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FUSION

Henry Clay and the Politics of Union

January 16, 2025

By Luke Nathan Phillips

 

Some time ago, Tyler Syck exhorted Americans in our own time to practice the nonideological pragmatism and haggling of the great Senator Henry Clay, The Man Who Would Not Be President. Syck captures an important whiff of the man and the statesman. But the essay is an incomplete reading of Clay’s person, intellect, and legacy. It sees the Great Compromiser as essentially a nonideological pragmatist, and while this Clay is more charismatic and eloquent, there is nothing that distinguishes him in politics from, say, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, or a certain reading of James Madison.

Syck writes that “Clay’s form of politics, divorced from ideological squabbling and dedicated to the defense of the institutions of republican government, produces stability, prosperity, and gradual innovation. While such thinking can never be all there is to politics, it can never be insignificant.” But there’s the rub: there was quite a bit of ideological squabbling in Clay’s politics, and while just as much of his politics was as stately as Syck depicts, in principles, tactics, temperament, and personality, these two facets of his politics simply cannot be separated in Henry Clay the man and politician.

Clay, like all great Americans and especially all great American politicians, was complex enough that he was claimed by many different schools of thought and ideological groups over the subsequent centuries. Spending two decades working to build a lasting partisan majority, especially in a world where a stable party system was quite new, will do that to you. Some have viewed Clay as the epitomal party-building pragmatist; others, presaging Syck, have seen in Clay a model of bipartisan compromise. In the past decade or so—especially after the revival of interest in Michael Lind’s old work between 2015 and 2019 among the conservatives called the NatCons, the New Right, the Realignment—Clay is claimed largely on the basis of his programs of national development, industrial policy, and protection of infant industries, the famed “American System.” This last reading is one of the first clues to Clay’s ideological backdrop.

The fact of the matter is, there were at least two Henry Clays. First, the young Clay, a firebrand son of thunder who unconstitutionally filled a U.S. Senate seat at the age of 29, who was elected Speaker of the House on his first day as a U.S. Congressman and single-handedly made that office the powerhouse it was to become. Clay, the dazzlingly charming impresario said to have mixed the first mint julip ever mixed in Washington D.C. at the Willard’s Round Robin, the great Madisonian partisan against the last of the Federalists. Clay, that great war hawk who, like another ambitious young nationalist politician in the years leading up to 1898, was probably the single most influential stoker of war fever around town for a wildly Homeric war of conquest. This Clay was less the pragmatic moderate compromiser, more the passionate ideologue.

Then, the middle-aged and old Clay. Over his mature statecraft—the Treaty of Ghent, the Missouri Compromise, his long recovery from the humiliation of the Election of 1824 and his eternal tarring by the ‘Corrupt Bargain’—Clay did change, in style and in substance. His enemy-turned-protégé William Seward would eventually eulogize him: …with a profound conviction of the true exigencies of the country, like Alexander Hamilton, he disciplined himself, and trained a restless nation [as well]… to the rigorous practice of that often humiliating conservatism which its welfare and security… so imperiously demanded.” This Clay remained a devotee of a certain politics, tempered now by his famed pragmatic outlook.

Clay spent his later life disciplining himself, mastering his passions, pushing the country toward a future of such self-improvement and control of the wildness of human nature, the rage within. His best interpreter, Daniel Walker Howe, suggests the Ericksonian reading in “The Political Culture of the American Whigs”, “that leaders may undertake to solve for their society at large the difficulties they encounter in their own lives. Wrestling with a problem on a personal level, the leader finds he must confront it on a social level too… His private struggle to attain self-mastery mirrored a statecraft whose objective was the substitution of compromise and rationality for violence and passion,” that his personal conquest of his own deepest failings transformed his character, his statecraft, and his ideology. Clay’s 1832 campaign against President Jackson, his constructive leadership of the Whig Party, his loyal opposition to the conquest of Mexico, and his last-ditch effort to save the union from the New Mexican consequences of that war in 1850, stand as proof.

How could such a man, who defiantly proclaimed that he would “rather be right than be President” merely be the dignified equivalent of a vulgar Machiavellian, a party-man operator loyal to institutions to the point of banality or gilded cynicism? How could he seriously be simply a half-mechanical, half-smoke-filled-room-surfing Federalist-Ten-style compromise operator like a Mitch McConnell or a Harry Reid?

His epithet, The Great Compromiser, must always be balanced with his myriad other legacies. No less than Hamilton or Roosevelt, Clay was sometimes decades ahead of his time. Style alone does not quite substance make. Now, Lincoln was probably wrong in his eulogy, that Clay “loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country;” but Lincoln’s insight, that Clay had clear political commitments, is more correct than the notion that Clay was a statesman for unconditional compromise alone.

Clay’s deepest political commitment, the highest temporal good for which no sacrifice could be too great, was the union itself. After his death, his sons and grandsons fought in the inferno he’d spent decades delaying. And he did, in fact, have an ideological conception of the union, and would compromise unconditionally for it to hold it together, because only under the conditions of the union could any sort of ideological conception be realized. And this necessarily meant an adaptation and compromise with other ideological conceptions of American destiny. Importantly, though, Clay seems to have spent a long, long time forming his own ideology so as to mix it usefully and harmoniously with the Jacksonian, abolitionist, and slaveocratic sectional components of the union. His central understanding, however, was clear.

The American System was its economic and structural manifestation—the harmony of interests, a mutually reinforcing balance of the industrial and agricultural and commercial and plantation systems into a genuinely integrated national economy far greater than the sum of its parts. The tariffs and subsidies were designed to aid the development of those industries, especially in manufacturing, and though they harmed the large planters of the south, they were always balanced out with other olive branches saving the face and often the interests of those free-trade oligarchs of the older order. Industry, agriculture, shipping, and commerce went harmoniously hand-in-hand. This was a political economy of systems of scale, not centered on Jefferson’s virtuous yeoman freeholders scattered across the Midwest, although again it must be noted that they were integrated into the system as much as any other interest.

And this centrality of national industry and national harmony was itself a further manifestation of the Whig ideal (descended from New England revivalist moralism rather than Federalist semi-aristocratic pretensions) of continuous rational self-improvement, the ethic of self-creation through discipline which has gone down to influence so much American life. At its extremes, it could ascend into utopian perfectionism—the Transcendentalists, for example, were close cousins—but it typically was more of the wholesome Tocquevillian civil-society ethos whose decline in the 21st Century the Putnams and Brookses of our time lament. Whiggery was in effect the ancestor of all the great moral and semi-spiritual movements of the early 20th Century, expressed especially in temperance, abolitionism, universal-education, and women’s rights.

This was not, to be clear, particularly traditionalist; but it was nonetheless a social vision of solidarity, self-control, and communal and individual improvement. And it contrasted starkly with the Jacksonian love of self-expression, natural freedom, egalitarian passion, plebiscitary communal self-governance, and all the other anti-elitist styles which pushed the freeholders westward, democratized American politics, and produced the first great anti-utopian American literature. Clay had a kind of respect for his fellow Americans of that temperament, but shaped the Whig Party in the opposite direction, for he sought to shape the country in the opposite direction too.  Contrary to contemporary criticisms of attempts to propose a Whig program for a Jacksonian electorate, Clay and the Whigs pioneered the development of a practical politics and ideological framework for exactly such a synthesis, a project which would eventually be completed by the Roosevelts in the 20th Century.

The Union Forever; The American System of Economics; Social Progress; Self-Improvement. We could also go into the Monroe Doctrine and gradual abolition by colonization, while we’re at it. These are not a non-ideological approach to American politics, nor a pragmatic compromise ideology alone. They are a distinct program of political development and social order, reflective of a very real collective tendency of the American spirit, which repolarized the American public discourse, organized the party system of the antebellum, shaped the commitments of half the country, provided the pragmatic justification for the Lincoln Administration’s refusal to accept southern secession, formed the basis of the ideological development of the unionist cause into a revolutionary abolitionist cause between 1862 and 1863, and provided the seeds of the program the Republican Congresses of the Civil War and Reconstruction would impose, eventually even overreaching in a decidedly non-compromising way. And of course, this legacy would splinter, its pieces reincorporated into different movements’ politics in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era and beyond.

Henry Clay was not the only one to build this legacy, but for the forty years he strode the national stage, he was its most important icon. Whatever the contemporary relevance, it at the very least proves that there is a possible politics of social solidarity and cohesion, political balance and responsibility, industrial and scientific and moral progress, and genuine patriotism in America.

The real importance of Henry Clay’s pragmatism, which Syck justly celebrates, is that it makes possible the politics of union. The Star of the West didn’t want to destroy anybody, certainly not the southerners and westerners from whose lands he’d emerged, nor the northerners whose politics he’d adopted later in life, even when those same Americans threatened to break the union and secede. He and Andrew Jackson, opposites in so many ways, were the only two American national figures who consistently and unconditionally opposed secession of any section for the entirety of the antebellum; and for all their mutual antipathy, they probably both had to be in power to keep American politics as organized as it was.

For in the politics of union, the irreconcilable, unmixable parties and sections and factions, which exist in opposition to each other, forge their identities by opposition to each other, become more distinctly themselves in opposition to each other, and yet become more functionally like each other in opposition each other. The irreconcilable parts must remain in community together, for they each would die on their own, and they genuinely need each other. But their general habit is to become the worst possible versions of themselves under union, which makes the common life miserable. The fights between slaveowner and abolitionist, easterner and westerner, Whig and Jacksonian—sometimes even literal, physical fights—were among the starkest and most destructive in American history. Opponents fed off each other’s rage.

Toleration, segregation, and compromise is not enough, for they do need each other and must engage routinely. “We are not enemies, but friends; we must not be enemies,” said the man for whom Clay was the beau ideal of a statesman, and this expresses Clay better than he ever expressed himself. His great rival in party-building, Martin Van Buren, always remained his friend. The nemesis of his Speakership, the mercurially enigmatic Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke, proclaimed in 1833 at the height of the nullification crisis that “there is one man and one man only, who can save the union—and that man is Henry Clay.” (This is remarkable, because as James C. Klotter dramatically retells in “Henry Clay: The Man Who Would Be President,” Randolph and Clay had fought a duel seven years before, and slowly reconciled. Randolph spoke these words shortly before his death.)

With goodwill and forbearance, it is possible, even likely, even inevitable, that in their engagement the worst tendencies of each part of the union will be influenced, improved, even redeemed by the best tendencies of the others. At moments of crisis, under the right leadership, the Whigs became somewhat more democratic; the Jacksonians became somewhat more self-and-society-improving. For a time, this politics could be maintained. That was Henry Clay down to the very core, a nationalist and a conservative and a progressive and a unionist all in one.

The tragedy in all this came only when faith in the system died and the politics of union broke down. Division became inevitable. The rot in America was so deep then that revolutionary change imposed upon one half or the other, as Lincoln came to realize, would be the only way to preserve the best of the whole. Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan were the avatars of that reality, and the price of union and freedom was 600,000 dead Americans. Our question today remains as it has always been—shall we live as friends or die as enemies? Clay hoped to demonstrate we could have our own principles and keep the union too. His failure then stalks our present.

 

Luke Nathan Phillips is a tour guide, MC, and writer in the Washington D.C. metro area. He writes on history, political thought, and cultural issues. He served as Publius Fellow for Public Discourse at Braver Angels from 2021 to 2024.

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