Henry Clay: The Man Who Would Be President by James C. Klotter (review)

Correction: Minor edits were made to the review following publication. Please click here for the updated version.

Henry Clay has attracted a clutch of recent biographers, from Robert V. Remini in 1991 to David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler in 2010 and Harlow Giles Unger in 2015. The subtitle of James C. Klotter’s Henry Clay: The Man Who Would Be Presidentannounces his distinctive approach. While in he delivers a well-crafted narrative of Clay’s life, Klotter cautions at the outset that “this is not a biography, per se, of Henry Clay,” but instead an attempt to answer a question: “Why did Clay not win the presidency?” (p. xvi).

It was certainly not for lack of ability or qualifications. Clay was a long-serving and distinguished Speaker of the House of Representatives and U.S. senator, for four years secretary of state, leader of the 1812 “War Hawks,” co-negotiator of the Peace of Ghent, father of the American System of political economy, and christener of the Whig Party. He was the architect of the three great compromises between the Constitution and the Civil War—over Missouri in 1820–1821, over nullification in 1833, and over slavery in the new southwest in 1850. No other statesman’s record comes close to this. Henry Clay accomplished everything there was to acheive in American politics except what he wanted most: to be president. He lost two national races—closely in 1844, not closely in 1832—barely missed the cut to get into the House runoff in 1824 and was an aspirant for the nomination twice more, in 1840 and 1848.

After several chapters introducing Clay’s personality and principles, Klotter settles in for a biographical narrative framed around his successive tries for the presidency. There are basically two ways to account for Clay’s repeated defeats. One is to seek for the telltale flaw in Clay’s character, some disabling weakness that forever doomed his hopes. Perhaps it was the overconfident temperament that lured him to run even when (as in 1832) defeat was certain, the volubility and hypersensitiveness that led him to repeatedly over-expose himself with speeches and public explanations when he should have stood silent, the penchant for “miscalculations and missteps” that sabotaged his chances time and again, or the ineptitude at political management that in 1824 cost him a place in the election in the House, which he might well have won (p. 381). Perhaps, as has been suggested, the denouement to that race, the purported “corrupt bargain” by which John Quincy Adams became president and Clay secretary of state, pegged him with an image he could not shake off, of being too grasping and ambitious to ever be trusted with the presidency.

The alternative approach is to disaggregate and particularize, to seek out distinct explanations for each electoral result rather than trace them all to some constant underlying cause. For instance, in 1844, when Clay came within a hair of winning, almost anything might have made the difference. Clay’s appearance of waffling on the Texas issue may have cost him crucial votes, but so may “the tariff, character concerns, immigration and nativist questions, Oregon, the American System,” and on down the list (p. 326).

Klotter meticulously explicates the array of explanations, both general and particular, for each of Clay’s defeats. His measured, thoughtful approach produces a balanced and carefully hedged analysis that readers who crave sharp and strongly stated conclusions may find frustrating. But this is in the nature of the case. We can never pin down a definite cause for even a single electoral outcome and Klotter is too knowledgeable and judicious to pretend otherwise. The question “why” is perhaps unanswerable and certainly not simply answerable. It may even be, as Klotter suggests, at crucial junctures Clay was just unlucky.

Or perhaps the question itself is unfairly framed. Clay stands at the head of a long...