Henry Clay

David S. Heidler, Jeanne T. Heidler:  Henry Clay: The Essential American
Henry Clay b. 1777; d. 1852

Henry Clay never became president, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.  The great leader of the Whig party, Clay saw the lesser William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor as Whig candidates in 1840 and 1848.  Harrison defeated an embattled incumbent (Martin Van Buren) during a deep recession and Taylor (after Polk stepped down) defeated Democrat Lewis Cass in large part because Van Buren ran on a free soil platform and siphoned votes away from Cass in New York.  Clay lost to John Quincy Adams in 1824, was crushed by Andrew Jackson in 1832, and got edged by Polk in 1844.

Clay, in a photograph--not many of those yet

I read Clay’s biography for a couple of reasons.  First, Clay was a very interesting individual.  He was probably the most important non-president of the pre-Civil War U.S. except for perhaps Alexander Hamilton.  Part of reading about the presidents is reading about great historical figures—Clay is still great even though he never quite made it all the way to the White House.  Second, Clay was a national figure for a long, long time.  Clay entered the U.S. senate in 1806, during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, and became good friends with Dolly Madison.  He was active in the Senate 44 years later, where he negotiated the Compromise of 1850, which helped (temporarily) avoid a civil war.  So wanted to read Clay just before I got into Lincoln, whose presidency really ended on epoch and began another.

Clay’s life had a real richness to it.  He was involved in many important events in many different decades.  The Heidlers’ book does a great job explaining these events in a very readable fashion.  It’s not the best biography that I’ve read—it can drag at times—but I’m glad that I read it.

Slavery:  This is an issue that whizzed right by Henry Clay.  He owned slaves, but was schooled in the era of Jefferson and Monroe—people who owned slaves but recognized that slavery was a regrettable and flawed institution.  The later part of his career he saw dominated by Southern fire-eaters, who actually came to defend the peculiar institution as a positive good.   

A Great Lawyer:  I’m a lawyer.  I find it inspiring that so many of our presidents were also lawyers, and really great ones at that.  Buchannan and Van Buren were both popular, jocular men who excelled in the courtrooms of New York and Pennsylvania.  As was Lincoln in Illinois.  Clay was also an excellent lawyer—hell, he successfully represented Aaron Burr in his state criminal trial in Kentucky (after which Clay had to go back to the Senate, and deal with the issue again).  But Clay was also a tremendously hard-working corporate lawyer.  He represented a number of railroads in property disputes with farmers and banks (including Henry Biddle’s Bank of the United States) against debtors.  None of this was popular work—he was representing corporate interests against regular people—but it was complex and detail oriented, and it paid the bills.  This is an inspiring fact about Mr. Clay.

The American System:  We today take it for granted that the federal government will support roads, bridges, harbors, and other infrastructure improvements.  But in Clay’s day, this was a controversial issue.  But Clay stood his ground boldly and fought for this program because he thought it would tie the nation together and improve the lives of millions of Americans.  This was a continuation of the great work done by Alexander Hamilton.  What makes me scratch my head is that so many people opposed this, especially people who stood to gain so much from this program.  (I wish we could get people to support a massive infrastructure improvement program today.  But what can you do.)

Personal Tragedy:  As with many of the men in this series, Clay had a number of personal tragedies befall him.  He lost sons and daughters to illness and one to the Mexican-American War, and as a result he and his wife ended up raising various grand children (he’s similar to Q in this regard).  And his long battle with TB at the end of his life was a long and rather unpleasant way to go.  Life was even more fragile then than it is today.

James K. Polk

Robert W. Merry:  A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent
James K. Polk:  11th President (1845-1849); b. 1795; d. 1849

Polk is a first-rate president (I'll not attempt to hide my very high opinion of the man) and Merry’s account of his life is engaging and compelling. Merry doesn’t hide his opinion either.  He thinks that Polk's president was almost a complete success.  Polk set out a number of goals at the outset of his presidency—completion of the annexation of Texas, favorable resolution of the Oregon border dispute, acquisition of California and New Mexico, reduction of tariffs, and the creation of an independent treasury system.  He accomplished all of these goals and left the office as a complete success.

Polk:  Gave us "from sea to shining sea."

I really like Polk, and I have since learning about him in grade school.  I think it’s awesome that he turned the United States into a continental power.  We take it for granted that this was going to happen, but it didn’t have to.  There is a ton of empty space between the Mississippi River and California / Oregon.  And given transportation and communications in the 1840s, it was just as likely (perhaps more likely) that an independent English-speaking nation would arise on the West Coast.

A Sudden Star:  Polk is the first U.S. President to suddenly rise to national prominence by becoming the president, and then achieving national success (this isn't Truman territory, but imagine if Clinton had entered office and rammed through his ambitious agenda).  Let’s not overstate things.  Polk had legitimate success as a Jacksonian congressman from Tennessee.  And he had a very quick rise once elected, become whip and Speaker of the House at a very young age.  But then he went back to Tennessee and served rather unsuccessfully as a one-term governor (he lost his re-election bid in 1841).  For most folks this would have represented an ending, but in the party-driven politics of the 1830s and 40s, Polk was able to win the ticket in 1844 as a result of fractures in the Democratic Party.  But unlike a lot of other compromise candidates (I’m looking at you Franklin Pierce), Polk’s presidency was a wild success.

Workaholic:  Each president brings a different temperament and working style to the office--and it doesn't seem that one was is right.  But Polk appears to have killed himself being president.  And I mean this in a literal sense—his death a few weeks after leaving office is I think rightly seen as partially caused by exhaustion.  When Polk set his goals he worked, and worked, and worked to pass legislation, establish diplomatic protocol, and plan a war.   And he constantly worried about all of it.  His effort appears to have paid off.  The sweat he put into each of his project appears to have greased the skids at the capital, in diplomatic circles, and to a lesser extent in Texas.  

(It’s a damn shame that his Secretary of State didn’t adopt the same can-do attitude in 1860.)

I think in large part because of this, Polk’s presidency seems very modern.  He had clearly defined policy goals.  He made major decisions based on his best judgment.  He refused to be bullied by Congress, and he enlisted others to help bend Congress to his will.  He was strongly partisan and believed in his party, but his opinions were his own.  Polk was also a rather colorless historic personality—nothing like Jackson or even Van Buren—which sounds like so many modern politicians.

Impotence:  It’s interesting that three of our early presidents—Washington, Jackson, and Polk—all appear to have been unable to father a child.  These are also three of the presidents who had truly emotional attachments to their country.  I don’t want to practice pop-psychology, but here’s my pop-psychology:  one could say that they were making up for something by putting their fatherly energy elsewhere.  

Vegas; LA; San Francisco; Grand Canyon; Seattle and Portland--Thanks Polk

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up:  Polk’s presidency is filled with truly dramatic and exciting moments.  The most colorful of these is Polk authorizing former Mexican president Santa Anna to re-enter the country so that he could negotiate an armistice--he of course took up arms against the U.S. after he passed through American lines.  We also have a friendly senator failing to notice the time and letting a Senate session expire before a vote could have been had on a treaty that would likely have ended the war much earlier--but he spoke to long, the Senate went into recess, and the war continued.  And the characters in the war itself, including John Freemont who would bungle so much in the Civil War, Winfred Scott, and host of others, make this one of the more interesting conflicts in U.S. history.  Isn’t this why we become interested in history:  For the moments when one decision changes so much?