ANDREW JACKSON’S PARTING gift to Martin Van Buren was the White House. The New Yorker coasted to victory in the 1836 election on the residual popularity of the hero of New Orleans. The opposition Whigs did themselves no favors by adopting the novel strategy of putting four separate candidates before the voters, hoping to garner enough electors from the different parts of the country to deny Van Buren a majority and then to defeat him when the contest went to the House of Representatives. Daniel Webster was the New England candidate of the Whigs, but he carried only his home state of Massachusetts. Ohio’s William Henry Harrison, the frontier general from the War of 1812, ran strongest among the Whigs, winning seven states. But the Whig total fell short of Van Buren’s fifteen states and 170 electoral votes, and the vice president became president. The Whigs learned that divide-and-conquer didn’t work when their own party was the one divided.
Van Buren’s prize was soon spoiled by a delayed effect of Jackson’s war on the Bank of the United States. State banks, flush with the deposits Jackson took from the national bank, had expanded credit rapidly, inflating a speculative bubble in Western lands. Jackson before leaving office felt obliged to restrain the speculation and issued an order—the “specie circular”—requiring that federal lands be paid for in gold or silver. The land bubble burst, and a panic seized the nation’s finances in 1837. When the trouble spread to the larger economy during the next several months, millions suffered from foreclosures, layoffs and evictions. Voters turned against Van Buren and the Democrats, giving Whigs reason to believe that 1840 could be their year to elect a president.
HENRY CLAY TOOK the lead in the early going. His loss to Jackson in 1832 was a distant memory, and he had spent much of the time since then trying to unify the Whigs. Daniel Webster had shown he was a regional candidate at best, and William Harrison’s military record hadn’t exactly carried voters away. Clay was hopeful, if cautious. “My friends are very sanguine about my election to the next presidency, and with reason, if I am to credit the information which daily reaches me,” he wrote to his son James in early 1838. “But I strive to prevent my feelings being too much enlisted in the subject.” He avoided contentious topics like Texas. “I do not think that the question of annexation is one that ought to be considered or entertained at all, during the existence of war between Mexico and Texas,” he told his New York friend Peter Porter. Mexico had not yet acknowledged its loss of Texas, and it occasionally conducted military raids into what it deemed its renegade province. “I would not for a moment consent to involve this country in war to acquire that country,” Clay continued. “Nor, if its independence were acknowledged by Mexico, and peace were established between them, would I concur in incorporating Texas in this confederacy, against the decided wishes of a large portion of it”—of America. “I think it is better to harmonize what we have than to introduce a new element of discord into our political partnership, against the consent of existing members of the concern.”
His caution paid off. “If I am to judge from information which daily, almost hourly, reaches me, there is every where an irresistible current setting in towards me,” Clay wrote to his son Henry in March 1838. “I believe that if the election were to come on in sixty days I should be elected by acclamation.” Yet he realized that the election was not sixty days away. “The election is nigh three years off, great changes may take place, I may die, and therefore we should look to the future with all the uncertainty which hangs over it.”
John Calhoun’s deepening sectionalism and his radical defense of the morality of slavery had largely eliminated the South Carolinian from serious contention for the presidency, but Clay sought to isolate him further, lest he inhibit the pro-Clay groundswell. Clay lashed Calhoun for embracing in Van Buren policies he had opposed in Jackson, starting with an endorsement of the Democratic administration’s preference for state banks over a national bank. “I handled Mr. Calhoun without gloves,” Clay boasted to Nicholas Biddle. To a claim by Calhoun that nullification had overthrown the protective tariff and ended the crisis of 1833, Clay responded with scorn. “Nullification, Mr. President, overthrew the protective policy?!” he declared mockingly in the Senate. “No, sir! The compromise was not extorted by the terror of nullification….It was a compassionate concession to the imprudence and impotency of nullification! The danger from nullification itself excited no more apprehension than would be felt by seeing a regiment of a thousand boys, of five or six years of age, decorated in brilliant uniforms, with their gaudy plumes and tiny muskets, marching up to assault a corps of 50,000 grenadiers, six feet high.”
When Calhoun responded with a blistering counterattack, Clay congratulated himself on a job well done. “I believe in private life he is irreproachable,” he said of Calhoun to an associate. “But I believe he will die a traitor or a madman. His whole aim, and the tendency of all his exertions of late, is to sow the seeds of dissension between the different parts of the Union, and thus to prepare the way for its dissolution. His little clique, distinguished more by activity and paradoxes than by numbers, is now busily endeavoring to propagate the notion that all the operations of the federal government, from the commencement, have been ruinous to the South, and aggrandizing to the North. This, although 40 years of the 48 during which the government has existed, have Southern men directed the course of public affairs!”
Clay turned his attention to Daniel Webster. In letters and conversations, including conversations with Webster, Clay said that the Massachusetts senator should eliminate himself from presidential consideration lest the Whigs be as divided at the next election as they had been at the last. Webster resisted. “I yesterday had a long interview and conversation with Mr. W.,” Clay reported to an ally in June 1838. “It was conducted throughout and terminated amicably; but he will do nothing at present in regard to withdrawing from the contest. I think he will ultimately be forced by his friends to adopt that course, but if he does he will embrace it slowly and sullenly. I shall avoid every thing on my part which might tend to produce a breach.” In another letter, Clay wrote, “The administration party is, beyond all doubt, prostrated. Nothing can continue it in power but the division among the Whigs as to their candidate for the presidency. Our division is now their only remaining strength. The people appear to be likely to remove that obstacle, by concentrating on one individual. Much, however, remains to be done.” And most of that could be done by Webster. “If Mr. W. were to retire (and I think his retirement would add strength to the cause and to his own high pretensions) all other difficulties would speedily vanish.”
When Webster continued to refuse to withdraw, Clay broadened his campaign. He treated Webster kindly in the Senate, not wishing to break Whig ranks in public. But he worked on Webster’s backers in private. “The partiality for Mr. W., and the admiration of his abilities, in your quarter are quite natural,” he wrote to a New England friend, who was a friend of Webster as well. “The same admiration extends everywhere. It is nevertheless perfectly manifest that he cannot be elected president at the next election. If I were withdrawn, Harrison would sweep every thing before him. I think then it is best for Mr. W. to retire from a position which, whilst it exhibits us divided and thereby encourages our opponents and discourages our friends, can lead to no issue favorable to himself. It is best for him and best for the common cause. It would be regarded as a measure of great magnanimity, and his praises would be generally sounded. It could not fail to redound to his benefit hereafter.” And it would solve the party’s problem—and Clay’s. “The feelings at the North, now stifled, would burst forth, and General H.’s friends would perceive the utter hopelessness of his remaining in the field. In six months from Mr. W.’s retirement, the whole matter would be finally settled.”
AN UNEXPECTED EVENT in September 1838 dealt Clay’s plans a blow. The Whig slate in Maine elections lost to the Democrats. State and local elections in those days were the closest thing to public opinion polls, and members of Clay’s party searched their souls to discover where they had failed. The Boston Atlas, a Whig paper, opined that the party needed to promote a popular hero, a Jackson-like character who could bring out the masses. The only Whig hopeful who approximated Jackson was Harrison. Clay had been tested at the polls in 1832 and been found wanting. Webster in 1836 had done even worse. “There remains, then, only General Harrison,” the paper declared.
Clay rejected the diagnosis and the prescription. He denied any responsibility for the Whig defeat in Maine. He thought the Atlas editor had an agenda he wasn’t sharing. “I am mortified, shocked, disgusted with the course of some men,” Clay said. “I had hoped for better things of them.” He suspected Webster of spurring the paper—published in Webster’s hometown—to this gambit. Without explicitly accusing Webster of guiding the editor’s hand, Clay cast strong aspersion. “Putting all circumstances together,” he remarked to a friend, “without an explicit disavowal from him, the conviction will be irresistible that his views and wishes have not been overlooked.”
WEBSTER KEPT MUM, and Clay became convinced he had connived in the editorial. Yet the heart of Clay’s problem was not what Webster did or didn’t do; it was what he himself wouldn’t or couldn’t do about the most controversial issue of the day. Even while he worked to get Webster to drop out of the race, Clay received a letter from Lewis Tappan, a New York merchant converted to abolitionism. “An opportunity exists for you to render a service to your country and to mankind such as you have never known,” Tappan said. Henry Clay should come out for emancipation. Tappan granted that there would be political risks for Clay. But the rewards to his reputation and to his place in the hearts of his compatriots would more than offset his losses. “To be the man who, at this junction, would nobly stand forth as the champion of human rights would be a greater honor than any of our countrymen has yet attained. If I mistake not, his contemporaries in his own country would acknowledge the wisdom of his course—certainly the wise and good in all lands would name him with gratitude—and success would attend his efforts. What is the reputation of a Jefferson, or Madison, or Franklin compared with the reputation such a man would acquire?”
Clay didn’t respond at once. He realized that what he said would alienate either New England or the South, and possibly both. He needed to choose his words with care. “I hope that you will believe that my omission to answer earlier your last favor has not proceeded from any intention to treat you with the slightest disrespect,” he finally wrote, a month after receiving Tappan’s letter. “The subject of your letter is one on which we unfortunately differ in opinion, and ascribing to you the same good motives which I claim for myself, I apprehend that there is no prospect of reconciling our conflicting opinions. I most conscientiously believe that the Northern agitation of the question of abolition is productive of no good. I believe it injurious to the unfortunate black race and hazardous to the harmony, peace and union of the whites. I am sure that you can not view the matter in the same light. But with our opposite sentiments, it has not appeared to me profitable to enter upon a discussion, for which indeed I have no time, and which is not likely to lead to any useful result.”
Clay told another abolitionist, James Birney, that the abolitionists were making emancipation more difficult. He cited his own state, Kentucky, which had pondered a convention to consider phased emancipation. The convention never happened. “It is my clear conviction that a decision against a convention was mainly produced by agitation of the question of abolition at the North,” Clay wrote. “I will not say that without that agitation this state was ripe for gradual emancipation, but it was rapidly advancing toward that point. We are thrown back fifty years.”
Clay hoped that his middle position—between radical opponents of slavery like Tappan and Birney and radical apologists for slavery like John Calhoun—would suit the majority of Americans who similarly eschewed extremes. But that majority didn’t find itself under the scrutiny Clay did, and didn’t suffer the simultaneous attacks he endured. “The abolitionists are denouncing me as a slaveholder, and slaveholders as an abolitionist,” he remarked wryly to a friend.
THIS MIDDLE POSITION might win him the nomination. Then again, it might not. Nearly everyone in the Whig party acknowledged Clay’s talents and experience; most felt gratitude for the compromises he had secured on the Union’s behalf. But the longer the economic hard times in the country lasted, and the more likely a Whig victory in the next election appeared, the more the party leaders determined to get behind the least controversial candidate. William Harrison had served in Congress from Ohio and been territorial governor of Indiana, but he had avoided the major controversies of the era and was shrewd enough to rest on the laurels of his military service.
Clay observed the trend yet tried to explain it away. The Anti-Masonic party met in November 1838 and nominated Harrison for president and Webster for vice president. The decision didn’t commit the Whigs in any way, but its logic reflected thinking like that of the Whig leaders. Clay waved it off. “The nomination has fallen still born,” he wrote dismissively. “It will work directly in the opposite way from that which was intended. Prudence alone suppresses the public expression of the indignation which it has excited in the Whigs.” Even so, Clay was candid enough to acknowledge that things weren’t going as he had planned. “Our cause is surrounded by embarrassments,” he said of the Whigs. “These are chiefly to be traced to our divisions which constitute our weakness, as they do the hopes of our adversaries.”