no capacity for politics and repeatedly insisted that he was not interested in the presidency, that he did “not care a fig about the office,” he nevertheless believed promoters who hailed his sagacity and wisdom.32Worse, he took to posturing in letters meant to display that sagacity and wisdom for the country. In the weeks following Buena Vista, these letters from Mexico rattled Whigs and nearly ruined Taylor’s political career before it got started. Most disturbing were his declarations that he was above the squabbles of party, that he was neither Whig nor Democrat, and that he had no firm commitments regarding political issues except to serve the American people. The meaning of such muddleheaded statements was anybody’s guess, but Whigs were understandably troubled. “If Taylor keeps writing letters,” one drily observed, “Clay will be nominated.”33
Taylor’s newly found conviction that he best understood the real workings of politics and how to manage them coincided with his inflated belief that his principles were superior to those of a corrupt political cohort in both the Whig and Democratic parties. He relied on his military service to establish his patriotic bona fides and bristled when anyone scrutinized or questioned his positions or motives. He had a tin ear, was both opinionated and instinctively wrong, and tended to make the worst political decisions with a certainty that increasingly exasperated the men who were trying to put him over. His core supporters embraced him because they thought he could win, not because he shared their political philosophy, for he was essentially uninterested in promoting specific programs, Whig or otherwise. He accordingly suspected that their good wishes only masked a nefarious plan to keep him away from the Democrats until they could dump him for Clay.34
“I think it impossible that the General should maintain silence as to his principles,” Clay said in early August 1847. “He must make some public avowal of them, in other words he must say whether he is a Whig or Democrat.”35 In late September, Clay told Crittenden that he wanted no conflict between his and Taylor’s supporters. Clay said that if such a thing occurred, “it will not be my fault.”36 The following day he wrote to Taylor, who was still in Mexico, to say as much as well as to inquire directly about the general’s plans. Meanwhile, Clay’s friends worked to correct the impression that Taylor had the unqualified support of Kentucky’s Whigs. In October, a committee headed by George Robertson and including Leslie Combs drafted a confidential letter to circulate among Whig organizations throughout the country. The circular declared that the Taylor movement in Kentucky did not represent the state’s actual Whig sentiment.37 This letter did not remain confidential for long, of course, and Taylor men were livid over it. Told by Crittenden and Letcher that Clay would not stand in their way, Taylor’s supporters now had evidence very much to the contrary. Indeed, Crittenden’s problems were complicated by the possibility that Clay was in the hunt, and he sought to counteract the baleful effect of the circular by arranging a deal with Taylor men in Kentucky to prevent overt displays of support such as an endorsement of Taylor by the legislature or even his nomination by the state Whig convention. Crittenden insisted that such restraint was necessary to avoid embarrassing Clay; it also would keep masked Crittenden’s involvement with the Taylor movement, possibly until Clay had in fact decided to withdraw.38
In the ensuing months, however, reining in the Taylor movement became increasingly difficult, especially after November 13, 1847, when Clay went far in removing doubts about his pursuit of the nomination. On that day, he delivered a major policy speech in Lexington in which he registered his strongest opposition yet to the Mexican War and flatly rejected the possibility of gaining territory from it. His opening was dramatic, a lament about the gloomy day that he said reflected the condition of the country as it was saddled with an illegitimate war of aggression, a product of Polk’s dishonesty and the imprudent annexation of Texas. Clay proposed solutions for the resultant problems confronting the country, the most important being his recommendations that Congress take an active role in setting the war’s aim and manner of its prosecution, that the government establish a proper boundary for Texas, and that the administration pledge not to acquire any territory to expand slavery.39
Although Clay remained noncommittal about being a candidate, the Lexington speech was the all but formal launch of his campaign for the nomination and the initiation of a drive to bolster the Whig Party for the expected battles over the expansion of slavery. “Party lines are broken down,” one Whig had exulted upon the emergence of the seemingly apolitical Zachary Taylor, “and the distinction between Wiggery [sic] and democracy confounded.”40 Yet even Taylor realized the deep differences that separated Whigs and Democrats on the usual issues of “Banks, Tariffs, internal improvements, Wilmot Proviso … to raise up some, & break down others.”41 The most profound difference, though, concerned what to do with any Mexican territory gained during the war. In this, the contrast between Whigs and Democrats was stark: expansionist Democrats wanted all the land they could get—some even wanted all of Mexico—and Whigs did not want any land at all. The Democrats said a Mexican cession would compensate the country for the expense of the war. Whigs viewed the war as a tainted project, an act of naked aggression against a weak neighbor undertaken precisely to effect a land grab.42 They adopted a position succinctly articulated as “No Territory.”
The Whig position was most striking because it allowed southerners and northerners to avoid arguing about slavery, and at this point in the controversy, simply not talking about slavery was the best way to promote sectional harmony. If there was no territory to squabble over, its status as slave or free became irrelevant. In addition to taking the threat of slave expansion off the table for edgy northerners, the “No Territory” stance removed for southerners the specter that the deserts of New Mexico, so obviously inhospitable to slavery, would tilt the slave-free sectional imbalance further in the North’s favor.
Yet if Whigs had stumbled on the best way to steer clear of disruptive slavery debates, the country was not so fortunate. Polk’s primary purpose in going to war was to acquire the Pacific coast and the Southwest, a goal that necessarily meant the Democratic Party was committed to obtaining new lands. This coincided with the reality that of all the issues that threatened to disrupt politics in the election of 1848, slavery loomed largest, even worse than in 1844 when the Texas question had become so contentious. Certainly slavery made earlier arguments over the national bank, trade, and federally funded roads seem mild disagreements in comparison. This was particularly evident in the prolonged and angry quarrels over Representative David Wilmot’s proposal regarding any territory that might be gained from Mexico. Shortly after the war started in 1846, President Polk asked Congress to appropriate $2 million in the hope that he could use it to persuade Mexico to sell its western provinces and prevent any additional hostilities. Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, tried to tie the money to a pledge that slavery would never exist in any territory taken from Mexico. Angry southerners doggedly fought the measure, but it twice passed the House. Although southerners were able to block the Wilmot Proviso in the Senate, they soon discovered that it had become an unrelenting antislavery position taken up by an increasing number of northerners. The proviso assumed a life of its own, a talismanic symbol for antislavery men, a menacing insult to southerners. An open sore in political debates resulted, and one’s position on the proviso became a test of sectional loyalty. All but one free state legislature endorsed it, and southern states passionately condemned it. Worse, it undeniably blurred party lines and truly confounded the differences between Whigs and Democrats, a development that was hardly the stuff of glad tidings, for it forced the sections into politically untenable and inflexible unity regardless of party. As the proviso threatened to collapse parties as national organizations, compromise became less likely and violent overreaction became more probable.
The speech in Lexington was Clay’s overt bid for northern support in the coming contest, a staking of the ground that separated his declared position on the Wilmot Proviso from that of the ambiguous General Taylor. Careful that everything he said would be accurately reported, he asked the journalists not to take notes at the event, promising instead to provide them with a written version. He told Horace Greeley that he expected the speech to establish him “as a Western man (I protest against being considered as a Southern man) with Northern principles.”43 It certainly seemed to persuade Greeley that Clay was the best candidate. The eccentric editor of the New York Tribune had been inclining to Corwin, but by the end of the month, he was giving Clay advice and chortling over plans by Whigs in New York City “to hold a great public demonstration in response to your Lexington Speech.”44 This relationship with Greeley was natural in a way, for they shared the same vision for the Whig Party, and the editor soon became Clay’s unofficial eastern campaign manager.
Yet Greeley’s loyalty to Clay has been questioned, if for no other reason than he was a member of Thurlow Weed’s faction of New York politics, the so-called junior partner in the triumvirate that included Weed and Seward, men who were at best lukewarm and occasionally hostile to a Clay candidacy. Greeley pushed Clay to choose Seward as his vice president, and his other activities, especially late in the day, suggested other goals. Possibly his maneuvers were calculated to dim the chances of the leading candidate, whoever that was at any given time, to keep a deft balance between all rivals, deadlock a convention, and have Seward emerge as the Whig dark horse in the manner of the Democrat Polk in 1844.45 In that estimation, Clay was a way to stop Taylor, nothing more. Possibly that was the way it was—a game within a game, a snarl of complexities in which nothing was really as it seemed, and nobody said what was true, whether Crittenden or Letcher or Greeley.
Or Zachary Taylor, for that matter. In early November, Taylor responded to Clay’s September 27 letter with an answer that on its face was more than cordial and perfectly candid. Nothing could come between him and Clay, he said, and most important, he declared that he had recently told a mutual friend about his willingness “to stand aside, if you or any other whig were the choice of the party.”46 The mutual friend was Crittenden, and what Taylor told Clay was true: he had told Crittenden he would defer to Clay. But he had also told Crittenden that numerous correspondents were telling him that the Whig Party would never support Clay’s candidacy.47 That bit of intelligence Old Rough and Ready chose to keep from the Old Chieftain.
If Taylor’s willingness in November to stand down in deference to Clay was sincere at the time, it became less so as time wore on. From his home in Baton Rouge, he again assured Clay of his friendship, but he declined an invitation to visit Ashland and ominously declared that letters from Kentucky “intended to produce unkind feelings on my part towards you” had failed to do so.48 Clay surely wondered, What letters? What Kentuckians? Only a few days later, Taylor told Crittenden that he had no intention of formally withdrawing from the presidential contest.49 That much, at least, was true. By the spring of 1848, Taylor had convinced himself and was busily convincing others that he had never promised Clay he would step aside. “I did not then, nor do I now believe, that Mr. Clay could be elected if he was the only Whig candidate in the field,” Taylor said, adding that Clay had obviously misunderstood him.50
Crittenden was in hot water with Taylor’s Louisiana supporters, who were angry about the confidential circular letter and displeased by reports that Crittenden had guaranteed Clay his loyalty. “I have no recollection of saying to Mr. Clay what he supposed me to have said, and what I think I did not say,” Crittenden assured wealthy New Orleans businessman Albert T. Burnley in a letter that Crittenden told him to keep secret. Burnley was among those Taylor men who wanted the Clay matter settled once and for all, but Crittenden could only offer what he described as a “true and candid statement” of the situation: Clay was on his way to Washington, Crittenden said, where nobody “would desire and advise him to become a candidate under present circumstances.”51 Clearly Crittenden wanted everyone to wait just a while longer and was praying that Clay’s reception in Washington would finally convince him to retire to Ashland.52
THE MORE WHIGS got to know Taylor, the less they liked him. The memory of the pluperfect mess John Tyler had created was still fresh, and Taylor’s reputation noticeably dimmed in the North. “Taylor seems still to be declining,” John McLean observed in Ohio, and Thurlow Weed believed that Old Rough and Ready was finished in New York. Weed even predicted that Clay would be the nominee with William Seward as his running mate.53
All was not well with Clay, however. His Lexington speech had produced mixed results at best. Because American soldiers were still in the field, its emphatic denunciation of the war struck some people as vaguely unpatriotic. There was nothing vague about its reception in the South, though, where it alienated many Whigs and spurred Democrats to proclaim that Clay would sell them all out to northern abolitionists.54 Clay had not endorsed the Wilmot Proviso, but he had essentially adopted its spirit by vowing to resist slavery expansion in the West, and too many southerners regarded that position as rank apostasy. Northern Whigs responded more positively, but it remained to be seen if their enthusiasm would overcome their reservations about Clay’s age, his awful record as a presidential contender, and his uncanny ability to unify otherwise discordant Democrats against him. Clay himself was disappointed, for the varied reactions were definitely not the groundswell of support he had always said was necessary to justify another run for the presidency.
In any case, his efforts left many establishment Whigs unmoved. In Congress, Taylor picked up enough support to merit the formation of an official organization that arose from a core of seven Whig junior congressmen picturesquely labeled the “Young Indians.” They were indeed relatively youthful. One of them was Abraham Lincoln, who was just turning forty. Lincoln, who had been in Lexington visiting his in-laws, the Todds, had heard Clay’s November 13 speech and apparently liked its message, considering his resolute opposition to the war. Clay had always been Lincoln’s ideal as a statesman, but he became a Young Indian nonetheless, a sign of Clay’s limited appeal in the North. Most of the Young Indians were southerners, but their commitment to Taylor emerged before Clay’s Lexington speech and had less to do with slavery than with their desire to discard old men who specialized in losing elections. They were just as averse to Webster as to Clay. The Virginians in their ranks actually wanted to reshape the Whig Party on a nostalgic model drawn from James Monroe’s time, one presumably without partisan rancor, a new coalition that would partner issueless Whigs and disaffected Democrats to rid the government of corrupt patronage and inaugurate a new era of patrician republicanism.55 Taylor’s talk of soaring above party politics and governing as an American made him seem just the man to accomplish that goal, and Virginia’s Young Indians warmed to their work of getting him nominated by state conventions rather than taking their chances at a national one that was likely to fall under the influence of the old guard—or, as Taylor called them, the “wire pullers.” “General Taylor cannot be nominated in a Whig National Convention,” Greeley emphatically predicted. Worse, a national convention was likely to do something foolish like declare a set of principles and thus push away wavering Democrats necessary for victory in the general election.56
This situation presented Clay with a clear imperative. He knew after the Lexington speech that many state conventions in the South would likely be unfriendly to him, and he was alarmed that in the absence of a national convention the Whig Party might make its bid for the presidency by jettisoning its principles, or more precisely, by nominating a man who had no demonstrable Whig principles at all. He recognized at last that the party was drifting from him at its political hub in Washington, whence congressional Whigs radiated spokes of influence to the courthouses and crossroads of the country. As much as he moved decisively on anything during these months of pondering and hesitancy, he moved decisively on this front.
It was brutally cold in Kentucky that December, and foot-deep snow blanketed the ground as Clay left Ashland for Washington the day after Christmas. He was “to attend to some professional engagement,” it was said (he actually planned to argue cases before the Supreme Court), but the sagacious suspected he was going to take “a survey of the ground,” after which “he will no doubt be better prepared to decide upon his future course.”57 Clay arrived in Washington on January 10, when mounting northern anger over southern ultimatums concerning Taylor was reaching its peak.
The capital, despite being cold and dreary, worked its old magic on him as always, and Clay began returning the favor, to the amazement of his friends and consternation of his enemies. Charming, vigorous, and clever, he appeared at parties to enchant stout matrons and nubile girls, who, regardless of age, giggled at his jests and blushed when he winked. The matrons prized his gloves as keepsakes, the girls greeted him with kisses, and Crittenden and Clayton were “in great distress.” For Clay did more than grace social salons. He quietly visited the lodgings of influential Whig leaders, always “calm, & in the best temper & frame of mind,” to speak of Whig programs and Whig honor, to ask after wives and children, to remind men of venerable friendships, to tell jokes and reminisce about past campaigns, to speak of future hopes. He ranged from the capital on a couple of long weekends to visit friends in Baltimore, and he spent a week in Berkeley County, Virginia. He was an honored guest at the marriage of Thomas Hart Benton’s daughter to Susan Jacob Clay’s brother, and the next day he marched into the House chamber, which had been temporarily turned over to the American Colonization Society, to deliver a lengthy speech as its president, an event that highlighted for northerners his lifelong commitment to gradual emancipation. The Benton affair had the side effect of proving he could be on civil terms with Democrats, as did a couple of visits to James and Sarah Polk at the White House where he traded quips with Mrs. Polk. She was no more immune to Clay’s charm than the other ladies of Washington: in a large company, she told him that if a Whig were destined to succeed her husband, she would prefer it to be Clay.58
William Seward watched all of this with a mixture of fascination and disgust. Clay, incredibly, single-handedly, was turning back the Taylor tide, achieving in only days for himself what a legion of operatives had labored for months to accomplish for Old Rough and Ready. Meanwhile, Clay found it increasingly difficult to resist the coaxing of friends who were themselves enthralled by this remarkably sleek political animal, social lion, tireless promoter of Whig principles, and real danger to Democrat aspirations. Taylor men continued to grumble that Clay could not win, but as January gave way to February, they were shaken and showed it.59 Clay supporters, gloomy for so long, were suddenly energized by the Old Chieftain, and they now told him that he was the only man standing between Taylor and the presidency, the only man who could sustain Whig principles. Friends noted that he was “apparently in fine & vigorous health, feeling beyond all doubt that he is quite able to take upon himself the burthens of office.”60
If we are to believe his frequently repeated statements to family and friends, Clay had left Ashland determined to announce that he would not seek the presidency, but possibly that was just a way for him to avoid the embarrassment of being cast aside. After a few weeks in Washington, however, he decided not to decide, at least not right away. He had always maintained that he would not make a definitive announcement until the spring, and now he resolved not to make any statement of his intentions until he returned home.61 After all, his being cast aside appeared less likely as northern Whigs transformed caution over Taylor into outright anger over aggressive plans to make him the nominee with southern state endorsements. Finally those northerners had had enough and emphatically insisted that the Whig candidate would have to be the product of a national convention. Taylor men tried to get their way by threatening to support him even if the Whigs nominated someone else, but they seriously overestimated their strength and their man’s appeal. A few wary southerners joined northern Whigs in Congress to demand a national convention. It was scheduled for June 7 in Philadelphia.62
Even the Young Indians, with all their pretensions to savvy political maneuvering and claims of knowledge about how best to win elections, had to admit that it had been a remarkable couple of months, for them a sobering lesson in the power of personality and the art of professional politicking. There was, after all, a reason he was called the Old Coon, the Old Chieftain, Prince Hal, Great Harry of the West, the Sage of Ashland. Those nicknames marked identities created over a lifetime of achievements and disappointments. All were melded into Mr. Clay, who returned to Washington in early 1848 and showed the town how politics was done.63
ON FEBRUARY 21, 1848, John Quincy Adams suffered a massive stroke and collapsed on the floor of the House of Representatives. He died two days later. Clay was still in Washington when Adams was stricken, but by the time Adams died, Clay had left for Philadelphia. The departure had been long scheduled, but it made Clay appear indifferent to Adams’s fate and disrespectful of his memory, and his enemies made as much as they could of it. Worse, his itinerary roughly coincided with that of Adams’s funeral cortege as it proceeded through Philadelphia on its way to Massachusetts, suggesting that Clay was persisting in a tasteless disregard for the former president. Clay had been loyal to Adams while serving as his secretary of state, and he had occasionally tried to sustain friendly contact with “Old Man Eloquent,” but he had never really liked the prickly New Englander. Now that Adams was dead, Clay made clear that he intended no impertinence. In Philadelphia he appeared in Independence Hall on February 26 to deliver a short eulogy in which he described Adams as “a great patriot.” He did not hide from close friends, however, a fatalistic resignation that indicated he was essentially unmoved by the old man’s passing. Clay was an old man himself. “So we go!” he told Kit Hughes, another old man who had been with Adams and Clay at Ghent more than forty years earlier.64
The criticisms of his behavior were bitter in some quarters, but they did him no lasting harm. If anything, he seemed to be leading a charmed life. While staying at Mayor John Swift’s residence, Clay went to bed as his servant, unaccustomed to the gas lighting, simply blew out the flame without turning off the jet. Swift awoke just before dawn to the strong odor of gas. He rushed to Clay’s bedroom, opened the door, and was almost knocked down by the fumes. As Swift frantically raised a window, he looked with terror at the bed, almost certain that his guest had been asphyxiated. “Mr. Clay,” he called out, “Mr. Clay, are you alive?” The bedclothes stirred. “Never felt better,” said Clay.65
He left Philadelphia on March 7 bound for New York City, where enormous crowds heard him speak at Castle Garden. Several weeks earlier, a huge meeting had attracted some ten thousand cheering supporters and was matched by a statement of support from the Whig caucus in Albany. Clay met with Martin Van Buren, building speculation that his and the Little Magician’s friends would be collaborating in the state. He also met with Albert Gallatin, effecting a reconciliation with the old man, now in his late eighties and still lively but with only a year and a half to live. In some of this, Clay was likely just mending fences and tidying up personal loose ends, but these travels and speeches and meetings struck many as having much deeper meanings.66
By the time Clay reached Ashland on March 30, he had every reason to feel a high sense of accomplishment. However, the success of his trip was already fleeting. While Clay received the acclaim of northern crowds, events moved decisively against him. As he left Washington, the Polk administration received a treaty ending the war with Mexico and detailing a massive cession of Mexican territory to the United States, including California and all the territory to its east stretching to Texas. On March 10, the Senate ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The three months between the treaty’s ratification and the meeting of the Whig convention in Philadelphia obscured the towering impact of this event on Clay’s candidacy, but it would be revealed in due course.67
More immediately evident was a setback he suffered in late February at the Virginia Whig convention. Whig meetings were also held in Kentucky and North Carolina on the same day as Virginia’s, February 22, which coincidentally happened to be both George Washington’s birthday and the first anniversary of Taylor’s triumph at Buena Vista. The outcome in Kentucky was of considerable importance to both Clay and Taylor, but the event itself greatly troubled those of Clay’s former friends who faced the prospect of at last revealing where they stood. For months Crittenden and Letcher had sustained an uneasy truce with Taylor men that had kept Kentucky from endorsing either the general or Clay. As the convention loomed, the plan to have it adjourn without pledging delegates to anyone was the best they could do for Clay, and they salved their consciences by insisting it was really a kindness to shield him from a humiliating defeat by Taylor, or to save him from the physical ordeal of a campaign, which they were sure would mean defeat for the Whigs in November.
Taylor’s supporters had been bristling over stories about Clay’s triumphant trip to Washington, and as the local convention neared, they suspected that the agreement to send uncommitted delegates to Philadelphia was a trick. They threatened to cancel the arrangement. “If the Ball opens with an angry discussion,” warned Letcher, “the fat is in the fire.” Clay’s former friends frantically tried to keep that from happening. They put in writing assurances that he would eventually withdraw. “Great G–d,” wailed Black Bob, “if he could have foreseen the predicament in which he had placed us friends and his party in this country [Kentucky], it [sic] could not have hesitated a moment about declining.”68 Clay’s former friends were only just barely able to persuade the Kentucky Whig convention in Frankfort on February 22 to stick to the arrangement and send uncommitted delegates to the national convention. That very result, however, had the ironic consequence of making the pledge of his withdrawal less valid, because true Clay supporters believed his position was growing stronger.
Furious Taylor men promptly strode into a Taylor rally already under way in Frankfort to join in an endorsement of Old Zach. Telegraph dispatches from Frankfort did not distinguish the regular Whig state convention from the Taylor rally, and Whigs across the country mistakenly concluded that the latter reflected the will of the state party. Later that very day at a crucial point in the Virginia Whig convention, Taylor men used that confusion to announce that the telegraph had brought news that Kentucky had nominated their candidate. The report caused the Virginians to pause, and all it then took to shove them over to Taylor was an outright lie: North Carolina had endorsed Taylor as well, Old Zach’s supporters proclaimed. Virginia followed suit. Everyone had counted Virginia in Clay’s column, and with good reason. Only through confusion and misrepresentation was the Old Dominion handed to Taylor, because North Carolina, like Kentucky, had not pledged its delegates to anyone. Clay, not Taylor, was the favorite of North Carolina Whigs, but the convention that met in Raleigh that same Tuesday was not certain about the Old Chieftain’s intentions and had decided to keep its delegates uncommitted.69
Despite this good fortune, Taylor seemed bent on self-destruction. In the first weeks of 1848, he slipped his letter writing leash and sent out a series of rambling communications that revived the worst of Whig fears. Stubbornly cultivating his image as a man beholden to no party, he accepted any nomination that came his way, including those of the Native American Party and the People’s Party. Taylor boasted about his independence and basked in his broad appeal, but Whigs were worried that he was risking the election, not to mention what his attitudes might mean regarding distributing patronage. The publication of Taylor’s views, starting in February 1848 when his supporters were laboring mightily for him in the state conventions, finally drove party leaders to reconsider their allegiance to a man with no apparent allegiance to them. Unwavering Taylor supporters strained to repair the damage by begging him to declare his fidelity to Whig principles, but he mulishly refused and made matters worse by again depicting himself as above politics. He even said that if the Whigs did not nominate him, he would run as an independent.70
Taylor’s missteps obscured the injury done to Clay by the state conventions in late February, and Clay still could hear the gushing praise of friends and the cheering of crowds as he finally decided not to withdraw. Virginia was not his any longer, but Kentucky and North Carolina were uncommitted. He received good reports from Georgia, and even glimmers of encouragement from Louisiana, Taylor’s home state, where Clay could possibly return the favor done to him by Old Zach’s Kentucky operatives. Clay’s northern support seemed stronger than ever, and Ohio governor William Bebb finally gave up on Tom Corwin and all but promised Clay that the Ohio delegation would be his in Philadelphia.71
Clay’s decision came late and after months of his former friends’ whispered promises that he would not run. Despite their better judgment, Taylor men had believed that Clay was on the verge of declaring that he would be content to retire forever to Ashland.72 To stop that speculation, he issued a formal statement announcing his intention to place his name before the convention in Philadelphia. Dated April 10, Clay’s statement appeared in the Lexington press on April 12, his seventy-first birthday, and was nationally published in the days that followed.73
Considering the need to quell false tales about his withdrawal, the announcement was an understandable gesture, but it was also a serious mistake. It shattered a venerated tradition of American presidential politics. Candidates were not supposed to be striving politicians but reluctant recruits finally answering the people’s call. Clay’s announcement was unprecedented, and it alienated many Whigs because they thought it haughty and presumptuous. In New York, upstate Whig Washington Hunt called the announcement “a clear case” of political suicide. Clay had “evidently treasured up all the clever things said to him by flatterers and parasites during his recent tour,” grumbled Hunt. “I consider him out of the question.”74
Yet others thought “it was high time” Clay made his intentions known and were delighted that he had.75 The Whig establishment might have been outraged, but the people did not seem to have found his gesture irredeemably offensive. “Mr. Clay has not five friends of his nomination in both branches of Congress,” observed the Georgia Whig Robert Toombs, “but eight-tenths of them are afraid to open their lips upon the subject to the public.”76 Nevertheless, Clay was surprised by the reaction to his announcement, and he resolved to keep quiet in the weeks after it. When he was told that only his clear opposition to slavery expansion would ensure Ohio for him, he insisted that he had said all he intended to say about the matter. He was determined to adhere to a promise he had made to Greeley months before to keep mum.77
The Old Chieftain was now on record as wanting the nomination, an intention that at last exposed for Clay the true sentiments of John J. Crittenden. On the day he drafted his announcement, Clay sent Crittenden a copy of it, with the aim of enlisting him in his effort. Crittenden responded in early May. “I hope it may turn out for the best,” was all Crittenden could offer Henry Clay. He insisted that Clay had known all along his “opinions & apprehensions on the subject,” which were, Crittenden said, that Clay could not be elected and thus should not be put forward as a candidate. Crittenden rather helplessly observed that the presidential election was “becoming more & more perplexed.”78
Clay now knew that Crittenden had deserted him. Clay did not respond. Crittenden would never write to him again.
Now that Clay had declared, all of Taylor’s pompous talk about being above politics and his practice of accepting nominations from other parties had to not only come to a stop but be disavowed. In Washington, even before he had responded to Clay’s April 10 announcement, John J. Crittenden consulted with his fellow lodgers Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs and drafted a letter for Taylor’s signature that would unequivocally vow allegiance to Whig principles. Some have claimed that after Clay’s April announcement, Crittenden stopped working for Taylor, but that was not true. Crittenden took a central role in saving Taylor’s candidacy well after Clay’s statement of intent.79 In the letter—he was working on it two weeks after Clay had declared himself—Crittenden sought to have it appear that Taylor plainly endorsed the idea of a passive executive and that he would be respectful of the congressional agenda on tariffs, the economy, and internal improvements. Crittenden took a swipe at “ultra” Whigs (meaning Clay, a particularly nasty touch coming from Crittenden’s pen), but he also had Taylor promise that he would use the veto only to strike down clearly unconstitutional legislation, a jab at the veto-happy Tyler.80 Crittenden and his colleagues hoped that this statement would repair all the damage Taylor had been doing to himself—never mind that much in the letter would be as much a surprise to Zachary Taylor as it would be soothing to Whig sensibilities.
In fact, saving Taylor from himself made for a considerable amount of heavy political lifting. Even as Crittenden was crafting his letter, Taylor was reacting to Clay’s announcement by writing a letter of his own. Dated April 20, 1848, the letter went to the Richmond Whig and declared that he would accept the Whig nomination only if the convention did not bind him with pledges. Worse, he claimed he had always intended to be a candidate for the presidency regardless of what the Whigs or the Democrats did. These statements were completely at variance with those Crittenden had devised for him. When Crittenden’s creation arrived in Baton Rouge, Taylor’s handlers promptly sat him down to transcribe it, sign it, and immediately send it to his brother-in-law John S. Allison. Soon to be known as “the Allison Letter,” it went to the Baton Rouge newspapers on April 22. The telegraph transmitted it across the nation. Taylor’s supporters, Crittenden foremost among them, hoped with all their hearts that the Allison letter would at least cancel out the potentially lethal effect of Taylor’s Richmond Whig blunder.
At the end of April, Zachary Taylor wrote Clay a sugared letter oozing with false modesty (Clay possibly knew more about the mood of the people, Taylor said), false flattery (“you were my first choice,” Taylor said), and false statements (he never wanted to be president, he said). But mainly Taylor dealt with the problem of his promise in November 1847 to step aside if Clay wanted to run. Taylor had actually stated the pledge to Crittenden as well as Clay, and the general was at first under the impression that it had come to light because of Crittenden. In late March, Taylor told Crittenden that he could not remember ever having written to him about the matter.81 After Clay’s April 10 announcement, Taylor concluded that his withdrawal promise had been exposed by his November 4, 1847, letter to Clay. He now told Clay that the matter was in the hands of the people, who had registered their preference in several state conventions. Taylor said he could not in good conscience now withdraw after receiving such sincere demonstrations of esteem.82
Clay was not overly troubled by any of these developments. After the revelations about Crittenden, nothing could surprise him, and if anything, he became even more hopeful that his supporters could deliver him the nomination in Philadelphia.83 Several weeks would pass before Whig delegates assembled in Philadelphia to choose the candidate, plenty of time for Taylor to write more letters.
It was Taylor’s turn, though, to lead the charmed life. Whigs did not care that he obviously had not written the Allison letter, because “fools build houses—& wise men live in ’em.”84 Most important was that the letter went far in calming Taylor’s shaken supporters.85 But something had already happened that was far more damaging to Clay’s chances than any of Taylor’s impolitic letters were to his, even if Old Zach continued to write foolish things to the newspapers. The early opposition of important Whig groups such as the Young Indians and the desertion of his own friends certainly dimmed Clay’s chances in 1848, but his bid for the nomination fell victim to forces beyond his control. Beginning with his Lexington speech of November 1847, Clay staked everything on opposing the Mexican War. From that position, he sought to placate northern hostility to slavery expansion and soothe southern honor by flatly rejecting any potential territorial gains from the war. Thus he could make the Wilmot Proviso both unnecessary and irrelevant.
After the Senate ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on March 10, however, there was no war to oppose, and the territorial gains were an accomplished fact. A month before he made his formal declaration and long before the Philadelphia convention, Clay and the Whigs who supported him lost the only issue that made him an appealing candidate, someone other than an establishment figure who lost elections. The end of the war created a new set of circumstances that gradually made his positions disagreeable both to the North and to the South. The question of whether the new western territories would be slave or free revived the Wilmot Proviso as a northern cause. It also renewed it as a threat to the South. Because he would not support Wilmot, Clay disappointed northern Whigs indispensable to his candidacy, hence the pleas from Ohio for him to make a plain declaration about the matter. Clay would not; he could not without completely losing the South. The consequences in the North were not clear until everyone gathered in Philadelphia, but northern Whigs had been quietly looking for alternatives to Clay for weeks. Winfield Scott was often suggested. Ultimately, however, they resigned themselves to Old Zach’s nomination. Taylor’s role in the Mexican War became less objectionable to them because the war was over, and his purported electability tipped the balance for those eager to drink from patronage troughs. On the other hand, Clay’s Lexington speech opposing slavery expansion in the West made him unacceptable to southern Whigs and cemented their initial inclination to become Taylor men.86
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo smashed every reason that the Whig Party had, other than sentiment, to make Henry Clay its presidential candidate. He sat at Ashland counting the days until the Philadelphia convention, but his numbers in this last lottery had already come up weeks before. They were losers.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S convention met in Baltimore on May 27, also with the chore of addressing the changed situation regarding the Mexican Cession. Democrats were just as divided as Whigs over slavery in the new territories, and an outright endorsement of the Wilmot Proviso promised to alienate the southern wing of the party. Consequently, Democrats adopted a policy they called popular sovereignty, which had all the political advantages of seeming to do something while actually doing nothing at all. Under popular sovereignty, the inhabitants of the territory would decide whether they were to have slavery or not, a gesture that the Democrats saw as perfectly compatible with their notions of decentralized, limited government, in essence the ultimate expression of Jacksonian states’ rights. As in everything, popular sovereignty’s devil was in the details, such as when exactly the settlers would make their fateful decision, which was vitally important since the presence of even a single slave made less likely the exclusion of slavery as an institution. But addressing specifics ruined the beauty of popular sovereignty’s indecisive ambiguity, the very feature that made it a workable dodge of the slavery issue. No specifics were therefore confronted. Instead, Democrats nominated Lewis Cass, an old Michigan moderate with a distinguished record and a reputation for deliberation so ingrained that Lincoln likened him to an ox—what Clay called “irresolution and want of decision.” But at the time, bovine apathy seemed precisely the way to deal with the difficult sectional problem of slavery. The Whigs had lost their No Territory policy when the Mexican War ended to include an enormous western land cession. The Democrats adopted a No Decision policy in its stead.87
Whig delegates assembled in Philadelphia during the first week of June. Northerners were fragmented, and southerners insisted that nominating Taylor was absolutely necessary, both bad signs for Clay. Taylor’s forces were extremely well organized, having expanded the Young Indians into a much larger Palo Alto Club to include growing numbers of Whig congressmen. As delegates bound for Philadelphia paused in Washington, Palo Alto members buttonholed them on train station platforms to persuade them that only Taylor could win in November. Leading Clay supporters, including Greeley, were exceedingly despondent but soldiered on.88 They set up Clay’s headquarters at Mayor Swift’s office and held nightly meetings in which Greeley, Leslie Combs, and John Minor Botts planned strategy. Surveying the dismal prospects, they concluded that Winfield Scott as a running mate for Clay was their best hope of stemming the Taylor tide. Scott had a deadly habit of writing letters even more foolish than Taylor’s, and he had sunk his own candidacy as a result, but teamed with Clay he could possibly help unify northern delegates and stop the southern momentum for Taylor. Scott, as it happened, was agreeable to the idea and was apparently approached by Clay operatives. Yet for some reason, Scott’s availability as well as his willingness to go on the ticket with Clay was never revealed to the delegates at Philadelphia. In addition, he was bedridden with severe diarrhea (a souvenir of his Mexican campaign) and could not contact the convention personally. Instead, rumors exaggerated his illness to make him unappealing as a candidate of any kind, and Taylor forces were able to suppress Clay’s last best chance to overtake their man.89
On Thursday, June 8, Zachary Taylor, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Winfield Scott, John Clayton, and John McLean (whose support was so paltry his friends promptly withdrew him) were placed in nomination. Everyone expected Clay to lead on the first ballot, but everyone knew that he would also fall short of the 140 votes required to secure the nomination. His managers, in fact, had estimated his first ballot total would be 115 votes, and from that figure they hoped to consolidate with Scott’s supporters to attract the little more than two dozen delegates necessary for the prize.
When the balloting ended, however, the convention was shocked by the result. Taylor, not Clay, led with 111 votes, and Clay had fallen far short of his benchmark with only 97. Just one Ohio delegate voted for him, revealing a serious disintegration of northern opposition to Taylor, but Kentucky’s delegation was the momentum shifter that broke Clay’s back. Only 5 of his own state’s 12 delegates remained loyal to the Old Chieftain.90
Clay’s candidacy never recovered. In two subsequent ballots that evening he continued to lose ground, and even a recess could not stem the tide. The next day, June 9, the dam broke on the fourth ballot. Taylor’s total climbed to 171 votes, well beyond the number necessary to win, while Clay sank to a dismal 35, falling to third place behind Winfield Scott. Only James Harlan of the Kentucky delegation had remained steadfast until the end. It was over. Henry Clay would never become president of the United States.
The convention nominated Millard Fillmore as Taylor’s running mate, something of an olive branch extended to the Clay wing. Clay liked Fillmore, and he was a rival of Seward’s, but his selection was clearly a sop, and the party adjourned to do battle with the Democrats amid considerable self-congratulation that was all the more hearty because the convention had elected not to adopt a platform of any kind. The Democrats had decided with popular sovereignty to let sleeping dogs lie, but the Whigs had spinelessly resolved not to get a dog at all.
Despite his insistence otherwise, the Whigs’ rebuke embittered Clay, and as he gave the matter more thought, the behavior of his “friends” enraged him. According to family tradition, he went so far as to draft an angry narrative that described Crittenden’s treachery, excoriating him and the Kentucky delegation for their betrayal. James, however, persuaded him not to publish it until he had taken time to reflect. Clay cooled down and was said to have torn the letter to pieces, but James’s wife, Susan (the keeper of the documents), gathered up the pieces and put them away. They were last seen—or at least their contents were last heard—when read to a historian of the Whig Party in 1920 by Susan’s son George H. Clay. The document afterward vanished.91
That is the family tradition, and as far as it goes, it corroborates Clay’s apparent decision to keep his own counsel regarding Crittenden. He did not utter a word about Crittenden’s candidacy for Kentucky governor, which in a way spoke volumes as a refusal to endorse the person who had been his closest friend. In fact, it was reported that James was the Clay in eruption, not his father. It was also said that the Crittendens had no compunction about speaking ill of Henry Clay.92
For his part, Crittenden did not write to Clay after the convention, nor did he try to call when he visited Lexington during the summer of 1848. What Clay thought of all this can only be conjectured. Observers insisted that he never discussed his friend’s disloyalty, even within his own family. Indeed, as Whig divisions had mounted during the spring and early summer of 1848, to the extent that they threatened to lose the election in the fall, Crittenden had been mentioned as a compromise candidate to supplant both Clay and Taylor. Clay, it was later said, had not objected.93
In the wake of the disappointment, he simply retreated to Ashland, and his loyal friends brooded.94 Clay never again felt any great affection for the Whig Party. Three years after these events, he had resigned himself to all that had happened—at least, he said so. He evinced little interest in hearing additional details about double-dealing in Philadelphia, and he claimed that Taylor’s nomination had “now no other than an historical interest” for him. “The thing is passed,” he said, “and no one has more quietly submitted to the event than I have.”95
EVEN THOUGH HE was now armed with the Whig nomination, Taylor again began insisting that he was above party. The attitude exasperated Whigs and delighted Democrats, who lampooned Taylor as a political Hamlet soliloquizing, “Independent or a Whig—that is the question. Whether ’tis better for my chance to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Clayites or to come forth at once a thorough Whig and by surrendering end them.”96
The parody was too close to the truth for Whigs.97 A serious move materialized to challenge Taylor, and in the first week of September a mass meeting in New York City’s Vauxhall Garden actually named Clay-Fillmore electors. Clay quashed this spontaneous, quixotic, and tardy show of support, however, by emphatically repeating to numerous correspondents and to the newspapers that he would not run as an independent.98
Ironically it was Cass who suffered the consequences of a splintered party when the Democrats’ “No Decision” dodge of popular sovereignty alienated antislavery elements of the party. During the summer, New York Barnburners joined with remnants of the old Liberty Party to establish a national organization based on the alliterative exhortation, “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.” The Free-Soil Party held its convention in August 1848 in Buffalo, New York, and became a haven for disaffected antislavery Whigs as well as Democrats, nominating Martin Van Buren with Charles Francis Adams as his running mate. The Van Buren candidacy pulled just enough votes away from Cass to give Taylor the victory in November.99 By then, Taylor had been firmly brought to heel by Whig leaders weary of his disastrous letters and political pretentiousness. In September, they forced him to sign yet another Allison letter that even more firmly stated his allegiance to Whig principles.
Whigs tried to use Clay as an example of party unity, but the effect was at best mixed. Much was made of the fact that Clay voted a straight Whig ticket in the Kentucky state elections that August, in which he had even cast a ballot for Crittenden as governor.100 But Clay would not give Taylor his blessing. Instead he privately castigated Taylor and provided correspondents with warnings about why they should not support him.101 In November, he simply did not vote. He was ill, it was reported, and confined to his bed, which evidently was true. It spared him a difficult decision.102
The outcome of the November election “was the triumph of General Taylor, not our principles,” Horace Greeley later observed. “It showed that a majority preferred General Taylor to General Cass for President: that was all.” Clay agreed that the contest was one of men, not ideas, and he greatly lamented its course and its outcome, which was the essential end of the Whig program for which he had labored most of his life. “At once triumphant and undone,” Greeley sighed.103
And as far as Henry Clay knew, it was also the end of him as a public figure. During the summer, Governor William Owsley had offered to appoint him to fill Crittenden’s vacated Senate post, but Clay declined.104 He suspected it to be nothing more than an empty gesture, an attempt to soften the party’s rebuke, only a little less meaningless than placing Fillmore on the ticket. And yet Owsley had said, “A patriot is never discharged but by death,” words that gained a bit more resonance as the weeks wore on: the Free-Soilers met in Buffalo, the major parties put their heads in the sand, and the sections snarled and snapped at each other over the prize of the western territories. Clay gradually became aware of the changing mood of the country, a mood he found increasingly disturbing, even alarming. By the fall, he was restless and worried. The collapse of the Whigs as a coherent engine of change and improvement was disappointing, but the possibility that the Union could shatter was terrifying. A visitor to Lexington that October noted that a great many people expected Clay to be elected to the Senate over the winter. “It is confidently believed he will accept.”105