HENRY CLAY, TOO, had his eye on the White House, again. Clay had made the most of his break with John Tyler. The schism unnerved many of the Whigs, and Clay felt obliged to buck them up. The Whig caucus gathered for a last time before its members went home at the end of the special session. “I distinctly recollect that night; it was dark and rainy,” Oliver Hampton Smith, a senator from Indiana, recounted. “Every thing around us looked like the weather and the night, dark and gloomy. Our hopes had been blasted; President Tyler had deceived us; our triumphant victory had been turned into ashes in our mouths; we were about to part, with no cheering prospects.” The members drowned their sorrows in booze.
And then their leader took charge. “The tall and majestic form of Henry Clay was seen rising in the west end of the room,” Smith recollected. “All eyes were upon him; he wore a bewitching smile upon his countenance. He addressed the Chair in a voice that indicated at once that he was not about delivering a dolorous address, adding to our gloomy feelings.” Clay declared, “Mr. Chairman, this is a dark night. There is no moon, and the little stars are slumbering in their beds, behind the dark canopy that is spread over the heavens. This is not the first time that the heavenly lights have been obscured, and the world kept in temporary darkness. Is this emblematic of our party? It may be so; but not of our principles. We senators will soon pass away, but our principles will live while our glorious Union shall exist. Let our hearts be cheerful. Let our minds look through the temporary clouds that overspread the heavens, and see the sun there, as in midday, shining upon our principles, fixed above like planets in the firmament. They may be obscured for a time by the cry of the demagogue, by the political treason of those we have cherished in our bosoms—but they must and will prevail in the end.”
Clay gazed around the room. “My friends, we have done our duty,” he said. “We have maintained the true policy of the government. Our policy has been arrested by an executive that we brought into power. Arnold escaped to England after his treason was detected. Andre was executed. Tyler is on his way to the Democratic camp. They may give him lodgings in some outhouse, but they never will trust him. He will stand here, like Arnold in England, a monument of his own perfidy and disgrace.”
He turned to Chairman Nathan Dixon, who was known for his hands-off policy in caucus meetings, which allowed the members to go at one another hammer and tongs. “Night after night we have looked upon your good-natured, gentlemanly countenance,” Clay said, his eye now twinkling. “We have seen with high gratification the very able and impartial manner in which you have discharged your duty, and especially the manner in which you have, by a single look, kept order at our meetings; the most excited, the most boisterous, has been quieted at once and brought into lamb-like docility.” The caucus members chuckled, recalling full well that nothing like order and certainly no lamb-like docility had characterized the meetings. “Could you have been seen while presiding, by the whole civilized world,” Clay continued, struggling to keep a straight face, “Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceanica would have raised a united voice in your praise.”
Turning back to the group, Clay concluded, “Gentlemen, one and all, permit me to bid you an affectionate farewell!”
The room erupted in laughter and applause. The rain outside continued, but the glumness in the room had lifted.
Chairman Dixon, however, insisted on the last word. “I have heard with infinite delight the remarks of the senator from Kentucky, and more especially those he has been pleased to address directly to myself, so just and so true,” he said. He nodded gravely, to underscore his seriousness. The gathered members quieted down. Dixon held them in silence. “The senator from Kentucky, at one time during his address, looked as if he was not in full earnest,” he went on. “But when you are as well acquainted with the senator as I am, you will give him full credit for sincerity for any remarks he may make before ten o’clock at night. After that there may be some doubts.”
The gathered lawmakers checked their watches, raised their glasses, and roared again.
CLAY RESIGNED HIS Senate seat in the spring of 1842 to rest, to tend to the affairs of Ashland and what remained of his law practice, and to ponder a final run at the presidency. He understood that in politics as in some other walks of life, familiarity can breed contempt. He guessed that the country might appreciate him more if he stepped off the stage for a time.
The strategy worked. Long before the regular campaigning in the 1844 election began, Clay was the only Whig anyone spoke of for the presidency. Henry Clay Clubs appeared in cities and towns across the country; members sung their favorite’s praises, endorsed his policies, and strove for his election. Twenty years he had sought the presidency; now he felt it surely within his grasp.
One thing alone might cause a stumble: Texas. Clay avoided the issue as much as possible. On a tour of the South in the first months of 1844 he talked about every subject but Texas. He initially averred a disinclination to discuss politics at all, saying his tour was simply a response to invitations from Southern friends to visit their fair states and cities. “A long cherished object of my heart is accomplished,” he told an audience in Raleigh. “I am at your capital and in the midst of you. I have looked forward to this, my first visit to North Carolina, with anxious wishes and with high expectations of great gratification.” His hopes had been more than fulfilled. “I did not expect to witness such an outpouring. I did not expect to see the whole state congregated together. But here it is!” He wouldn’t intrude on the good feeling by venturing into politics. “I have come with objects exclusively social and friendly. I have come upon no political errand. I have not come as a propagandist. I seek to change no man’s opinion, to shake no man’s allegiance to his party.”
Yet people had asked his views on various public matters. He would be impolite not to answer. He would make it short. “I am a Whig, warmly attached to the party which bears that respected name, from a thorough persuasion that its principles and policy are best calculated to secure the happiness and prosperity of our common country,” he said. He explained his party’s policies. He and the Whigs favored tariff protection for American industries. Protection strengthened the entire country, building up its industries, including the textile industry, the principal purchaser of Southern cotton. Clay had tracked changing sentiments in the South; he realized the region was less opposed to protection than it had been a decade earlier. Even so, he stressed that differences on this and other issues should be resolved by compromise rather than confrontation. “Extremes, fellow citizens, are ever wrong. Truth and justice, sound policy and wisdom always abide in the middle ground, always are to be found in the juste milieu. Ultraism is ever baneful and, if followed, never fails to lead to fatal consequences.” He advocated a national bank and a national currency. States were sufficient for many things, but not for the nation’s currency. “The several states can no more supply a national currency than they can provide armies and navies for the national defense.” As he did at every opportunity, Clay emphasized the need for Americans to resist the siren call of separatism. “This Union will not, must not, shall not be dissolved.”
On the subject of slavery and abolition, Clay said nothing new. He simply reminded his listeners of what he had already said. “My opinion was fully expressed in the Senate of the United States a few years ago, and the expression of it was one of the assigned causes of my not receiving the nomination as a candidate for the presidency.” Clay’s audience knew that his excoriation of the abolitionists had prompted the Whigs to nominate the uncontroversial Harrison. They wondered if he had softened his stand. He made clear he had not. He wouldn’t change a word of what he had said. He still judged the abolitionists a curse. If this view cost him the nomination again, he could live with that.
He intended to leave Texas alone. He might have succeeded if John Calhoun hadn’t forced the issue. Days before Calhoun’s Pakenham letter became the talk of Washington, Clay remarked to a friend, “I have found a degree of indifference or opposition to the measure of annexation which quite surprised me.” In an open letter written from Raleigh, Clay explained that he had not previously spoken on the Texas question because he saw no benefit from injecting that vexing topic into the current political discussion. But the news that the administration had signed a treaty of annexation made a comment imperative. Clay noted, in his Raleigh letter, that Mexico still claimed Texas and had recurrently tried to enforce its claim. “Under these circumstances, if the government of the United States were to acquire Texas, it would acquire along with it all the encumbrances which Texas is under, and among them the actual or suspended war between Mexico and Texas.” Prudence dictated that America keep its distance. “I certainly am not willing to involve this country in a foreign war for the object of acquiring Texas.” Yet even if Mexico consented to American annexation of Texas, Clay said, he would not support it. It would aggravate the already raw feelings between North and South. “I think it far more wise and important to compose and harmonize the present confederacy, as it now exists, than to introduce a new element of discord and distraction into it.” Annexation, moreover, would do grave harm to America’s reputation. “It would be to proclaim to the world an insatiable and unquenchable thirst for foreign conquest or acquisition of territory. For if today Texas would be acquired to strengthen one part of the confederacy, tomorrow Canada may be required to add strength to another.”
THE INITIAL RESPONSE to his Raleigh letter on Texas pleased Clay. He discounted flutters in Washington as part of the nervousness that afflicted the political classes there. “I feel perfectly confident in the ground which I have taken,” he declared to a friend. “I entertain no fears from the promulgation of my opinion. Public sentiment is every where sounder than at Washington.”
But public sentiment shifted during the spring and early summer of 1844. Its prime mover was Andrew Jackson. From his home outside Nashville, Jackson had followed the fortunes of Texas and of Sam Houston, the wayward protégé who had led Texas to independence and become president of the Texas republic. Houston favored the annexation of Texas to the United States but had grown frustrated by the refusal of the United States to take Texas in. He finally wrote a letter to Jackson explaining that if America continued to spurn Texas, Texas must make other arrangements. “My venerated friend, you will perceive that Texas is presented to the United States as a bride adorned for her espousal,” Houston said. “But if, now so confident of the union, she should be rejected, her mortification would be indescribable.” Texas would look elsewhere for aid. “She would seek some other friend.”
Houston knew that Jackson understood that the other friend was Britain. Houston also knew that Jackson abhorred Britain as much as ever, and that Jackson would move heaven and earth to keep Britain from gaining a foothold in Texas. Jackson responded as Houston supposed he would: he demanded that the Democratic party make annexation its first priority. Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s other protégé, had been the favorite to win the Democratic nomination for president, but Van Buren was waffling on Texas, not wishing to alienate Northerners. When Van Buren declined to declare for annexation, Jackson abruptly withdrew his support and threw it behind dark horse James K. Polk, a former governor of Tennessee. Jackson’s endorsement carried Polk to the Democratic nomination and set him on a platform that belligerently endorsed annexation.
Henry Clay had expected to run against Van Buren. The emergence of Polk compelled him to recalibrate his stance on Texas. “Personally I could have no objection to the annexation of Texas,” he wrote in an open letter on July 1. Readers of his Raleigh statement scratched their heads, for that document had given the distinct impression that he opposed annexation. “But I certainly would be unwilling to see the existing Union dissolved or seriously jeoparded for the sake of acquiring Texas,” he continued, placing his objection on policy grounds rather than personal preference. “If any one desires to know the leading and paramount object of my public life, the preservation of this Union will furnish him the key.”
By the end of July he had moved a bit more. “Far from having any personal objection to the annexation of Texas, I should be glad to see it, without dishonor—without war, with the common consent of the Union, and upon just and fair terms,” he said. This still left annexation a stretch, in that Mexico continued to threaten war, and many Northerners remained opposed. Clay tried to separate Texas from the broader slavery issue. “I do not think that the subject of slavery ought to affect the question, one way or the other. Whether Texas be independent, or incorporated in the United States, I do not believe it will prolong or shorten the duration of that institution. It is destined to become extinct, at some distant day, in my opinion, by the operation of the inevitable laws of population.” Under these circumstances, annexation might not be so bad after all. “It would be unwise to refuse a permanent acquisition, which will exist as long as the globe remains, on account of a temporary institution.” Again he cited his touchstone: “I should be governed by the paramount duty of preserving this Union entire and in harmony.”
AS BEFORE, CLAY found himself in the exposed middle. Polk’s expansionist platform united the Democrats by including a demand for the Oregon country to balance the demand for Texas. The former would make free states, the latter slave. The Whigs nominated Clay but lacked a comparably galvanizing platform. “My position is very singular,” Clay wrote in early September. “Whilst at the South I am represented as a liberty man, at the North I am decried as an ultra supporter of slavery, when in fact I am neither one nor the other.”
He tried to return the debate to less divisive ground. He talked up a national bank and a tariff with something for everyone. But he couldn’t escape Texas. Clay parried charges of having shifted his position. “Could I say less?” he asked a friend. “Can it be expected that I should put myself in opposition to the concurrent will of the whole nation, if such should be its will?” Unconvincingly he added, “I think any one who will take a fair and candid view of all my letters together must be satisfied with their import and perfectly convinced of their entire consistency.”
He strove to hearten his supporters. “The prospects of the Whig cause are very encouraging,” he wrote on September 19. But unflagging energy must be the rule. “Our opponents are every where making the most strenuous exertions and they ought to be met by countervailing efforts.”
Straws in the political wind showed a trend toward Polk, yet Clay continued to battle. “The great contest, fraught with such important consequences to our country, will now soon be decided,” he wrote to John Quincy Adams in the last week of October. “The elections of the current year have been remarkable for the closeness of the majorities which determined them. Still, if I am to judge of the final result by the information which I have received, the Whigs will succeed by a large electoral majority.”
IT WAS NOT to be. The Oregon plank of the Democratic platform appealed to voters in the westernmost states of the North, which were already sending settlers to the Willamette Valley, while Polk’s Texas demand guaranteed the support of the lower South. Clay’s middle position on slavery cost him votes in New York and Michigan, where he ended up losing by a few thousand votes each. Had these states tipped his way, they would have sufficed, with his victories in the upper South, mid-Atlantic and New England, to put him in the White House. Instead it was Polk, the newcomer to national politics, who won the office for which Clay had been so long striving.
He couldn’t conceal his disappointment. “The sad result of the contest is now known,” he wrote to William Seward, a New York Whig. “We are only left to deplore that so good a cause, sustained by so many good men, has been defeated.” The Whigs had struggled mightily, and they had lost. “As for myself, it would be folly to deny that I feel the severity of the blow most intensely.” His career’s goal, which had been so close, was suddenly beyond reach, probably forever. “My duty now is that of resignation and submission, cherishing the hope that some others more fortunate than myself may yet arise to accomplish that which I have not been allowed to effect.”