Henry Clay

His father was a Baptist preacher the neighbors called Sir John, and when he died in 1781 he left each of his sons two enslaved people. British troops raided the house soon after. Clay's mother remarried and took the family west to Kentucky in 1791 without him, leaving the boy behind a Richmond shop counter on the promise of a clerkship. He got it, at the Virginia Court of Chancery, where his penmanship caught the eye of George Wythe. Wythe's writing hand was crippled and he needed someone to hold the pen for him. Clay did it for four years, read law under him and then under the state attorney general, took the bar in 1797, and rode for Lexington at 20.

The House of Representatives made him Speaker the moment he arrived in 1811 — 34 years old, a brand-new member, and one of only two men ever handed the chair that way. He held it for most of a decade and rebuilt it into an office with real leverage over legislation. Secretary of State followed, then four separate terms in the Senate, then three defeats for the presidency. BriefHistory carries the bargains he brokered and what they bought the country. What is left over is the household and the plantation that paid for the career.

He and Lucretia Hart had 11 children. All six daughters were dead by 1835, the last two as young mothers. Henry Jr. was killed commanding a regiment at Buena Vista in 1847, in a war his father privately called immoral. Theodore, the eldest son, spent the back half of his life in a psychiatric hospital. And Clay held people in bondage from childhood to death — 122 of them at Ashland over his lifetime — while writing that slavery in Kentucky was slavery in its mildest form and still slavery. Charlotte Dupuy sued him for her freedom in 1829, lost, and was sent to New Orleans away from her family before he freed her. Around 1836 he had Esther Harvey and her son sold south, the wife and child of Lewis Hayden, who escaped and became a Boston abolitionist.

Tuberculosis killed him in his room at the National Hotel in Washington on June 29, 1852, and he became the first person to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda. His headstone at Lexington Cemetery reads: I know no North, no South, no East, no West. The Whig Party he built collapsed within four years. Lincoln called him his ideal of a great man and took the economic program whole. Sixteen counties carry his name, plus a submarine and a town in Liberia settled by people freed out of Kentucky. A 1986 survey of historians ranked him the greatest senator in American history. Ashland, a National Historic Landmark, has rebuilt its tours around the people enslaved there.

Henry Clay's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Treaty of Ghent other
  Negotiated as one of the American commissioners ending the War of 1812 1814
• American Colonization Society company
  Founded to settle free Black Americans in West Africa 1816
• Missouri Compromise law
  The first of the sectional bargains he engineered 1820
• Compromise Tariff law
  Written with John C. Calhoun to end the Nullification Crisis 1833
• Compromise of 1850 law
  His last, carried by Stephen Douglas after Clay left the floor exhausted 1850
• Ashland building
  The Lexington estate, now a National Historic Landmark 1806

• 1781 aged ~4 His father dies and leaves each son two enslaved people The widow received 18 more and 464 acres. British troops raided the house shortly afterward.
• 1797 aged ~20 Admitted to the Virginia bar and leaves for Lexington, Kentucky He had spent four years as George Wythe's secretary and amanuensis.
• April 11, 1799 aged 21 Marries Lucretia Hart at her father's house in Lexington
• January 19, 1809 aged 31 Duels Humphrey Marshall and both men are hit Neither was killed. Clay fought a second duel, with John Randolph, in 1826.
• November 4, 1811 aged 34 Elected Speaker of the House as a first-term member, at 34
• March 4, 1825 aged 47 Becomes Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams Jacksonians called the appointment a corrupt bargain and never let it go.
• 1829 aged ~52 Charlotte Dupuy sues him for her freedom in Washington She worked for wages for 18 months while the case ran. Clay won it.
• 1847 aged ~70 His son Henry Jr. is killed at the Battle of Buena Vista
• June 29, 1852 aged 75 Dies of tuberculosis and is the first to lie in state in the rotunda

• Andrew Jackson 1767–1845
  Seventh President whose populist policies and Indian Removal Act left a deeply contested legacy. rival
• John Quincy Adams 1767–1848
  Diplomat, sixth president, and later congressman who opposed slavery’s expansion and shaped early American foreign policy. served as his Secretary of State
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. called him his ideal of a great man
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. denounced his colonization plan
• Zachary Taylor 1784–1850
  War hero elected twelfth president who opposed extending slavery into western territories. broke with him over the Compromise of 1850
• Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811–1896
  Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin whose novel galvanized the abolitionist movement. wrote against the institution he defended