Henry Clay

Biography

Henry Clay was born in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1777, the son of a Baptist minister who died when he was four. As a teenager he worked as a clerk at the Virginia High Court of Chancery and became secretary to the judge George Wythe, under whose influence he read law; he was admitted to the bar in 1797 and moved to Lexington, Kentucky. There he built a successful practice, taught at Transylvania University, married Lucretia Hart in 1799, and developed the Ashland plantation, worked by enslaved people.

Clay entered the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1803 and twice served short unexpired terms in the US Senate. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1810, he was chosen Speaker in 1811 and, as a leading war hawk, helped push the country into the War of 1812. He was one of the American negotiators of the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, returned to the speakership, promoted his 'American System' of tariffs, a national bank and internal improvements, and in 1820 led the passage of the Missouri Compromise.

In the 1824 presidential election he finished fourth and then helped John Quincy Adams win in the House; his appointment as Adams's secretary of state led to charges of a 'corrupt bargain'. Elected to the Senate in 1831, he ran against Andrew Jackson as the National Republican candidate in 1832 and lost heavily, helped end the nullification crisis with the Tariff of 1833, and became a founder and leader of the Whig Party. He resigned from the Senate in 1842 and narrowly lost the 1844 presidential election to James K. Polk.

Clay opposed the Mexican-American War, in which his son Henry Jr. was killed. Returning to the Senate in 1849, he proposed the measures that became the Compromise of 1850, easing the sectional crisis over slavery for a time. He died in Washington in June 1852 and was the first person to lie in state in the US Capitol.