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Chapter 1

The Great Triumvirate

Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun

Three statesmen dominated American politics for the first half of the nineteenth century, and no book on influential leaders of Congress would be complete without including a chapter on the trio. Known collectively as the “Great Triumvirate,” Henry Clay of Kentucky, nicknamed “Prince Hal,” Daniel Webster of Massachusetts “Black Dan,” and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, “Cast-Iron Man,” served in both houses of Congress, as well as in the position of secretary of state, the premier post in the executive cabinet. Each man harbored ambitions to become president of the United States, and yet each fell short. Despite their failure to ascend into the top position, however, these three men could properly be called, in the words of one historian, “heirs of the founders.”¹

Henry Clay

The eldest of the three, Henry Clay, was born in Virginia on April 12, 1777, less than a year after the Second Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain. He became emblematic of the restless American who abandons the eastern states to try his luck on the frontier. After studying law under the legendary William & Mary professor George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and mentor to Thomas Jefferson, Clay headed west to make his way in Kentucky, which had recently joined the Union. He married into a wealthy Kentucky family, ensuring that he would possess the financial means to make his way in politics, which was not a lucrative field. Clay and his wife, Lucretia, eventually produced eleven children, seven of whom predeceased him.²

He tried his hand at practicing law, and he excelled in his field, but he preferred politics to a legal career. In 1803, Clay was appointed to the state legislature to represent Fayette County. As a member of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, he fought to gerrymander the commonwealth’s districts to ensure Jefferson’s reelection as president in 1804. He also voiced support for “internal improvements,” government-financed construction of roads, bridges, and canals that were vital to the burgeoning population of a nation undergoing rapid growth and change. It was to be his lifelong passion, for Clay recognized that the nation could prosper only if it possessed the infrastructure necessary to support its people.³

Even at this early stage in his political career, Clay’s rare, exceptional qualities were apparent. He was a supremely gifted public speaker with an agile mind and a keen sense of legislative maneuvering. He seemed to recognize a problem, and possible solutions, quicker than other elected officials did. Everyone who encountered him, friend and foe alike, recognized a young man of superior intellect and ability.

The legislature rewarded Clay by selecting him to serve in a vacant U.S. Senate seat. His appointment was all the more remarkable because he had not reached the constitutionally mandated age of thirty when he was appointed. No matter. He served for slightly more than two months, until the term expired, despite the problem of his age.⁴

Although his first term in high office was uneventful, Clay nonetheless became nationally famous in those early days. He carried his fame home to Kentucky after his Senate term expired. Practicing law again, he agreed to represent former Vice President Aaron Burr in a case that soon became a cause célèbre. Burr was suspected of engaging in treason for entering into a murky conspiracy to separate western lands of the United States from the government in Washington, DC. Clay believed that Burr was the victim of overzealous Federalist prosecutors. Because the Federalists opposed the Democratic-Republicans, Burr’s prosecution clearly was a political vendetta, or so the defense argued. Clay’s representation paid off handsomely for Burr; a grand jury refused to indict the man for treason. Clay later regretted his support for Burr after President Jefferson pushed for a new prosecution of his former vice president.⁵

He would occasionally return to his law practice over a lengthy public career, but Clay reserved his passion for politics. Shortly after he returned from his first stint in the U.S. Senate, he reentered the state legislature. Before long, he was elected Speaker, an extraordinary feat for one so young.⁶

Although he would later become associated with strong national policies, during these years Henry Clay echoed Jefferson’s disdain for a robust national government or an activist foreign policy. The Democratic-Republicans distrusted centralized authority, and they especially resented interference from Great Britain. To their disgust, the Old Empire, engaged in a war with Napoleon Bonaparte’s France, contended that any country daring to trade with France was aiding the enemy. Because the United States attempted to trade with all European powers, even belligerents, English naval vessels sometimes stopped American ships and removed sailors they deemed to be British deserters. In some cases, the offenders were guilty, but on numerous occasions, the alleged transgressors were American citizens forcibly conscripted into the British Navy.

President Jefferson was rightfully incensed at his ancient enemy’s outrageous behavior, but he had few options to forestall such activities. The United States was a fledgling nation with a weak army and an almost nonexistent navy. Retaliation through force was hardly an option. Unfortunately, Jefferson was a victim of his own policies. As part of his commitment to an agrarian lifestyle and a weak central government, he had allowed U.S. armed forces to atrophy during his watch. Now, with his tenure in office nearing an end, he was forced to suffer all manner of indignities. Even after the British fired on an American ship, the USS Chesapeake, in the summer of 1807, arousing intense war fever among the populace, Jefferson knew that he could not risk war. The nation was ill-prepared. Instead, he sponsored legislation to cut off trade with Great Britain and France. By promoting the Embargo Act of 1807, the president was gambling on the possibility that the loss of American exports would hurt the belligerents and force them to cease and desist from harassing American ships on the high seas.⁷

Seeking to support his president’s new policy, Henry Clay introduced a measure to require Kentucky legislators to wear homespun cloth as opposed to clothing imported from Great Britain. Most members of Congress supported the gesture, but not everyone. During the debate over the resolution, Clay and another member, Humphrey Marshall, faced off against each other. After trading insults, the two men engaged in a duel, still an occasional practice at the time. Slightly injured, the men lived to tell the tale.⁸

Clay reentered the U.S. Senate in 1810 after the state legislature selected him to fulfill the remaining fourteen months of Buckner Thruston’s term when the senator resigned to become a federal judge. The United States remained at odds with Great Britain, and Clay echoed the anti-British rhetoric of the era. The Embargo Act had proved to be disastrous for the American economy, and it had not deterred the British from harassing American ships. Clay became one of the loudest voices calling for aggressive measures against Great Britain. It was one of several issues that he took up during his short stint. Determined to echo his constituents’ views, the senator also spoke against rechartering the First Bank of the United States, and called for the annexation of West Florida.⁹

Clay might have won a seat in the Senate in his own right, but he opted to stand for a position in the U.S. House of Representatives instead. He held the distinction of being the only congressman in American history to be elected Speaker of the House on his very first day in the chamber. He was thirty-four years old. Once again demonstrating his masterful understanding of the legislative process, Clay greatly expanded the power of the Speaker. He appointed allies to important committees, and he adroitly maneuvered bills to favorable committees. He also engaged in floor debates, a practice his predecessors refrained from following. Although occasionally denounced as “haughty and imperious,” Clay strove to allow all members an opportunity to participate in debate, and most representatives found him to be evenhanded and fair. He knew that his political opponents would condemn his activism, but Clay shrugged off criticism. He eventually served as Speaker multiple times, serving longer than any other Speaker except Sam Rayburn.¹⁰

Clay entered the House as a “war hawk,” one of the new breed of congressional members who pushed for war against England. He led the effort to arm the nation, going so far as to spring from the Speaker’s chair to address the House on one occasion. Using his superior rhetorical skills to full advantage, Clay stood before his colleagues and railed against the British. In his estimation, “we are called upon to submit to debasement, dishonor, and disgrace—to bow the neck to royal insolence.” The continued impressment of American citizens, the refusal to vacate lands ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Paris, and the British disruption of American commerce were more than the Speaker could bear.¹¹

President James Madison had asked the House to provide for 10,000 troops, but Clay thought the number was far too low. Owing in no small measure to Clay’s power, influence, and eloquence, the House agreed to the Senate version of a bill to equip 25,000 men. Congress eventually approved a measure to raise 100,000 militiamen for a 6-month period. The war hawks forced the war on an initially reluctant president, although Madison subsequently understood the virtues of confronting the British in battle.¹²

Speaker Clay frequently met with James Monroe, Madison’s secretary of state, to plot strategy. The two men agreed that a new embargo should precede military action, although Monroe opted for a sixty-day embargo instead of Clay’s preference for thirty days. Led by John Randolph of Virginia, traditional Democratic-Republicans objected to Clay’s support for a war. Randolph and his brethren feared that an armed conflict would lead to disaster. Aside from the nation’s lack of resources and war-making capability, military expeditions inevitably strengthened a centralized government. The central tenet of the Democratic-Republican ideology was that government power was to be usually resisted and always distrusted, for all governments, no matter how well-crafted or administered, were inherently oppressive and therefore dangerous to the liberties of the people. Henry Clay’s decision to push for war demonstrated that he had outgrown—or betrayed, in Randolph’s view—his party.¹³

President Madison acquiesced to the embargo in April 1812. Two months later, he asked Congress for a declaration of war. In politics and war, one must be careful what he asks for; he might get it. The hawks believed that the war would end swiftly with an American victory that might allow the United States to annex parts of Canada, which existed under British control. Early in the war, however, American forays into Canada ended in defeat, raising the possibility that the country might lose the war and, instead of gaining new lands, forfeit some of its own territory. In 1814, the British even invaded Washington, DC, and burned important government buildings, including the executive mansion.¹⁴

Having tied his fortunes to the war, Clay’s public reputation and political power rose and fell in tandem with news reports on the success or failure of the conflict. At the outset, when America’s military expeditions failed to achieve the desired results, Clay and the war hawks were denounced as foolhardy and wicked men whose zeal for blood and glory was exceeded only by their folly. Their reputations suffered mightily throughout 1812 and 1813.

This is not to say that Clay’s prominence as a public figure sagged as his reputation suffered. President Madison dispatched a five-member commission—composed of Clay, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, Senator James Bayard of Delaware, Ambassador Jonathan Russell, and Ambassador John Quincy Adams—to Europe to negotiate with England on terms for ending the war. Although his foreign policy experience was limited, Clay was included because he was a well-known war hawk, and any treaty he negotiated would gain legitimacy among the pro-war faction in Congress. Initially reluctant to leave the House, Clay finally agreed to participate. He resigned his seat in Congress and set out for Europe early in 1814. The English were in no hurry to deal with their American cousins; thus, the back-and-forth negotiations, or lack thereof, among the peace commissioners consumed the better part of a year. Frustrated with the slow pace—not to mention the constant bickering with Adams—Clay gained an appreciation of the possibilities, and limitations, of diplomacy.¹⁵

When the negotiators got down to brass tacks late in the year, they came to the same terms that existed before hostilities erupted. Each side agreed to return to the status quo ante bellum. No one lost or gained territory, and yet the British steadfastly refused to stand down from impressing American citizens on the high seas. As a practical matter, however, the war with Napoleon’s France had ended; the British were far less inclined to stop American vessels on the chance that they were aiding and abetting the French war effort. The Treaty of Ghent, signed by the belligerents on Christmas Eve 1814, was not a calamity, but neither did anyone view it as an unassailable triumph.¹⁶

Clay returned home fully prepared to face constituents angry that so much blood and money had been spent to return to the original position. To his surprise, however, he enjoyed a more favorable reception than he had anticipated. The United States had been bloodied by the war, but, nonetheless, it had gone toe-to-toe with one of the mightiest powers on earth. The United States had not been conquered. To cap off the conflict, Andrew Jackson had led a ragtag group of soldiers in a surprise victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815. The peace treaty had already been signed, but the slow pace of communications ensured that no one knew about it at the time. With Jackson’s lopsided victory, Americans emerged from the dark days of the war feeling more optimistic than they had in years. In addition to Jackson, who earned a reputation that would sweep him into the presidency in 1829, President Madison and former congressman Clay became popular figures again.¹⁷

In his absence, Clay had won another term in the House of Representatives. He stepped into the position intent on retaining his firm hand on the legislative agenda. He also established new standing committees. Now more than ever, these committees would debate and pass legislation as House procedures became institutionalized. Clay exercised the prerogative of appointing committee chairmen and assuring that bills he desired to see enacted were afforded the proper treatment.¹⁸

The Henry Clay of 1815 was a different man than the one who had embarked on a legislative career before the war. No longer could he subscribe to the cramped view of government he had entertained when he slavishly followed the Jeffersonian party line. Now Clay was a new fellow, reborn as a nationalist who appreciated the role of government in securing the blessings of liberty for the citizenry, to say nothing of posterity. Under his watch, the House considered features of his American system, a series of roads, bridges, and canals. He also championed the creation of a national bank as well as the establishment of a permanent standing army.

This new man would go on to an illustrious career lasting into the 1850s. His name would become synonymous with “compromise” in an era when the term did not hold negative connotations akin to surrendering one’s principles. One early test of his ability to forge common ground among opponents holding disparate views arose regarding the issue of slavery in newly admitted states.¹⁹

Slavery had been a contentious issue lurking in the shadows of the American republic since before the Founders declared independence from Great Britain in 1776. In Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the delegates to the Second Continental Congress skirted over the issue by referring to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without referencing property rights—which southerners took to include chattel slavery. If the document asserted that “all men are created equal,” slaveholders argued that slaves were not men, and therefore no contradiction existed in continuing the peculiar institution in the southern half of the Union.²⁰

In the Constitution, the Founders could not ignore the issue because slaves composed approximately 18 percent of the population, with the majority congregated south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Ignoring the horrible irony, southerners lobbied to count their slaves as persons so that the South could maximize its representation in the House of Representatives, which was based on population, and thereby ensure that slaves were treated as less than human. Outraged northerners objected. They settled on an uneasy compromise: bondsmen were deemed to be 60 percent less productive than free white laborers; therefore, they would be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and taxation in the Constitution. It was a devil’s bargain, in the language of a later age, but it preserved the peace long enough to see the nation through a gestation stage of half a century.²¹

Now the Founders had passed from the scene and the slavery issue had reemerged with a vengeance. Henry Clay was in the thick of it. Late in 1818, he had submitted a petition forwarded from settlers in the Missouri Territory seeking statehood. St. Louis was a growing city, and the territory was an obvious candidate for admission into the Union. The difficulty was that the citizenry sought to become a slave state, which would upset the rough balance between so-called free states and slave states. The free state population of 5.152 million already exceeded the slave state population of 4.485 million, but the Constitution’s three-fifth’s clause granted the South seventy-six House seats, as opposed to the fifty-nine seats that it would hold if only the free population was counted. Everyone wondered what would become of the status quo if Missouri favored the South. As part of the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Missouri was an important test case to determine whether, and under what conditions, new states would be admitted into the Union.²²

Congress began debating the Missouri question in February 1819. Clay recognized a golden opportunity to appease a majority of legislators when Maine, which then existed as the northern district of Massachusetts, petitioned for admission as a free state. Lacking the votes to push through a compromise in the House, Clay allowed the Senate to take the lead in offering a measure to establish a demarcation line of 36º 30′. States above the line outlawed slavery, and those below the line allowed the institution to survive.

The House rejected the Senate compromise, but Clay was not ready to admit defeat. He appointed a committee of House conciliators to sit down with senators and hammer out a suitable solution. On March 2, 1820, the group reported out three separate bills. One bill admitted Maine as a free state, a second allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, and a third established the 36º 30′ line.²³

One congressman facing the end of his term, James Tallmadge Jr. of New York, offered an amendment to the statehood bill proposing that “the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been fully convicted; and that all children born within the said State, after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years.” The measure risked alienating the South, and Clay, himself a slaveholder, understood the stakes. Although he was sympathetic to opponents of slavery, Clay was anxious to find a solution that did not threaten to dissolve the Union.²⁴

Accordingly, he maneuvered to strike out Tallmadge’s amendment before sending the measure to the Senate for a vote. When Congressman Randolph of Virginia moved to reconsider the bill, Clay ruled him out of order until the rest of that day’s business had been concluded. Afterward, Clay had the bill, sans Tallmadge’s amendment, moved over to the Senate. Later that day, Randolph moved again for reconsideration. This time, Clay ruled him out of order because the bill was already being debated in the Senate. The trick was widely regarded as a smooth, albeit slightly shady, means of getting what Clay wanted by hook or by crook.²⁵

The Missouri Compromise, as it came to be called, revealed Henry Clay as a master legislator. One prominent historian commented that “Clay entered the Missouri crisis a clever if conventional border state politician. He came out of it a statesman.” From that point on, his reputation was assured. Whatever else happened in his career, Henry Clay would forever after be known as the “Great Pacificator.”²⁶

He briefly retired from the House after his triumph, but won reelection in 1822. The next year, he entertained the possibility of running for president. The incumbent, James Monroe, was approaching the end of his second term. Although the Constitution did not provide for presidential term limits, every chief executive since George Washington had voluntarily retired at the end of his second term, assuming the electors had not involuntarily retired them earlier, as in the case of John Adams. Now an acknowledged statesman and master of the House, Clay was an obvious choice for president. His likely competitors included three men serving in Monroe’s cabinet: Treasury Secretary William Crawford, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun.

What no one fully appreciated was the appeal of a new kind of candidate, a frontiersman and hero of the Battle of New Orleans, General Andrew Jackson. Rough-hewn, uneducated, and unrefined, Jackson personified the populist, self-made man that would become irresistible in American politics. When he appeared on the political scene after the Tennessee legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate, he made a virtue of his vices. In earlier times, a man as rough and inexperienced in the ways of polite society and conventional politics would have been placed at a severe disadvantage in the race for elective office. In the case of General Jackson, it was exactly those qualities that appealed to the voters.

After Crawford suffered a stroke and Calhoun withdrew, the dynamics of the race changed. Despite his poor health, Crawford remained in the contest, as did Clay and Adams. Jackson unexpectedly emerged as a formidable candidate. Crawford and Jackson argued for stronger state governments while Clay and Adams sought a more powerful national government.

Clay was optimistic about his chances to win the election. He had deduced that in a field of multiple candidates, no one man could capture a majority of the electoral votes, as required by the Constitution. In such a situation, the election would be shifted into the House of Representatives, with the top three vote-getters pitted against each other in a runoff. Because he remained in office as House Speaker, Clay had good reason to believe that he could call in favors to ensure his election as president. His only problem was that he must capture enough electoral votes to ensure that he would be among the top three candidates advancing to the runoff.

In what could only be interpreted as a humiliating repudiation by voters, Clay fell short. He was mortified to learn that he had placed fourth in the field, denying him a place on the final ballot. Always a man to face political reality, Clay reluctantly accepted his loss, and immediately plotted a path forward. John Quincy Adams entered into talks with Clay, presumably to entice the Kentucky congressman to lend his support.

Although the two men often had been at odds with each other, they agreed to join forces. Clay threw his support to Adams in the House, and his candidate captured the prize. Afterward, Adams offered Clay a position as secretary of state. The latter knew that accepting the offer would lead to charges of an improper quid pro quo agreement, but Clay wished to move up in the political hierarchy. At the time, the secretary of state position was viewed as a stepping stone to the presidency, and Henry Clay desperately wanted to be president. He accepted the offer. As he had suspected, howls of protest erupted. Critics charged that a corrupt bargain had led to Adams’s victory and Clay’s new position within the administration. No one was more outraged than Andrew Jackson, who believed, with some justification, that he had been robbed of his rightful place in the executive mansion. Jackson and Clay would become bitter rivals for the remainder of their professional lives.²⁷

Clay remained as secretary of state for the entirety of the Adams administration. He believed in the protective tariff to allow American manufacturers to compete effectively with European suppliers, a view supported by numerous public men of the day. What set Clay apart was his support for independence movements in Latin America and his willingness to negotiate commercial treaties there. He had supported improved relations with Great Britain and France, but his efforts to come to terms on a stable U.S. border with Canada were rebuffed. Clay was not a failure as secretary of state, but he realized that the work was not to his liking, and his talents were perhaps best used elsewhere.²⁸

As Adams’s presidency progressed, the bitterly resentful Jacksonians bided their time, carefully building up grassroots support for the general to challenge the incumbent in the 1828 election, and thereby avenge the earlier loss. The first party system was breaking down, with Jackson’s supporters identifying themselves as “Democrats” to stress their devotion to the people, while Adams’s followers were called National Republicans, as opposed to the Democratic-Republicans of Jefferson’s day.

The 1828 campaign was notoriously nasty, with each side hurling all manner of invective in speech and print. The typical charge lodged against Jackson was that he was a demagogue who would seize power, if elected, and wreck the constitutional republic. In some quarters, Adams’s men intimated that Jackson’s wife, Rachel, was guilty of bigamy because she had married the general before a divorce from her first husband was final. Rachel’s sudden death of a heart attack a little more than a month after the election devastated Jackson, and he never forgave his political enemies, including Henry Clay, for what he believed was their role in triggering her death. Clay had not been directly involved in the campaign to smear Rachel Jackson, but he had acquiesced as the innuendo circulated.

Andrew Jackson won a decisive victory in 1828, sweeping President Adams and his secretary of state out of office. Fearing the frontiersman’s uncouth ways and his populist appeal, Clay was dismayed to see Jackson victorious. He believed that the old general was unqualified and represented a clear danger to the republic. Without high office to support his opposition, however, Clay had no choice. He returned to private life, breeding horses at his estate, Ashland, near Lexington, Kentucky.²⁹

Within a few years, however, he reentered political life. In 1831, the state legislature returned Clay to the U.S. Senate after an absence of more than two decades. He would serve from 1831 until 1842, and then again from 1849 until 1852. During his term in the 1830s, he vehemently opposed Jackson’s policies, which he believed to be ruinous, especially when the president sought to dismantle Clay’s American system.³⁰

Their confrontation came to a head regarding the renewal of the charter for the Second Bank of the United States. The bank was supposed to be rechartered in 1836, but Nicholas Biddle, the bank’s president, pushed for an early renewal with the expectation that Jackson’s concerns for reelection would temper his well-known antipathy toward the bank. Congress passed a bill to renew the charter, and the president vetoed it. In his veto message, Jackson explained that he had acted “to make it compatible with justice, with sound policy, or with the Constitution of our country.” He ordered his treasury secretary, William J. Duane, to remove federal funds from the national bank and send them to Jackson’s pet banks. When Duane refused, the president pressured him to resign. Duane’s successor, Roger B. Taney, was far more compliant.

Clay and his allies were furious. “We are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending toward a total change of the pure republican character of the government, and to the concentration of power in the hand of one man,” Clay said as he introduced a resolution in the Senate to censure Jackson. “The powers of Congress are paralyzed, except when exerted in conformity with his will, by frequent and extraordinary exercise of the executive veto, not anticipated by the founders of our Constitution, and not practiced by any of the predecessors of the present chief magistrate.” The Senate complied with Clay’s request, passing the censure, which amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. In 1837, the Democrats gained control of the chamber and expunged the record. For all practical purposes, the censure had no effect, but Jackson later mused that as he retired from the presidency, his only major regret was in not shooting Henry Clay or hanging John C. Calhoun.³¹

Jackson was sixty-five years old in 1832, and his health was declining. Many observers believed he would not seek a second term. With John Quincy Adams’s defeat in the 1828 election, Henry Clay had become the National Republicans’ leading figure. He looked to the 1832 election as yet another opportunity to ascend into the presidency. If he could succeed Jackson, perhaps he could undo some of Old Hickory’s more damaging policies.

Jackson surprised the field of potential candidates when he announced that he would seek a second term. The 1828 election had involved a splintering of the remnants of Jefferson’s old Democratic-Republicans. Four years later, the dissolution was complete, and new factions emerged. Jackson’s Democrats, formerly a loose association of pro-Jackson men, now formed into a recognizable political party favoring Jackson’s policies: opposition to the national bank, forcible removal of Native Americans from land in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, and opposition to proposals nullifying national laws.

Jackson’s opponents were disorganized. The Anti-Masonic Party, created to fight the spread of Freemasons, nominated a former attorney general, William Wirt, for president. The so-called Independent Party (the Nullifiers) nominated Virginia Governor John Floyd. Clay captured the National Republican nomination, but he worried that the presence of so many parties and candidates would allow Jackson to win a second term. He was right to be worried. When the votes were tallied, Jackson won 286 electoral votes, carrying 26 states, while Clay earned 49 electoral votes and carried 6 states. Wirt carried Vermont (7 electoral votes) and Floyd carried South Carolina (11 electoral votes).³²

He had known disappointment in the presidential arena, but this loss was especially poignant because he tasted defeat at the hands of a bitter foe. Still smarting from the election, Clay settled back into his Senate career. He immediately faced a long-festering nullification crisis.

When Congress enacted the Tariff of 1828, southerners were upset because the measure appeared to protect northern factories at the expense of southern agricultural exports. Denouncing the “tariff of abominations,” southerners claimed the right to nullify national tariff laws and refused to enforce them. If the administration enforced the laws, southerners reserved the right to secede from the Union. Another tariff, enacted in 1832, only added to southerners’ anger. Although President Jackson was born and reared in the South and purported to be a champion of state rights, he would not acknowledge the right of a state or any of its citizens to nullify a law or secede from the Union. He promised to send troops into the South to enforce the law, if necessary. He would hang traitors, he said.

Henry Clay favored high tariffs and he recoiled from any talk of nullification or secession, but he feared that Jackson’s bellicose rhetoric only worsened the rift between North and South. Reaching out to John C. Calhoun, a South Carolinian who had started his career as a nationalist but appeared to be moving into the state rights camp, Clay again relied on his penchant for compromise to broker a deal. It appeared to be an unbridgeable chasm. For Clay to step away from a protective tariff after he had spent so much of his political career talking up the need to protect American manufacturing was almost unthinkable. Even more unimaginable was the notion that Calhoun, a stern man of principle, unyielding where the interests of the South were concerned, would agree to a compromise. Yet, something had to be done to cut the Gordian knot.³³

The Compromise of 1833, coupled with the Force Bill allowing the president to enforce tariff collection, eased the crisis. Although the compromise tariff was similar to the tariff of 1832, it provided that all tariff rates above 20 percent would be reduced by a tenth every two years, with the final reductions amounting to 20 percent—the original rate—in 1842. The measure pleased everyone, and no one, as compromise measures often do. Southerners could claim that they successfully reduced tariff rates, albeit gradually, and northerners could brag that they refused to kowtow to southerners’ insistence on immediate tariff relief, and they were not intimidated by talk of nullification or secession.³⁴

Despite his preference for compromise on large questions that might wreck the Union, Clay remained as fiercely partisan as ever. During an anti-Jackson speech in 1834, he likened his opposition to Jackson’s monarchical tendencies to the Whigs, a British political party famous for its criticism of monarchy. With the National Republicans essentially obsolete, Clay’s supporters gravitated to the notion of a Whig Party, and so they brought it to life.³⁵

During these years, Clay contemplated retirement from elective office. He was almost sixty—a greatly advanced age at a time when life expectancy hovered around the late thirties or early forties—and he had suffered a series of personal misfortunes, including the death of his daughter, Anna. In fact, Clay was so despondent that he chose not to run for the presidency in 1836. Because Jackson was retiring and his hand-picked successor, Vice President Martin Van Buren, was hardly a formidable opponent, Clay might have eked out a victory in 1836, but he could not bring himself to enter the race.³⁶

In his absence, the Whigs failed to unite behind a single presidential candidate. General William Henry Harrison ran in all free states except Massachusetts, as well as in the slave states of Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. Henry Lawson White, formerly a Jackson man, now realigned with Clay and the Whigs, ran for president in the remaining slave states, except for South Carolina. Senator Daniel Webster ran in Massachusetts, and North Carolina Senator Willie P. Mangum ran in South Carolina. With the wide array of Whigs splitting the party, Van Buren narrowly won the presidency.³⁷

It would have been a good time to retire, but the Panic of 1837, a major recession that weakened Van Buren and the Democrats, convinced Clay that he should stay in Congress and ponder the future of the Whig Party a while longer. He sensed that he might have one more opportunity to grab the brass ring in the 1840 election. When party members suggested that the Whigs schedule a national convention, Clay agreed.

He knew that the nomination would not be his for the asking despite his eminence. Daniel Webster, another grand old man from the same era as Clay, initially appeared to be his strongest rival. Yet, he and Webster had been around so long that both men had collected numerous political enemies. It simply was not possible to lead a public life for decades and escape the growing animosity among the petty and the jealous. Antislavery men did not trust Clay; he was a slave owner and, in their view, too quick to compromise on matters of principle. Webster had the opposite problem. He was a darling of the New England Whigs, but men farther south feared that he was too beholden to abolitionists to be trusted in high office. William Henry Harrison, a military hero whose political views were not well known, maneuvered to grab the Whig nomination, denying Clay and Webster what each man believed to be his right.

In the fall election, Harrison defeated Van Buren—infantilized in a popular campaign song as “little Van . . . a used up man”—to become the first Whig president. Ceding leadership of the Whigs to a Johnny-come-lately was not easy for Clay. He was convinced that he could perform as president far better than Harrison, and Harrison knew of Clay’s opinion. Clay might have returned to the executive branch as secretary of state in the new administration—the president-elect had offered him any cabinet post he desired—but he would have none of it. He could not bring himself to serve a man he believed to be his inferior in every way. Instead, the post went to Daniel Webster.³⁸

Even if he did not occupy a formal position in the Harrison regime, Clay, from his perch as a U.S. senator, expected the new president to resurrect the essential features of the American system following the neglect of the Jackson and Van Buren presidencies. He advised the new president to call a special session of Congress to entertain bills reinstating the national bank as well as Clay’s proposals for new infrastructure construction. Without regard for protocol, Clay drafted a proclamation for Harrison’s signature. Mindful that his critics believed him to be Clay’s puppet, Harrison bristled at the barrage of suggestions, writing his would-be confidant that “you are too impetuous. Much as I would rely on your judgment, there are others whom I must consult and in many cases to determine adversely to your suggestions.” On another occasion, an exasperated Harrison remarked, “Mr. Clay, you forget that I am President.”³⁹

Clay claimed to be “mortified” at Harrison’s rebuke. The president’s resistance left him fuming, unsure of how he could direct the Whigs from the sidelines. The men eventually reached an uneasy accommodation, but it was short-lived. The sixty-eight-year-old Harrison died suddenly after only a month in office. In his place stood John Tyler, the first vice president to ascend into office upon the death of his predecessor.⁴⁰

The new president was determined to step out of Harrison’s shadow and demonstrate his independence. If Clay had experienced troubles with Harrison, Tyler was even worse. Initially, though, the relationship between the two men appeared promising. Harrison had called the special session of Congress that Clay had requested. With Harrison dead, the session continued. President Tyler signed a measure repealing Van Buren’s Independent Treasury Act, which had allowed the government to conduct financial transactions through the U.S. Treasury and sub-treasuries in the absence of a national banking and financial systems. Clay had urged the repeal as the first step in rechartering a national bank. Congress passed a bill creating the new bank, as Clay recommended, but Tyler vetoed the measure, arguing that the bank was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court had held that the bank was constitutional, and the original institution had existed for four decades. No matter; Tyler was a strict constructionist, and apparently something of a contrarian. Tyler vetoed a compromise measure as well.⁴¹

Clay was upset at what he believed to be the new president’s impetuosity. Consequently, Tyler and Clay became locked in a battle for leadership of the Whigs. Despite their standoff, Congress and the president managed to enact part of the Whig agenda. They passed the Preemption Act of 1841, which allowed settlers derisively known as “squatters” on government-owned lands the right to purchase 160-acre homesteads at a minimum price without going through an auction. Tyler also signed a bill that allowed for bankruptcy protection for individuals, a relief measure aimed to alleviate suffering brought on by the Panic of 1837.

Tyler’s resistance to the Whigs’s efforts to increase the protective tariff further exacerbated his rift with Henry Clay. After the president vetoed several bills to raise the tariff, he signed a measure to retain the lower level. He also pocket-vetoed a measure to continue a distribution program whereby states received revenue from land sales from which they could fund infrastructure projects and make other investments. It was clear that John Tyler, elected on a Whig platform, did not share the Whig ideology.⁴²

Disgusted with the Faux-Whig incumbent, Clay anxiously looked to the 1844 presidential election. With Harrison dead and Webster sidelined—he had resigned as secretary of state a year earlier—the Kentucky senator was the only elected official with the gravitas to lead the party. Perhaps Tyler, already contemplating the creation of a third party, could be dumped and a faithful Whig—such as Clay himself—could be substituted in his place.

The political scene was changing fast by 1844. With the rise of anti-immigrant nativism and the pressure to annex Texas as part of the United States, the Whigs struggled to adapt. Clay sought to play to the party’s strengths by focusing on economic issues. In his view, the Whigs could point to strong policies that were helping the country recover from the 1837 recession. Whatever else it did, the party must avoid discussing Texas annexation, a subject that would anger one or another faction. Southerners wanted guarantees that Texas and other new territories would be open to the expansion of slavery while northerners resisted these efforts. Clay had already suffered political reversals over the slavery issue, and he was not willing to sacrifice his ambition again on the altar of freedom. Alas, after President Tyler negotiated an annexation treaty with Texas, Clay could not avoid the issue. He announced that he opposed annexation.⁴³

Clay won the Whig presidential nomination in 1844, but his opposition to Texas annexation hurt him politically. He had expected to run against Martin Van Buren, who also opposed annexation, but, to his surprise, he faced the Democratic Party’s nominee, James Knox Polk, a dark horse candidate. Polk announced that he favored annexation. Clay found himself in an untenable position. He began to temper his opposition, which aggravated his supporters and yet failed to win new converts, most of whom had distrusted Clay for much of his political career. Clay’s track record simply was too long and well known. Polk, a relatively unknown politician despite having previously served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, promised that he would annex Texas and secure Oregon from Great Britain, thereby satisfying Americans who believed that territorial expansion was in the national interest. This concept became known as Manifest Destiny, the belief that American expansion across the continent was inevitable and justified. In this rapidly shifting terrain, the stodgy old-time politician, Henry Clay, lost to the more agile Polk in the general election. It was a close matter. Had a few thousand votes here and there swung the other way, Clay could have squeezed out a victory.⁴⁴

Bitter and exhausted, he retired to his Kentucky estate to focus on his law practice and retire debts accumulated during his long public career. Clay remained vitally interested in national affairs, however, especially as the United States engaged in a war with Mexico over disputed territory. During the 1844 campaign, he had warned that Polk, if elected, probably would initiate a war with Mexico, and his prophecy came to pass. Clay’s own son died in the war, adding to the heartache of a personal life where many of his children did not live to old age.⁴⁵

Late in 1847, Clay delivered a speech arguing against the war with Mexico and harshly criticizing President Polk. In his scathing indictment of the administration, Clay warned that acquiring land from Mexico would upset the balance between free states and slave states, which he thought unwise and potentially calamitous. Observers understood that Clay was now running for president in 1848. He was seventy years old and in ill health, apparently suffering from tuberculosis, a common nineteenth-century ailment. Yet, the Whigs had performed well in the midterm elections, and Clay thought he might have one more presidential campaign left in him. To clear up any ambiguity, he even offered a public statement that he would run for president. At the time, candidates were expected to be circumspect in their presidential ambitions; consequently, Clay’s frank admission of his political intent struck many voters, even Clay supporters, as unseemly.⁴⁶

He had been in this position before. Once again, Henry Clay, his party’s most renowned and accomplished statesman, returned to the U.S. Senate, but he was denied the Whig presidential nomination. General Zachary Taylor, a general officer fresh off his victories in the Mexican War, won the nomination on the fourth ballot during the 1848 Whig National Convention. Having tried and failed to win the presidency so many times, Clay was bitter and disheartened by the loss. General Taylor went on to capture the presidency in the fall election, but he did so without Clay’s help. The grand old Kentucky gentleman did not stump for the Whig ticket that year.⁴⁷

Clay again flirted with retirement, but he had one last issue to confront from his perch inside the Congress. Worried that slavery might tear the Union apart, he agreed to lead the U.S. Senate toward one final compromise. He initially remained on the sidelines while Taylor formed a cabinet and pursued a “nonaction” policy that allowed new territories to enter the Union without engaging in an extensive debate on slavery. Disgusted, Clay eventually sought middle ground to soothe tensions between northern and southern congressional representatives, but a suitable plan proved elusive. After President Taylor’s sudden death in 1850, however, the calculus changed. Clay began revamping a compromise measure to handle the lands ceded by Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which formally ended the war in 1848.⁴⁸

Even before Taylor died, Clay had introduced a series of resolutions into the Senate to address the slavery question and reconcile northern and southern interests. He had hoped to debate the resolutions separately, but southerners urged him to compile the resolutions into one package. Collectively, the series became known as the Compromise of 1850. As chairman of a Committee of Thirteen, Clay proposed an omnibus bill admitting California to the Union as a free state; organizing Utah and New Mexico without resolving the slavery question in those territories; prohibiting the slave trade (but not slave ownership) in the District of Columbia; establishing boundaries for Texas and paying the state’s $10 million debt; enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act; and offering a declaration that Congress could not interfere with the interstate slave trade.⁴⁹

Like any compromise, the bill held something for everyone, but it also risked alienating hardliners on both sides of the slavery question. South Carolina’s venerable statesman, John C. Calhoun, although too ill to speak at length, offered a blistering critique of the compromise, which another senator read aloud in his stead. In the meantime, antislavery men such as New York’s William H. Seward found the call for vigorous enforcement of the odious Fugitive Slave Act too outrageous to support. Daniel Webster, New England’s champion antislavery man, to the surprise of many, offered his support for the plan, upsetting many of his constituents and supporters in the North.⁵⁰

The president opposed the compromise after Clay offered the bill, but Taylor died in July 1850, and his successor, Millard Fillmore, agreed to support the measure. Passage appeared more promising with Fillmore’s support, but the bill failed on July 31. Clay redoubled his efforts to enact the measure by agreeing to separate the components for a vote on each part. With his advanced age, declining health, and physical exhaustion from overwork hampering his effectiveness, Clay left the task of redrafting the legislation and securing passage to Stephen A. Douglas, a freshman senator from Illinois. After Douglas deftly maneuvered to have the individual bills enacted, the compromise was put into place and, once again, the Union was preserved. The compromise would not last indefinitely, but it succeeded in keeping the peace for more than a decade, an impressive achievement.⁵¹

The Compromise of 1850 was Henry Clay’s swan song. He had already announced his intention to resign from the Senate in September 1852. Before that could happen, the old lion, seventy-five years old, died of tuberculosis in Washington, DC, on June 29, 1852. He was the first public man to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda. Afterward, his body was returned to Lexington, Kentucky, for burial. His gravestone reads “I know no North—no South—no East—no West.” He left behind a distinguished legislative legacy that made him one of the most influential people ever to serve in the U.S. Congress.⁵²

Daniel Webster

“Godlike Daniel,” as he was called by some of his most ardent supporters, was a reference to his legendary oratorical skills. He possessed a dazzling ability to speak for hours, often without notes or a printed text. Complete paragraphs flew from his mouth—no stammering, no mangled syntax or misplaced modifiers anywhere—spoken in exactly the right sonorous tone and inflection to render his words eloquent and memorable. He stood ramrod straight, projecting a confident image of an erudite statesman, unencumbered by self-doubt or worry. For many New Englanders, Daniel Webster was the beau ideal of a nineteenth-century politician, a personification of New England virtue in the flesh.⁵³

He was born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, on January 18, 1782, the second youngest of eight children born to farmer Ebenezer Webster and his wife. As a boy, he suffered from poor health, which frequently excused him from the drudgery of farm work. Young Dan used his time wisely, immersing himself in books. At age fourteen, he briefly attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, before enrolling in Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. While at Dartmouth, Webster’s oratorical gifts became apparent, and he delivered speeches arguing in favor of Federalist Party’s platform of a strong central government.

He graduated from Dartmouth in 1801, and studied law under the tutelage of a Salisbury attorney. He later taught school before moving to Boston to work as a lawyer. Although Webster never loved the law, he viewed it as a means of making a comfortable living and eventually pursuing a political career. In 1808, he married a young woman, Grace Fletcher, who bore him four children before her death in 1828.⁵⁴

His political career began as a loyal Federalist criticizing Thomas Jefferson’s administration. Incensed at British impressment of American sailors, Jefferson lacked the military might to send American troops to fight against the empire, although public sentiment favored such action. The president struck back in the only way he thought possible, by initiating an embargo against Great Britain and France. The hope was that the economic hardships would provide incentives for the warring European nations to leave American ships in peace. Yet, the embargo hurt domestic producers as much or more than it hurt the English and the French. New England was hit especially hard. As a loyal man of his region, young Webster penned an anonymous pamphlet railing against the administration’s ill-conceived policies.

Not surprisingly, Webster also argued against the War of 1812, which he viewed as a misguided enterprise initiated by Jefferson’s successor, James Madison. A few intrepid Federalists hinted at the possibility of secession from the Union, but Webster drew the line there. He believed that for all its imperfections, the Union must be preserved. He preferred to rail against inept presidents in the hopes that they would alter their policies. He would not threaten to destroy the nation because he did not get his way.⁵⁵

As a delegate to the so-called Rockingham Convention, Webster authored a report attacking Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans. It made his reputation as a leading administration critic. Afterward, Massachusetts voters elected him to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Reflecting the majority of his constituents’ sentiments, he continued to oppose the war, and his public stature grew with each battlefield reversal, of which there were many. All the while, his graceful, elegant oratory, declaimed on the House floor, suggested that here was a man destined for greatness in the life of the republic. His supporters believed it, and Daniel Webster believed it.⁵⁶

Unfortunately, for Webster, after the war ended with the Treaty of Ghent, President Madison and his party enjoyed a political resurgence as a grateful public basked in the afterglow of a quasi-victory. Although the war might properly be labeled a draw, the United States could take pride in having fought one of the greatest powers on earth to a draw. Andrew Jackson’s victory in the Battle of New Orleans also reinforced the American myth of a special providence. By 1815, a vocal critic of the war such as Webster seemed out of touch with most Americans. He still enjoyed popularity in New England, but Webster’s broader appeal—crucial to a man who already harbored presidential ambitions—was sorely lacking.

In the postwar era, Madison championed the need for the Second National Bank of America as well as a protective tariff and the infrastructure program that Henry Clay urged on the administration. Webster knew the bank was much needed, but he voted against it in the House because he thought the bank should remove paper banknotes issued by state banks from circulation. On the tariff, he adopted a middle-of-the-road approach, generally supporting protective measures, provided the rates were not so high that they hurt New England manufacturers. When the rates increased, he opposed the tariff because it was too expensive for his constituents. He would change his opinion of the tariff during his long public career.⁵⁷

Outside of high tariff rates, Webster knew something about expensive tastes. For much of his adult life, he lived beyond his means, and he was always anxious to earn additional income. It was not unheard of for members of Congress during his era to continue practicing a vocation while serving as a legislator, especially when Congress was out of session. Thus, Webster earned a handsome income accepting legal cases, especially appellate cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He continued to argue leading cases after he left the House in 1817. During the first quarter century of the 1800s, Webster appeared before the high court in an astonishing 168 cases.⁵⁸

He had been an advocate of the first rank even before he appeared regularly in the Supreme Court, but he perfected his oratorical style during those years. Spectators crowded into the courtroom on days when Webster appeared before the bar. He knew that he was a featured attraction, and he often played to the audience as well as to the justices. With few court rules as to style or time limits on speaking, Webster and his contemporaries held court for hours. Always confident of his ability to extemporize, Webster frequently wrote out a short outline of the points he sought to make and constructed his arguments as he went along. He was not above adding rhetorical flourishes, classical allusions, and appeals to sentiment, sometimes drawing tears from the justices and members of the crowd. At the same time, Webster’s arguments were grounded in logic and legal maxims of the day.⁵⁹

Few listeners could forget Webster’s brilliant 1818 peroration in a case involving his alma mater, Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. In a four-hour argument about the sanctity of contracts, Webster engaged his rapt audience as he spoke with heartfelt emotion: “Sir, you may destroy this little institution,” he said of Dartmouth College, the passion evident in his voice. “It is weak; it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out! But if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those great lights of science which for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land!” To modern sensibilities, such appeals sound maudlin, but they struck a great many denizens of the nineteenth century as profound and touching. “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!” Struggling with his emotions, Webster strove to finish his plea. “Sir, I know not how others may feel, but, for myself, and when I see my alma mater surrounded, like Caesar in the Senate-House, by those who are reiterating stab upon stab, I would not, for this right hand, have her turn to me, and say, Et tu quoque mi filii! And thou too, my son!”⁶⁰

By the 1820s, Webster’s legal career flourished even as his political career reached a crossroads. The Federalist Party was in its death throes everywhere except New England. Recognizing the precarious state of the party, New England Federalists urged Webster, one of the few living bright lights of the dwindling organization, to stand again for election to the House. He agreed to do so. In 1822, he won his election, and took his seat the following year. Although he and Speaker Henry Clay had seldom seen eye to eye, that did not stop Clay from appointing Webster chair of the House Judiciary Committee in recognition of the Massachusetts representative’s reputation as an accomplished lawyer. From that position, Webster pushed to relieve Supreme Court justices from circuit-riding duties—a common practice at the time where the justices would go on the road to hear cases in addition to their duties listening to appeals in the nation’s capital—and he supported measures to fund internal improvements.⁶¹

As the 1824 presidential election approached, Webster surveyed the field of candidates and pondered his choices. He saw General Andrew Jackson, the uneducated, uncouth frontiersman, as unqualified. William H. Crawford, another leading candidate, had suffered a stroke. Webster eventually endorsed John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts. Although the two men hailed from the same state, they were hardly allies. Webster believed that Adams had deserted the Federalist Party and harmed its viability years earlier. Yet, when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives following an electoral stalemate, Webster’s support helped Adams eke out a victory.⁶²

Following Adams’s inauguration in 1825, Webster became a leading administration supporter in the House. His party now traveled under the name “National Republicans,” while their opponents, the Democrats, rallied around Andrew Jackson. The Democrats bitterly charged that Adams, with assistance from Henry Clay, had stolen the 1824 election, and they vowed to resist all measures proposed by the new administration. Adams urged Congress to adopt a system of internal improvements modeled on Clay’s American system, but the opposition was firm and well organized. Webster, now inextricably aligned with the Adams forces despite his earlier reservations, even became a vocal proponent of the protective tariff, ignoring his long-standing ambivalence.⁶³

While some public men, notably John C. Calhoun, began their careers as nationalists and gravitated toward state rights as they grew older, Webster experienced the opposite. He had been first and foremost a New Englander during his early years. Although he had stopped short of embracing calls for secession, he had been willing to defend a state’s right to resist federal encroachments. By the time he moved into the U.S. Senate in 1827, he was known as a fierce advocate of national interests. Having amassed seniority and mastered the procedures and rules of the House, Webster did not want to leave, but the state legislature believed he would be a powerful voice in the Senate. He acquiesced. As a senator, Webster, always ambivalent, wrestled with the issue but eventually supported the Tariff of 1828, which raised tariff rates and infuriated southerners. He also opposed Jackson’s election to the presidency in 1828, to no avail. Jackson overwhelmed Adams, sweeping into office and promising to reform government and rein in his predecessor’s nationalist policies.⁶⁴

Webster looked on in horror as Jackson initiated his promised reforms. Infuriated, he argued against the administration’s support for the Indian Removal Act, which forced Native American tribes to leave their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States, and recoiled from the spoils system instituted by Jackson to reward his friends and loyal supporters with federal patronage. On one matter, though, he agreed with the president. During these years, state rights advocates bandied about the doctrine of nullification, which would allow states dissatisfied with federal policies to “nullify,” or render such policies null and void. Jackson would not tolerate nullification threats. Webster, too, thought that this loose talk was dangerous, and he embarked on a public campaign to defend the Union.⁶⁵

Webster’s most famous defense of the Union occurred in January 1830. South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne, a proxy for Jackson’s vice president, John C. Calhoun, stood in the well of the Senate during a debate over land policy and charged that northern men, in advocating high tariff rates, were deliberately harming western as well as southern interests. In his response, Webster objected to Hayne’s characterization of the North as antagonistic to the South, although Webster simultaneously denigrated the institution of slavery. The New Englander also blanched at the southerner’s state rights defense.

Hayne offered a rebuttal to Webster, reiterating his belief that the North in general, and Webster in particular, were “making war upon the unoffending South.” In his reply, Hayne suggested that nullification was an acceptable remedy for states aggrieved by oppressive federal policies. He refused to recognize the value of the Union as paramount, contending that the states were superior to the federal government.⁶⁶

This challenge could not go unanswered. In his second reply to Hayne, delivered on January 26, Webster argued that the U.S. Constitution, as the supreme law of the land, had established “we, the people” as the ultimate source of authority, not the states. The doctrine of nullification threatened to undermine the delicate balance of power established in the Constitution, thereby effectively returning the nation to the Articles of Confederation, the first national constitution, or to anarchy. The Articles had failed precisely because that document had allowed the states to be sovereign, producing a government that was too weak and ineffective to rule the nation, or its citizens. For Webster, nullification was logically and practically unworkable as well as tantamount to treason.

Hayne and his southern brethren had argued that they prized liberty over Union, and they would fight to preserve their right to live free of an obdurate government. Webster believed that liberty and Union must coexist. He also sought to snuff out the talk of possible Civil War. As he concluded his second reply to Hayne, Webster uttered some of the most famous words ever spoken in the Senate:

When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as “What is all this worth?” nor those other words of delusion and folly, “Liberty first and Union afterwards”; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all it sample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!⁶⁷

The speech, widely reprinted and circulated, enhanced Webster’s reputation as one of the greatest orators of his age. It also transformed him into an iconic figure, a Union man extraordinaire. In years to come, he would support President Jackson’s promise to dispatch troops to quell domestic disturbances and ensure that the southern states would not secede from the Union. He worked with both Jackson and Clay, figures he frequently opposed, in ending the secession crisis of 1833.⁶⁸

Webster remained opposed to much of Jackson’s agenda, however, especially the president’s plan to destroy the Second National Bank of the United States. Ever the populist, Jackson distrusted the bank, believing that the consolidation of financial power into the institution harmed small farmers who depended on the whims of the bankers to finance their operations. Webster thought that the benefits of a strong banking system far outweighed the risks of consolidated power, and he spoke out on this point repeatedly. Jackson won that fight, although a national recession in 1837 indicated that Webster’s argument probably was correct if judged on economic grounds.⁶⁹

Webster’s growing stature made him a contender for presidential politics during the 1830s. He sought the nomination of a new political party, the Whigs, in 1836, but he could not garner sufficient support. He might have become a vice presidential candidate under General William Henry Harrison in 1840, but instead he accepted a position as secretary of state after Harrison won the election. The new president died after only a month in office, leaving his vice president, John Tyler, in the executive office. Webster continued on as secretary of state, despite numerous differences with Tyler.⁷⁰

Tyler, a former Democrat, had been added as a vice presidential candidate to balance the Harrison ticket, but he was not ideologically aligned with the Whig platform. It soon became apparent that he would resist measures the Whigs had expected Harrison to champion. In particular, Tyler shared Andrew Jackson’s mistrust of the Bank of the United States. Webster thought a compromise bill could be enacted to reestablish the bank but limit the scope of its power. He urged his former congressional colleagues to pass such a bill, but they refused. Tyler vetoed the strong bill presented to him, which outraged the president’s cabinet. Except for Webster, cabinet members resigned en masse to protest the veto. Tyler appreciated Webster’s show of support, especially since the two men seldom agreed on policy, but the decision to remain as secretary of state strained Webster’s standing with other Whigs.⁷¹

Facing a recalcitrant Congress and alienated from the Whigs, Tyler became a pariah in Washington. He did what many unpopular presidents do when faced with a stalled domestic agenda: He turned his attention to foreign policy. Among their most pressing issues was a developing crisis with Great Britain over the border between Canada, where the British maintained a presence, and Maine. The secretary of state met with the British envoy, Lord Ashburton, and they agreed on the boundaries in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, signed in 1842.⁷²

Despite Webster’s show of support when the rest of the cabinet resigned, he and Tyler never developed a close relationship. Their political perspectives were simply too divergent. Leading Whigs also pressured Webster to resign, correctly observing that his continued political viability within the party required his departure. In May 1843, he finally left the administration, explaining that he had satisfied his ambition in the State Department in negotiating the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. It was time to move on to other challenges.⁷³

On the eve of Webster’s departure, the Tyler administration took up the issue of whether Texas should be annexed as part of the United States. The president believed that it should be, despite fears among the antislavery faction of the Whigs that adding new territory would aggravate the question of whether slavery should be extended beyond current boundaries. Freed from his allegiance to the administration, Webster argued against annexation. It became a crucial issue as the 1844 presidential election neared. Henry Clay won the Whig nomination, which made him the party’s leader. Webster had been a faithful party man when he was a Federalist, and now he continued the tradition of fidelity when he was a Whig. He and Clay had seldom agreed on policy, but Webster came out strongly for Clay in 1844. To Webster’s disappointment, Democrat James K. Polk—“Young Hickory,” named for his ties to Old Hickory, Andrew Jackson—won the presidency in a close election.⁷⁴

Webster had considered retirement when he left the Tyler administration, but he believed he had much left to contribute in his public life. Returning to the Senate in 1845, he remained a strong voice against Polk’s expansionist policies as well as the war with Mexico. As slavery became a key issue, Webster, caught in an untenable position, hedged his bets. His antislavery constituents and colleagues in New England expected him to oppose the spread of the institution as vigorously as possible. Throughout his career, Webster had objected to the peculiar institution; his opposition was no surprise to anyone. For a man who entertained presidential designs, however, he sought to mollify southerners, to the extent possible. Setting aside his objections to human bondage, he refused to condemn southern leaders, making him a Cotton Whig, the faction seeking to protect economic interests, rather than a Conscience Whig who believed that opposing slavery was the paramount issue.⁷⁵

Owing to his prominence, Webster was always a serious presidential contender in the Whig Party, but he faced a new, formidable opponent. He had always known that Henry Clay was a presidential rival, but General Zachary Taylor emerged in 1848. Old Rough and Ready was a hero of the Mexican War, and he capitalized on his newfound fame. Although he was not well known as a Whig, Taylor’s popularity and newcomer status made him an attractive candidate. Taylor eventually won the party’s nomination.⁷⁶

By 1848, the Whigs were a dying political party. Taylor, nominally a Whig, captured the presidency, but he was hardly an exemplar of Whig orthodoxy. The more zealous antislavery Whigs could not stomach Taylor, and so they broke away to join forces with antislavery Democrats, the so-called Barnburners, to form the Free Soil Party. Webster once again was caught in the cross fire. He might have joined forces with the Free Soilers—after all, he had promised never to support Taylor—but he reluctantly cast his lot with the Whigs.

Despite throwing his support to his party’s nominee, Webster was not a Taylor man. He could not expect a political reward in exchange for his support. Indeed, he was closed out of the new administration’s deliberations on patronage. Godlike Daniel appeared to be anything but like a god. He was a man without a party, still influential, but far past his prime.⁷⁷

Within a year of President Taylor stepping into office, a new crisis emerged. As Webster had feared, the addition of new territories to the United States directly raised that nagging question of slavery, a question that had lingered for decades, but now worsened. All the talk of nullification and secession had raised the political temperature, and it appeared that North and South, after all the threats and bluster, might come to blows.

Henry Clay, the Great Pacificator, tried one last time to mollify all parties. In January 1850, he offered a legislative package to resolve the current crisis. No one believed it would settle the issue indefinitely, but perhaps it could preserve the peace a while longer. The Compromise of 1850 sought to balance interests between slaveholding and nonslaveholding states. Extreme partisans on each side rejected the measures as a violation of deeply held principles.⁷⁸

Webster’s support was crucial. Aside from Henry Clay and possibly President Taylor, he was the leading Whig in the United States. He resolved to make his opinion known on the floor of the Senate, as he had on so many memorable occasions. On March 7, 1850, spectators crowded into the chamber to hear the great man’s words. Anticipation was high. Webster did not possess the singular power to determine the fate of the legislation, but he could sway the vote at the margins.⁷⁹

He opened his three-and-a-half-hour speech with one of his most stirring rhetorical flourishes. “Mr. President,” he said, referring to the Senate’s presiding officer, “I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States.” It was a dangerous time, and something must be done to soothe the fears of all men in every region. “It is not to be denied that we live in the midst of strong agitations, and are surrounded by very considerable dangers to our institutions and our government,” he said. “The imprisoned winds are let loose. The East, the North, and the stormy South combine to throw the whole sea into commotion, to toss its billows to the skies, and disclose its profoundest depths.”

He pointed out that for good or ill, slavery had existed in the United States and was unlikely to end in the foreseeable future. Abolitionists who called for an immediate end to bondage were fooling themselves. The institution was firmly planted on American soil, and it was not to be dislodged easily. At the same time, it was unlikely to spread in the southwestern territories. They were arid and not easily cultivated. Without an agricultural base, slavery could not flourish. In Webster’s opinion, the assault on slaveholders and their property was overblown. Enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act—a crucial part of Clay’s legislative compromise—would not undermine the abolitionist position.

Webster did not merely castigate northern men. He faulted southerners for employing hysterical threats to tear apart the Union if they did not get their way. Secession talk harmed everyone’s interests, and must be avoided.

He was eager to redirect the discussion toward reaching a suitable compromise. “And now, Mr. President, instead of speaking of the possibility or utility of secession, instead of dwelling in those caverns of darkness, instead of groping with those ideas so full of all that is horrid and horrible, let us come out into the light of day; let us enjoy the fresh air of Liberty and Union.” It was a ringing endorsement of Clay’s plan, and the speech swayed some opinions, helping the bills known collectively as the Compromise of 1850 eventually pass the Senate.⁸⁰

The Seventh of March speech, as it came to be known, destroyed Webster’s political support in New England. The famous writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson typified the response. He was aghast. “ ‘Liberty! Liberty!’ Pho! Let Mr. Webster, for decency’s sake, shut his lips for once and forever on this word. The word ‘Liberty’ in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word ‘love’ in the mouth of a courtesan.” Theodore Parker, a prominent abolitionist, exclaimed that “no living man has done so much to debauch the conscience of the nation.” Horace Mann, an influential educator, denounced Webster’s proposal as a “vile catastrophe.” The great orator had once walked among the gods, but his stock had fallen. He now consorted among “harlots and leeches.” Senator William H. Seward characterized Webster as a “traitor to the cause of freedom.” Future Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, a vocal opponent of slavery, added Webster’s name to the “dark list of apostates.” Sumner believed that “Mr. Webster’s elaborate treason has done more than anything else to break down the North.”⁸¹

Outside of New England, many Americans viewed Webster as a hero. He had known that the speech probably would destroy his political career, but he spoke up, anyway. The National Intelligencer, an influential newspaper in Washington, DC, hailed the senator’s speech, arguing that it would add “fresh lustre to the fame of the great orator” owing to Webster’s “truly national and patriotic spirit.” Webster’s longtime adversary, Isaac Hill, a newspaper editor who previously served as a U.S. senator and governor of New Hampshire, proclaimed the speech “the crowning act” of a great man’s life. In his book, Profiles in Courage, written more than a century after the speech, Senator John F. Kennedy wrote movingly of the man who, “to the end . . . had been true to the Union, and to his greatest act of courageous principle.”⁸²

By all accounts, Daniel Webster in his dotage could call up his famous eloquence upon occasion, but mostly he was embittered and given to heavy drinking. Immediately following his March Seventh speech, he worried that Clay’s compromise was doomed to failure. Webster’s reputation would sink into an abyss as a result. Indeed, there was a good reason to worry. President Taylor opposed Clay’s plan, leading to a legislative impasse. There the matter remained until the intervention of a deus ex machina almost too strange to believe. For the second time in a decade, a Whig president died in office. Old Rough and Ready was neither as rough nor as ready as he had appeared. Taylor fell ill from a gastrointestinal illness and passed away on July 9, 1850, elevating his vice president, Millard Fillmore, into office.

Fillmore initially agreed with Taylor that Clay’s scheme must be resisted. He soon changed his tune, much to the delight of moderates from both parties. Fillmore also installed Webster as his secretary of state. Given his alienation from other Massachusetts men, Webster no doubt heaved a sigh of relief when he resigned from the Senate. He would never return.⁸³

His second stint at the State Department found Webster laboring to push through the Compromise of 1850. In the meantime, Clay took a leave of absence while Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois performed the heavy lifting of lobbying for the plan. Douglas oversaw the division of the legislative package into separate bills, and the piecemeal enactment of each measure. For his part, Webster drafted a special message for President Fillmore to present to Congress asking that the crisis be ended. Webster also used administration patronage to attract supporters to the cause. After the compromise was enacted, Webster helped enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, ensuring his continued estrangement from antislavery New Englanders. A coalition of Democrats and Whigs in the Massachusetts state legislature elected Charles Sumner, a strong antislavery advocate, to the U.S. Senate in a move that was widely considered a rebuke to Webster.⁸⁴

The secretary retained his interest in foreign policy as the administration pursued trade relations with Asian countries, especially Japan. With Webster at the helm, the administration asserted American power in Latin America, and negotiated the release of a Hungarian rebel, Lajos Kossuth, in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Webster triggered a diplomatic crisis with Austria, which controlled Hungary, when he toasted Kossuth and Hungarian independence at a congressional banquet in Washington, DC, in January 1852.⁸⁵

As the 1852 presidential election neared, he harbored a desire to run one final time, although it was an irrational hope. Webster had never garnered much support outside of New England. Now, after his crucial role in engineering the Compromise of 1850 and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, he had eroded what little support he had ever enjoyed in the North. At the 1852 Whig National Convention, President Fillmore and another hero of the Mexican War, General Winfield Scott, jockeyed for the party’s nomination. Scott eventually prevailed, going on to lose in the general election to the Democrat, Franklin Pierce. Daniel Webster’s last chance to campaign for president was lost.⁸⁶

Even if he had won the Whig nomination, he would not have served as president. The Whigs were a dying breed, soon to be buried forever. The same could be said of Webster. He was seventy years old in 1852, at a time when that age was ancient, indeed. He was the last of the Great Triumvirate to pass from the scene. John C. Calhoun had died in 1850, and Henry Clay was gone in June 1852. Webster remained in office, but his performance as secretary of state frequently was subpar, occasionally embarrassing. The great man knew his salad days were long past, and so he drank to take his mind off the sad state of affairs. He may have suffered from cirrhosis of the liver as well as a range of vague, undiagnosed illnesses.

To exacerbate matters, Webster suffered a severe head injury in May 1852. As the months progressed, he became increasingly frail. It was clear that he could not continue as secretary of state. On October 18, 1852, he wrote the last letter of his life. Addressing the correspondence to President Fillmore, he opened with the customary salutation, “Dear Sir.” He said he wished he could serve out the rest of his term “with you, around your Council Board.” It was not to be. “Consider my Resignation as always before you, to be accepted, any moment you please.” Six days later, in the words of a colorful New York Times obituary writer, Webster “passed from the scene of his vast labors and his glorious triumphs, to join the great of all ages in the spirit-land.” The time was 2:35 a.m. on Sunday, October 24, 1852.⁸⁷

Today Daniel Webster’s legacy looms large. Modern commentators forgive him his apostasy on the Compromise of 1850, for it was a divisive question in a divisive time. Instead, he is remembered and revered for his unparalleled eloquence, his status as a silver-tongued orator without equal in the annals of the U.S. Congress. His famous addresses still thrill students of American history—certainly not as much as in his day, but undeniably so. His paeans in favor of the Union and his pleas to place country above party are testaments to the power of statesmanship to effect positive change. If Webster did not always live up to his aspirations, he nonetheless inspired future generations with his masterful expressions of the nation’s ideals.

John C. Calhoun

For modern audiences, John Caldwell Calhoun is the most difficult member of the Great Triumvirate to understand or appreciate. He is remembered as an ardent apologist for state rights and slavery. Because ultimately he landed on the wrong side of history, his legacy is tainted. Why couple with him celebrated legislative giants such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster? Calhoun was simply another crass, heartless, and self-interested southerner dressing up his racist views under a blanket of constitutional niceties that, when stripped away, do not survive serious scrutiny, or so his detractors, then and now, have charged.

It wasn’t always that way. Young Calhoun was a nationalist who sought to improve America’s position in, and preparedness for, world affairs. He never questioned the legitimacy of slavery as a defensible institution, it is true, but few white Americans of the time argued against the existence of the institution. At the start of his long career, Calhoun was not quite the zealous proslavery advocate and state rights champion he was to become. Time and circumstances changed him.⁸⁸

He was born in the Abbeville District, South Carolina, on March 18, 1782, the fourth of five children born to Patrick Calhoun, a farmer, planter, and eventual member of the South Carolina state legislature, and his wife, Martha. Patrick fought in the American Revolution, but opposed the ratification of the U.S. Constitution because he feared it would strip too much power from the states, an anti-centralist position his son later adopted. In 1796, Patrick Calhoun died, leaving thirteen-year-old John to help operate the family business since his siblings had already left home.

As a child of the South Carolina frontier, Calhoun’s life was difficult, and his future appeared bleak. Yet he refused to accept his lot in life. Aside from working to support his family, he read and studied mostly on his own, although he briefly attended an academy in Georgia. It was obvious that the young man was gifted. His brothers recognized his potential, and they decided to cultivate it by sending him to Yale College in Connecticut. The opportunity forever altered the trajectory of his life and career.⁸⁹

While he was a student at Yale, Calhoun encountered Timothy Dwight, the university’s president, a committed Federalist. Dwight bitterly opposed President Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans, arguing passionately for the right of secession should New England choose to separate from the rest of the Union. It is ironic that Calhoun was first exposed to secession—which came to be identified so closely with the southern states, and with Calhoun himself—while under the tutelage of a northern man, and a Federalist at that.⁹⁰

He excelled at his studies, graduating as Yale’s valedictorian in 1804. Afterward, Calhoun remained in Connecticut to study at Litchfield Law School, the first school of its kind in the United States. He returned to South Carolina and became a member of the bar in 1807. Although Calhoun did not especially enjoy practicing law, he developed a knack for it. His arguments were logical, and his manner serious. Like the other members of the Great Triumvirate, he was known for his superior oratorical style. He was not quite a match for Webster or Clay in eloquence, but Calhoun established a reputation for logical reasoning and tightly argued opinions. He possessed a pleasant baritone voice and a self-confident, arguably arrogant public persona that impressed and often intimidated others. He was truly a cast-iron man.⁹¹

He enjoyed one success after another, beginning with his personal life. In 1811, he married a first cousin once removed, Floride Bonneau Calhoun. The couple produced ten children, seven of whom lived to adulthood. Their daughter Anna Maria later married Thomas Green Clemson, founder of the South Carolina University that still bears his name.⁹²

Even as he raised a family, Calhoun threw himself into politics, his lifelong passion. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1810, he arrived in Washington, DC, the same year that Henry Clay became a congressman, and two years before Daniel Webster. Although he and Clay would differ on many political issues in subsequent years, in 1811 they were united in their calls for the United States to declare war against Great Britain. The war hawks, a faction of which Clay and Calhoun were leading members, believed that Great Britain’s attacks on American shipping threatened the health of the nation and undermined its values. Calhoun helped prepare the Report on Foreign Relations as well as the War Report of 1812, two documents that laid the groundwork for an armed confrontation with the English. He also served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which played an instrumental role in pushing the country toward war.⁹³

After war erupted during the summer of 1812, events did not occur as Calhoun and his colleagues had hoped. American forces suffered a series of humiliating defeats, and the national economy suffered. Worried about the country’s welfare as well as his own political career, Calhoun became indefatigable in his efforts to raise troops, provide sufficient funding to finance military operations, and regulate trade to alleviate the economic hardships precipitated by the fighting. He had done much to usher in the war, but he was equally determined to see that American soldiers had everything necessary to turn the tide.

Because he was so tied to the war, Calhoun’s reputation suffered with every battlefield defeat. His fortunes improved at war’s end, however. With the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814, and General Andrew Jackson’s victory in the Battle of New Orleans the following month, the war became more popular. American public opinion swung in Calhoun’s favor. The war years had been a dark time, but the cessation of hostilities revealed a proud, undefeated nation. Calhoun’s stock rebounded.⁹⁴

He had been dismayed by the poor management of the war. Calhoun witnessed firsthand the hazards of decentralization when it came to conducting national affairs, especially with the military. After their experience under oppressive British rule during the colonial period, Americans had distrusted a standing army, preferring instead to rely on a voluntary militia system. The system had failed during the War of 1812, Calhoun believed, and he thought he saw the solution. The United States needed a professional army. It also needed a system of permanent, high-quality roads as well as a central bank of the United States to handle financing. In short, he became a powerful voice for national authority.

Given his desire to see improvements in the military, it was only natural that Calhoun joined the cabinet. In this case, a new president, James Monroe, found that few men of promise desired to manage the War Department when the administration commenced in 1817. Monroe finally offered the position to Calhoun, and he accepted. He now was well placed to enact his program, calling for an improved navy and a system of internal taxation to finance it.⁹⁵

Calhoun’s tenure was stormy. He and Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford, both of whom harbored presidential aspirations, became rivals within the Monroe administration. Perhaps more damaging to Calhoun’s quest to improve wartime preparations than Crawford’s opposition, Americans were wary of spending money on military affairs in the aftermath of the War of 1812. State rights advocates, fearing any federal interference with slavery, urged Calhoun and Crawford to resist promoting policies that would strengthen the central government. In March 1821, Congress reflected this mistrust of big government by passing a new law, the Reduction Act, to cut the number of enlisted men in half as well as trim the officer corps. Despite his fear that Americans had learned nothing about military preparedness from the war, Calhoun also understood that his future political prospects required him to placate state right advocates. He acquiesced when the Reduction Act passed.⁹⁶

Native American relations, always problematic in the early American republic, were becoming an urgent political issue during the 1820s as ever more white settlers headed west. Because Indian affairs were under his department, Calhoun developed a plan to relocate some tribes to western lands to avoid conflicts with state governments in the eastern United States. Monroe accepted the proposal. General Andrew Jackson’s invasion of Florida in 1818, which President Monroe had not approved, complicated Calhoun’s efforts to negotiate Indian treaties. In fact, he grew so frustrated with the political realities of dealing with tribes that he created the Bureau of Indian Affairs with the War Department to handle the innumerable details involved in managing Native American issues.⁹⁷

Calhoun was still serving as secretary of war when the Missouri Crisis occurred in 1819. Watching as members of Congress strove to balance the admission of free states and slave states into the Union, Calhoun believed that the country would not be dissolved, but he understood that the crisis exacerbated a growing rift between North and South. He also knew where his allegiance would lie if the sections could not resolve their differences. Calhoun was a southern man, and he never forgot that fact. Even as he pursued national policies within the Monroe administration, he was mindful of his home region’s interests and desires.⁹⁸

When the 1824 presidential election season commenced, Calhoun threw his hat into the ring. His rivals, Andrew Jackson, William Crawford, and Henry Clay, could claim broader political support than he. It soon became obvious that Calhoun could not win the nomination, but he was a consensus choice for the vice presidency. When the presidential election ended in a stalemate, the election went into the House of Representatives. John Quincy Adams, a Massachusetts man, emerged as the victor. Calhoun was his lieutenant.⁹⁹

In a later era, presidential and vice presidential candidates ran as a single ticket, but in 1824 it was possible to have the chief executive and his secondary officer from different parties and political ideologies. Such was the case with Adams and Calhoun. They shared few, if any, political goals. They did not enjoy warm personal relations. Nothing suggested that these very different personalities would work well together, and they did not. Calhoun soon became disillusioned with the Adams administration, especially the president’s support for high tariffs and internal improvements.¹⁰⁰

During these years, the South was becoming ever more isolated from the North as the slavery issue took center stage. Fearful that northern men would support policies to limit the extension of slavery into new territories, southern representations became ever more vocal in their support for state rights. Calhoun had voiced support for national laws, but he owed his political viability to the South. He could not afford to alienate his constituents. As the South moved away from supporting national policies, Calhoun followed along. Whether his political evolution was as principled as he argued is a matter of debate.

What is not disputed is Calhoun’s estrangement from the Adams administration. Anyone watching political developments during John Quincy Adams’s presidency clearly saw the animosity building among the Democrats who believed that their man Andrew Jackson had been denied his place in the executive mansion. Sensing the shifting political tides, in 1826 Calhoun wrote a letter to Jackson offering his support in the next presidential election. It was an audacious act for a sitting vice president to throw his allegiance to someone other than his chief, but, then again, John C. Calhoun was an audacious man.¹⁰¹

Just as Calhoun had never been close to Adams, he was not a thoroughgoing Jacksonian. The uneducated backwoodsman with the populist rhetoric was the antithesis of the Yale-educated South Carolinian and his well-developed sense of manners and propriety. A southern man with an aristocratic bent simply did not behave as Jackson did. Still, Calhoun understood how to practice politics as well as anyone. Jackson upheld southern values and state rights far better than Adams, who hailed from the antislavery North. Jackson owned slaves and was amenable to imposing his will on nonwhites. The opportunistic Calhoun believed, with some justification, that Jackson would offer a better deal than Adams. Their divergent opinions on nullification and the Union were some years in the future.¹⁰²

In the election of 1828, Jackson won the presidency, resoundingly defeating Adams. Calhoun once again became vice president, making him only the second man in American history to serve as vice president under two separate presidents.¹⁰³ If Calhoun had hoped to enjoy better relations with Jackson than he had with Adams, however, he was badly mistaken. From the outset, their relationship was strained, and it only grew worse with time.

It began with the so-called Petticoat Affair. Modern audiences may find the entire episode silly and hardly worthy of presidential attention or debate, but contemporaries viewed it differently. It was customary at the time for the wives of cabinet members to invite each other to Washington social events as a common courtesy. Calhoun’s wife, Floride, organized a group of cabinet wives to shun Peggy Eaton, the wife of incoming Secretary of War John Eaton. The young woman, known for her beauty and charm, had married John Eaton a few months after her husband, a sailor, had died at sea. Whispered rumors suggested that her husband had killed himself after discovering that his wife had been conducting an affair with Eaton. Perhaps jealous at Peggy Eaton’s propensity to turn men’s heads, Floride Calhoun and the other ladies of her circle professed their outrage at the woman’s “unladylike,” scandalous behavior.

Ordinarily, a president of the United States might have ignored what soon became known as the Petticoat Affair. Andrew Jackson, however, did not view the episode as ordinary. He was still grieving the sudden death of his beloved wife, Rachel, from heart disease a month after Jackson won the presidential election of 1828. He believed that Rachel had died owing to the stress of the campaign, when the general’s detractors had charged Rachel with adultery. She supposedly married Jackson before her marriage to her first husband had been dissolved. Jackson was incensed that Rachel had died because of scurrilous charges lodged against her good character. He viewed the charges against Peggy Eaton’s character as analogous to Rachel’s situation.¹⁰⁴

The Petticoat Affair soured Jackson against Calhoun. The vice president had supported his wife even as Jackson supported the Eatons. Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s secretary of state, shrewdly recognized an opportunity to enter Jackson’s good graces. A widower who need not fear a wife’s disapproval, Van Buren vocally supported John and Peggy Eaton, winning the president’s approval. Later, Jackson threw his support to Van Buren to become his vice president and heir apparent, leaving Calhoun in the political wilderness.¹⁰⁵

Jackson and Calhoun became further estranged in 1830 when the president learned that while Calhoun served as secretary of war, he had favored censuring Jackson for the general’s 1818 decision to invade Florida without presidential approval. Contemporaneous letters left little doubt that Calhoun had supported the censure despite his subsequent assurances to the contrary. The news enraged Jackson, who believed that his vice president had betrayed him. Their relationship never recovered from the revelation.¹⁰⁶

The thinly veiled animosity between the president and vice president was illustrated by an otherwise minor incident that occurred during a formal dinner honoring Thomas Jefferson’s birthday held at the Indian Queen Hotel in Washington, DC, on April 13, 1830. As was the custom, political luminaries stood to offer toasts. They tended to be pro forma expressions of faith in the American republic and the speaker’s desire for the nation’s continued health and success in the days to follow. All eyes looked to President Jackson and he stood and lifted his wine glass. He said, much to the discomfort of the southern representatives, “Our Union—it must be preserved.” Jackson spoke only a few months after the debate between Robert Hayne and Daniel Webster on the nature of liberty and the Union. Everyone present understood what the seemingly trite comment meant in the context of the tariff debate. The president rejected all talk of nullification and secession.

Calhoun was not anxious to demonstrate infidelity to his superior officer, but he could not allow the remark to pass without comment. After Jackson sat, Calhoun rose and surveyed the room. “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear,” he toasted, clearly expressing the southern view that the Union was a means to an end, not an end in itself. He was not quite finished, though, adding a postscript lest anyone think him too obtuse. “May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States and distributing equally the benefit and burden of the Union.”¹⁰⁷

The two men, never close, drifted further apart over time. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin occurred over the nullification crisis. As his career progressed, Calhoun came to see the push for protective tariffs, a central feature of Henry Clay’s legislative program, as detrimental to the South. Tariffs tended to assist northern manufacturers at the expense of southerners, who were seldom involved in manufacturing, but often supplied raw materials to both northern businesses and European companies. The tariffs helped northern manufacturers compete against European importers, but they also drove down demands for raw materials.¹⁰⁸

As vice president under Adams, Calhoun was angry that an 1828 tariff had been pushed through Congress over southern opposition. He anonymously produced an essay, “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” denouncing the Tariff of Abominations and arguing for a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. He became a vocal champion of nullification, which allowed a state to nullify, or void, a federal law that harmed the interests of the state, as determined by state legislatures. He also argued on behalf of concurrent majorities, the right of a state’s majority—although a minority of the whole nation—to oppose a tyranny of the majority on the federal level.

Calhoun believed that his notions of federal-state relations were a natural extension of Jeffersonian theories of limited government. He cited arguments developed by Jefferson and Madison in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions opposing the oppressive Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. If a minority did not possess the authority to resist a majority, it would be possible for the federal government to become ever more centralized, eventually eclipsing the states altogether and making a mockery of the carefully crafted system of federalism established by the Founders.¹⁰⁹

Jackson initially appeared to be a state rights advocate, but he and Calhoun parted ways over nullification. Jackson recognized, even if Calhoun turned a blind eye, that allowing a state to nullify federal laws would only lead to chaos and disorder. The proper method of opposing federal control was through participation in federal lawmaking. Replacing the tyranny of the majority with the tyranny of the minority was not a viable solution to the crises of the 1820s and 1830s.¹¹⁰

In July 1832, Jackson signed a new tariff law. He knew it would be unpopular in the South, and so he had pushed Congress to lower the tariff rates. If it were simply a matter of a specific rate, Jackson’s compromise effort might have placated all but the most hardened nullifiers, but emotions were too raw and opinions too fixed to allow for reasoned debate. The South Carolina legislature took the audacious step of nullifying both the 1828 and 1832 tariffs, declaring them void.

Never a man to back down from a fight, Jackson prepared U.S. Navy ships to embark for the harbor in Charleston, South Carolina, and threatened to hang any man, including Calhoun, who supported nullification or secession. In his “Proclamation to the People of South Carolina” in December 1832, the president contended that nullification was a constitutional absurdity that could not and would not be tolerated.¹¹¹

By the time the crisis erupted, Calhoun had resigned the vice presidency and entered the U.S. Senate. He helped to defuse the crisis by working with Henry Clay to craft a new tariff with slightly higher rates in exchange for Clay’s agreement to denounce Jackson’s military threats. Looking ahead to the next presidential election, Clay was eager to garner even a modicum of southern support, and he never minded denouncing “King Andrew,” anyhow. Congress then enacted a force bill allowing Jackson the authority to use the military to put down nullifiers should they take up arms.¹¹²

Calhoun’s resignation as vice president in December 1832 came as no surprise. It had been a longtime coming. Calhoun was a philosophical proponent of nullification in an administration that vigorously opposed the concept. As Jackson prepared to enter his second term with a new vice president, Martin Van Buren, Calhoun had only three months left in office. He decided not to wait, resigning from the vice presidency before the end of his term. A day later, stepped into his new role as a U.S. senator representing South Carolina.¹¹³

Now that he could speak freely as a South Carolina man once again, Calhoun was liberated. Recognizing that the presidency probably was beyond his reach, he need not pull his punches, or moderate his views. He came out strongly against many of Jackson’s actions, including the president’s decision to remove federal funds from the Second Bank of the United States and deposit them into state banks. He also voted to censure Jackson for removing the funds, which contributed to the economic downturn known as the Panic of 1837.¹¹⁴

With the Democratic-Republican Party dissolved, along with the short-lived Nullifier Party, Calhoun was politically adrift. He occasionally voted with the Whig Party to oppose the Jackson administration, but he was never an ideological Whig. The party pushed for internal improvements and increased government centralization, and Calhoun thought such measures were dangerous. For that reason, among others, he could not support William Henry Harrison, the Whigs’s 1840 presidential candidate. Eventually, following Jackson’s retirement, Calhoun gravitated to the Democratic Party.¹¹⁵

When it was clear that American politics was shifting during the 1840s, Calhoun’s hopes for the presidency revived. Perhaps they had never disappeared in the first place. After more than a decade of service in the Senate, he resigned in March 1843 to focus on another presidential campaign. His years as a southern man, increasingly shrill in his public defense of slavery, had alienated him from his allies. Once upon a time, he and Henry Clay had been war hawks together, and they had shared a Whig opposition to Andrew Jackson. Those days were long past. Calhoun now was a man without a party, and his efforts to launch a viable presidential bid in 1844 failed as a consequence.¹¹⁶

The strange nature of the decade’s politics became clear after Harrison’s inauguration. The new president served for only a month before he unexpectedly died. His vice president, John Tyler, stepped into the executive mansion. Like Calhoun, Tyler had attached himself to the Whig Party, but it was never a good union. Leading Whigs such as Henry Clay became disillusioned with the new man, viewing him as an impostor.¹¹⁷

If Calhoun never quite fit comfortably into the ideological or party splits of the 1840s, his discomfiture had its advantages. President Tyler was also a man without strong party ties. Calhoun was not wrong to think that he might be rewarded with a cabinet post. A proud man, he would accept nothing less than the premier position, secretary of state. At the beginning of the Tyler administration, Daniel Webster occupied the chair. After his departure, Tyler chose Abel P. Upshur from Virginia as his new secretary. Upshur’s tenure lasted only eight months. He was one of six people killed on February 28, 1844, when a ship’s gun exploded on the steamship USS Princeton while he and President Tyler were on board. It was sheer luck that Tyler himself escaped injury.¹¹⁸

It was an ill wind for the administration, but it blew in Calhoun’s direction. The president had not intended to offer the secretary of state position to Calhoun, but a Virginia Whig, Henry Wise, spoke out of turn and extended the offer through a proxy. When President Tyler learned of Wise’s unauthorized action, he was apoplectic, but he could not disavow the offer without harming his relationship with Wise. Because Wise was one of Tyler’s few congressional allies, the president, through gritted teeth, agreed to add Calhoun to the cabinet.¹¹⁹

The pressing issue of the day was whether Texas should be annexed as part of the United States. Secretary Upshur, who shared Tyler’s affinity for annexation, had been negotiating secretly with the Republic of Texas lest Mexico, already suspicious of U.S. designs on Texas and the possibility that the republic’s border might be extended farther southward, learn of the talks and threaten war. Calhoun agreed with Upshur and Tyler on the annexation question, but he was a greater political liability to Tyler than Upshur had been. By 1844, Calhoun was viewed as an extreme southern partisan who naturally wanted to annex Texas so that slavery could spread westward. Upshur had operated behind the scenes, mostly in the shadows; consequently, he had enjoyed room to maneuver. Upshur slyly downplayed the role of slavery in the negotiations. With the fiercely partisan John C. Calhoun as the new secretary of state, it was clear that the Tyler administration sought to bring Texas into the fold, which provided ammunition to both the Mexican government and antislavery northern men who feared what annexation would do to the United States.

As Tyler had feared, Calhoun’s participation triggered a political backlash. When Senator Benjamin Tappan of Ohio, an annexation opponent, leaked several documents, including a letter from Calhoun to British Ambassador Richard Pakenham defending slavery, the Senate refused to ratify the annexation treaty. Tyler’s plan was in shambles, but Calhoun had emerged stronger from the episode, at least in the South. He had gone on record as a strong apologist for slavery, and he had forced potential presidential candidates to come out in favor of, or against, annexation.¹²⁰

Calhoun’s political machinations did not improve his presidential prospects. After he recognized that he could not capture the 1844 nomination, he cut a deal with the Democratic candidate, James Knox Polk, of Tennessee. Calhoun would support Polk’s presidential candidacy in exchange for a pledge to support Texas annexation and oppose the Tariff of 1842. Calhoun also wanted Polk to dissolve the Washington Globe, a Democratic newspaper. When Polk agreed to the terms, Calhoun threw his weight behind the Democrat. Polk won the election. The lame duck Tyler administration managed to push through a joint House and Senate measure expressing support for annexation, and a treaty soon followed.¹²¹

Polk came into office, and Calhoun returned to the U.S. Senate representing South Carolina. He had helped Polk win the presidency, but Calhoun soon showed his well-known independent streak. Polk prosecuted a war against Mexico over disputed lands in south Texas, and Calhoun opposed the war. He understood that during wartime, a president assumes extraordinary powers that require greater government centralization, which Calhoun opposed. Although he voted against prosecuting the war, he believed that any new territory acquired as a result of the conflict should be open to slavery. When Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot proposed that the peculiar institution be banned from newly acquired lands, Calhoun was one of many southern members of Congress to howl in protest at the proviso.¹²²

Calhoun was open to political compromise when it was possible to do so without undermining state rights and the honor of the South. In one instance, he worked with the Polk administration to reach a compromise with Great Britain over the Oregon territory. The president supported the concept of Manifest Destiny, which called for Americans to gobble up territory from coast to coast. Great Britain still claimed ownership to lands encompassing present-day British Columbia as well as the western states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. During the 1844 presidential election, Democratic expansionists had used the slogan “54–40 or fight” to argue that the United States should go to war if the British did not recognize American claims north of the 54–40 line. Calhoun worked with his successor, Secretary of State James Buchanan, to negotiate a treaty that essentially split the difference, allowing England to retain British Columbia at the 49th parallel and ceding other territory to the United States. The Senate ratified the treaty in 1846.¹²³

Although Calhoun remained an integral participant in national affairs during this time, his health declined as he entered his sixties. A recurring bout of tuberculosis left him sidelined. His last major act as a public figure occurred shortly before his death, when Congress debated the series of laws known as the Compromise of 1850. He was sixty-eight years old when the measures came before the Senate. Although he was too short of breath to speak, he wanted his views made known. On March 4, 1850, Calhoun’s friend and colleague, Senator James Mason of Virginia, agreed to read a statement on the South Carolinian’s behalf.¹²⁴

He was in no mood for compromise, despite Henry Clay’s plea to preserve the Union even at great cost. When Calhoun appeared in the Senate chamber that March 4, he looked ghastly. It was clear that he was not long for the world. “Acting under the advice of my friends, and apprehending that it might not be in my power to deliver my sentiments before the termination of the debate, I have reduced to writing what I intended to say,” he explained, his voice little more than a whisper, a far cry from the booming Calhoun voice of old. He turned it over to Mason, who stepped forward. “It affords me great pleasure to comply with the request of the honorable senator,” Mason said in agreeing to read the remarks aloud.

Calhoun, speaking through Mason, opened with conciliatory words. “I have, senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion,” he said. It was true, although Calhoun was a little disingenuous in referring to “agitation.” He had been the cause of much agitation, and he might have relieved some of the tension by supporting Clay’s compromise as a “timely and effective measure.” He continued with his assessment. “Entertaining this opinion, I have, on all proper occasions, endeavored to call the attention of both the two great parties which divided the country to adopt some measure to prevent so great a disaster, but without success. The agitation has been permitted to proceed with almost no attempt to resist it, until it has reached a point when it can no longer be disguised or denied that the Union is in danger. You have thus had forced upon you the greatest and gravest question that can ever come under your consideration: How can the Union be preserved?”

Relying on the metaphor of a physician examining an ill patient, Calhoun suggested that a diagnosis of the Union’s malady was necessary. “The first question, then, presented for consideration in the investigation I propose to make in order to obtain such knowledge is: What is it that has endangered the Union?” He offered his analysis.

“To this question there can be but one answer—that the immediate cause is the almost universal discontent which pervades all the States composing the Southern section of the Union. This widely extended discontent is not of recent origin. It commenced with the agitation of the slavery question and has been increasing ever since.” The South had been mistreated repeatedly, and eventually the region could no longer tolerate such abuses.

Calhoun cautioned against accusing the South of overreacting or exacerbating the crisis. The problem was “the long-continued agitation of the slave question on the part of the North, and the many aggressions which they have made on the rights of the South during the time. I will not enumerate them at present, as it will be done hereafter in its proper place.”

Calhoun lamented the loss of balance between sections that had governed the nation for decades. “The equilibrium between the two sections in the government as it stood when the Constitution was ratified and the government put in action has been destroyed,” he charged. “At that time there was nearly a perfect equilibrium between the two, which afforded ample means to each to protect itself against the aggression of the other; but, as it now stands, one section has the exclusive power of controlling the government, which leaves the other without any adequate means of protecting itself against its encroachment and oppression.”

Mason, speaking for Calhoun, laid out the argument against Clay’s compromise, namely that it was too slanted against the South. “Having now, senators, explained what it is that endangers the Union, and traced it to its cause, and explained its nature and character, the question again recurs, How can the Union be saved? To this I answer, there is but one way by which it can be, and that is by adopting such measures as will satisfy the States belonging to the Southern section that they can remain in the Union consistently with their honor and their safety.”

Calhoun’s literal voice could no longer raise objections, but his pen remained booming and powerful. He set forth the principal reason that he and his southern colleagues could not agree to additional compromises:

The South asks for justice, simple justice, and less she ought not to take. She has no compromise to offer but the Constitution, and no concession or surrender to make. She has already surrendered so much that she has little left to surrender. Such a settlement would go to the root of the evil, and remove all cause of discontent, by satisfying the South that she could remain honorably and safely in the Union, and thereby restore the harmony and fraternal feelings between the sections which existed anterior to the Missouri agitation. Nothing else can, with any certainty, finally and for ever settle the question at issue, terminate agitation, and save the Union.

In Calhoun’s opinion, the South was weaker than the North. It had already compromised far too often in the past. It was too late to save the Union with yet another series of half measures cobbled together at the last minute. Clay harped on the desire to save the Union, but Calhoun had never believed that the Union was worth saving if the South must be humiliated to achieve that goal. Only the North could save the Union now: “At all events, the responsibility of saving the Union rests on the North, and not on the South. The South can not save it by any act of hers, and the North may save it without any sacrifice whatever, unless to do justice and to perform her duties under the Constitution should be regarded by her as a sacrifice.”

Calhoun offered no olive branch, would entertain no compromise, but he did not call for Civil War. “It is time, senators, that there should be an open and manly avowal on all sides as to what is intended to be done,” he wrote. “If the question is not now settled, it is uncertain whether it ever can hereafter be; and we, as the representatives of the States of this Union regarded as governments, should come to a distinct understanding as to our respective views, in order to ascertain whether the great questions at issue can be settled or not. If you who represent the stronger portion, can not agree to settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so; and let the States we both represent agree to separate and part in peace.” In short, the regions could separate and that could be accomplished without bloodshed.

He ended with a flourish:

I have now, senators, done my duty in expressing my opinions fully, freely, and candidly on this solemn occasion. In doing so I have been governed by the motives which have governed me in all the stages of the agitation of the slavery question since its commencement. I have exerted myself during the whole period to arrest it, with the intention of saving the Union if it could be done; and if it could not, to save the section where it has pleased providence to cast my lot, and which I sincerely believe has justice and the Constitution on its side. Having faithfully done my duty to the best of my ability, both to the Union and my section, throughout this agitation, I shall have the consolation, let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility.¹²⁵

It was his most famous speech. It was also his last. Calhoun died of tuberculosis on March 31, 1850. He did not live long enough to see the outcome of the 1850 debate. Clay’s compromise eventually passed after Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois pushed through parts of the package as individual bills during the late summer and early fall. Henry Clay, with Douglas’s able assistance, had done it again, even over Calhoun’s objections. The Union once again was preserved, at least temporarily.¹²⁶

Figure 1.1 Henry Clay. Source: Library of Congress.

Figure 1.2 Daniel Webster. Source: Library of Congress.

Figure 1.3 John C. Calhoun. Source: Library of Congress.

Following his death, Calhoun’s legacy was difficult to assess. Southerners saw him as a giant among political philosophers and statesmen. Aside from his defense of state rights and slavery, he was cognizant of the need to protect minority rights in a system constructed on majority rule. His logical arguments favoring liberty over Union especially appealed to the Fire-Eaters, those extreme southern partisans who urged the South to secede a decade after Calhoun had passed from the scene.

For northerners—and perhaps for subsequent generations of Americans—he was too wedded to outdated notions. His preference for state rights, his tolerance of the abominable institution of slavery, and his willingness to inflame passions at a time when cooler heads were needed made him part of the problem, not the solution. Calhoun simply could not grasp the need for a living constitution to evolve as societal standards evolved. He was a relic of a bygone era.

Whatever his legacy, few can deny that John C. Calhoun, like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, left an indelible mark on the history of the United States. The Great Triumvirate demonstrated the power of elected leaders to shape the life of the nation, even if they never captured the presidency. These three men indeed were congressional giants, and their collective footsteps reverberated for generations.

NOTES

1. See, for example, H. W. Brands, Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster: The Second Generation of American Giants (New York: Doubleday, 2018).

2. Brands, Heirs of the Founders, 12–13; Scott Farris, Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2012), 24; David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American (New York: Random House, 2010), 3–42; Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1991), 3–31.

3. Farris, Almost President, 21; Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 46–51.

4. Richard B. Cheney and Lynne V. Cheney, Kings of the Hill: How Nine Powerful Men Changed the Course of American History (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996 [1983]), 3; Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 61–63; Remini, Henry Clay, 43–44.

5. Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 54–64; Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 14–15; Remini, Henry Clay, 42–43.

6. Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 68.

7. See, for example, Michael Beschloss, Presidents of War: The Epic Story from 1807 to Modern Times (New York: Crown, 2018), 7–36; Cheney and Cheney, Kings of the Hill, 6.

8. Cheney and Cheney, Kings of the Hill, 3; Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 68–74.

9. Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 75–76; Remini, Henry Clay, 59–63.

10. Cheney and Cheney, Kings of the Hill, 8–9; Farris, Almost President, 24–25; Peterson, The Great Triumvirate, 51–53; Remini, Henry Clay, 72–93.

11. Clay is quoted in Calvin Colton, The Life of Henry Clay, the Great American Statesman (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1855), Vol. I, 165. See also Cheney and Cheney, Kings of the Hill, 9; Farris, Almost President, 25.

12. Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 90–93; Hugh Howard, Mr. and Mrs. Madison’s War: America’s First Couple and the Second War of Independence (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), 24–29.

13. Brands, Heirs of the Founders, 26–31; Cheney and Cheney, Kings of the Hill, 12–15; Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 90–99.

14. Beschloss, Presidents of War, 57–96; Peterson, The Great Triumvirate, 38–46.

15. Brands, Heirs of the Founders, 60–62; Farris, Almost President, 25–26; Peterson, The Great Triumvirate, 44–45.

16. Brands, Heirs of the Founders, 62–63; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15–18, 70–79.

17. Brands, Heirs of the Founders, 53–60, 62–66; Peterson, The Great Triumvirate, 44–46.

18. Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 121–24; Peterson, The Great Triumvirate, 50–56.

19. Brands, Heirs of the Founders, 64–66.

20. Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 131–32; David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 3–19.

21. Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution, 83–90.

22. Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 139–48; Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution, 73–90.

23. Fergus M. Bordewich, America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 76–82.

24. The amendment is quoted in Jeff Forrest, Ph.D., Issues & Controversies in American History: Slavery in the United States (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2012), 180.

25. Hannis Taylor, The Origin and Growth of the American Constitution: An Historical Treatise (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), 280; Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 143–44; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 147–48.

26. Bordewich, America’s Great Debate, 80. See also Farris, Almost President, 27; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 147–60.

27. Much has been written about the election of 1824. See, for example, Farris, Almost President, 27–29; Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 154–85; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 203–11; Joseph Nathan Kane, Facts About the Presidents (New York: Ace Books, 1976), 81–82; Nancy E. Marion, The Politics of Disgrace: The Role of Political Scandal in American Politics (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2010), 55; Jules Witcover, Party of the People: A History of the Democrats (New York: Random House, 2003), 127–29.

28. Brands, Heirs of the Founders, 124–26; Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 190–96.

29. The circumstances surrounding the 1828 presidential election are recounted in numerous sources. See, for example, H. W. Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 389–405; Brands, Heirs of the Founders, 144–47; Farris, Almost President, 30–31; Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2008), 4–7.

30. Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 231–36.

31. Clay is quoted in Henry Clay, The Life and Speeches of Henry Clay of Kentucky, Vol. 2 (New York: James B. Swain, 1843), 177. See also Brands, Andrew Jackson, 501, 502; Farris, Almost President, 30; Meacham, American Lion, 278–79. The anecdote about not shooting Henry Clay or hanging John C. Calhoun is found in many sources. See, for example, Remini, Henry Clay, 677–78.

32. Brands, Andrew Jackson, 473–75; Farris, Almost President, 33; Kane, Facts About the Presidents, 90; Meacham, American Lion, 220.

33. The “nullification crisis” has been discussed in many sources. See, for example, Brands, Heirs of the Founders, 197–218; and Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 395–410. The classic study is William H. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1965]).

34. Bordewich, America’s Great Debate, 82–84; Forrest McDonald, States’ Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776–1876 (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2000), 108–10; Peterson, The Great Triumvirate, 212–33.

35. Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 312–16; Remini, Henry Clay, 458–70; Witcover, Party of the People, 158–60.

36. Brands, Heirs of the Founders, 253–58; Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 269–75.

37. Kane, Facts About the Presidents, 102–3; Witcover, Party of the People, 150–54.

38. Remini, Henry Clay, 566–69; Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), 511–12; Witcover, Party of the People, 158–60.

39. The quotes are from Gary May, John Tyler: The American Presidents, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Sean Wilentz, editors (New York: Times Books, and Imprint of Henry Holt and Company, 2008), 59. See also Heidler and Heidler, Henry Clay, 338–40; Remini, Henry Clay, 569–76.