Henry Clay, Sr. (April 12, 1777 – June 29, 1852) was a nineteenth-century American statesman and orator who represented Kentucky in both the House of Representatives and Senate. He served as Secretary of State from 1825 to 1829. He was a dominant figure in both the First Party System and the Second Party System. Known as "The Great Compromiser" and "The Great Pacifier" for his ability to bring others to agreement, he was the founder and leader of the Whig Party and a leading advocate of programs for modernizing the economy, especially tariffs to protect industry from international competition, a national bank, and internal improvements to promote canals, ports and railroads. He was a leading war hawk and, according to historian Clement Eaton, was "more than any other individual" responsible for the War of 1812.[1] Clay was also called "Henry of the West" and "The Western Star."[2] Although his multiple attempts to become president were unsuccessful, to a large extent he defined the issues of the Second Party System. He was a major supporter of the American System, and had success in brokering compromises on the slavery issue, especially in 1820 and 1850. He was part of the "Great Triumvirate" or "Immortal Trio," along with his colleagues Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. In 1957, a Senate committee chaired by John F. Kennedy named Clay as one of the five greatest senators in U.S. history.[3] In his early involvement in Illinois politics and as a fellow Kentucky native, Abraham Lincoln was a great admirer of Clay.[4] Henry Clay was born on April 12, 1777, at the Clay homestead in Hanover County, Virginia in a story-and-a-half frame house, an above average home for a Virginia farmer of the time.[5] He was the seventh of nine children of the Reverend John Clay and Elizabeth Hudson Clay.[6] His father, a Baptist minister called "Sir John," died four years later (1781).[5] He left Henry and his brothers two slaves each and his wife eighteen slaves and 464 acres (1.88 km2) of land.[7] She soon married Capt. Henry Watkins, who proved himself to be an affectionate stepfather to Clay. Elizabeth had seven children with Watkins to add to the nine she had with John Clay.[7] When Henry was six, three of his young cousins were killed in an Indian attack on Clover Bottom, now the Shawnee Lake section of Mercer County, West Virginia, with one child shot, another viciously stabbed to death and the other taken to Chillicothe, Ohio to be burned at the stake. Clay received an elementary education from Peter Deacon, a British teacher.[7] He was then hired as a shop assistant in Richmond, Virginia. He was hired after his family had relocated to Versailles, Kentucky to run a tavern,[7] leaving Clay to be raised and educated by a boy's club. His stepfather later secured Clay employment in the office of the Court of Chancery, where he displayed an adeptness for understanding the intricacies of law.[8] Here he became friends with George Wythe.[8], who was hampered by a crippled hand and chose Clay to be his secretary because of his neat handwriting.[8] While Clay was employed as Wythe's amanuensis, the chancellor took an active interest in Clay's future and arranged a position for him with the Virginia attorney general, Robert Brooke. Clay received a formal legal education at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, studying under George Wythe. Under Brooke, Clay prepared for the bar, to which he was admitted in 1797. Seeking to establish a lucrative law practice, Clay relocated in November 1797 to Lexington, Kentucky, near where his family then resided in Woodford County. He soon established a reputation for his legal skills and courtroom oratory.[9] Some of his clients paid him with horses and with land. Clay came to own town lots and the Kentucky Hotel. His father-in-law, Colonel Thomas Hart was an early settler of Kentucky and a prominent businessman. Clay became manager of Hart's legal workings.[10] In 1803, as a representative of Fayette County in the Kentucky General Assembly, Clay focused his attention mostly on trying to move the State capital from Frankfort to Lexington. He also worked diligently to defend the Kentucky Insurance Company, which he saved from an attempt in 1804 by Felix Grady to repeal its monopolistic charter.[11] In 1806, United States District Attorney Joseph Hamilton Daviess indicted Aaron Burr for planning an expedition into Spanish Territory west of the Mississippi River. Clay and John Allen successfully defended Burr. Some years later Thomas Jefferson convinced Clay that Daviess had been right. Clay was so upset by this that many years later when he met Burr again, Clay refused to shake his hand.[12] Clay's influence in Kentucky state politics was great enough for him to be selected by the Kentucky legislature to serve as United States Senator for two short terms (1806-7 and 1810-11), completing the unexpired terms of John Adair, who had to resign his seat for his alleged part in the Burr Conspriacy and Buckner Thruston, who resigned to serve as a judge on the United States Circuit Court. Interestingly, Clay was below the constitutionally appointed age of thirty when elected to his first term as U.S. Senator in 1806. On April 11, 1799 Clay married Lucretia Hart at the Hart home in Lexington, Kentucky. She was a sister to Captain Nathaniel G. T. Hart, who died in the Massacre of the River Raisin in the War of 1812.[10] Clay and his wife had eleven children (six daughters and five sons): Henrietta (1800), Theodore (1802), Thomas (1803), Susan (1805), Anne (1807), Lucretia (1809), Henry, Jr.(1811), Eliza (1813), Laura (October 1815), James Brown (1817), and John (1821). Seven of Clay's children preceded him in death. By 1835 all six daughters had died of varying causes from whooping cough to yellow fever to complications of childbirth, and Henry Clay Jr. was killed at the Battle of Buena Vista during the Mexican-American War. His wife Lucretia died in 1864 at the age of 83 and is interred with her husband in the vault of his monument at the Lexington Cemetery. Clay was a second cousin of abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay and the great-grandfather of suffragette Madeline McDowell Breckinridge. On January 3, 1809, Clay introduced to the Kentucky General Assembly a resolution requiring members to wear homespun suits rather than British broadcloth. Only two members voted against the patriotic measure. One of them was Humphrey Marshall, an "aristocratic lawyer who possessed a sarcastic tongue" and who had been hostile toward Clay in 1806 during the trial of Aaron Burr. Clay and Marshall nearly came to blows on the Assembly floor and Clay challenged Marshall to a duel. The duel took place on January 9 in Shippingport, Indiana. They each had three turns. Clay grazed Marshall once, just below the chest. Marshall hit Clay once in the thigh.[13] In the summer of 1811 Clay was elected to the United States House of Representatives. He was chosen Speaker of the House on the first day of his first session, something never done before or since. During the fourteen years following his first election, he was re-elected five times to the House and to the speakership.[14] Before Clay's entrance into the House, the position of Speaker had been that of a rule enforcer and mediator. Clay turned the speakership into a position of power second only to the President of the United States. He immediately appointed members of the War Hawk faction (of which he was the "guiding spirit"[1]) to all the important committees, effectively giving him control of the House, quite a maneuver for a 34-year-old House freshman. The War Hawks, mostly from the South and the West, resented British violation of U.S. maritime rights and treatment of U.S. sailors. They advocated for a declaration of war against the British.[15] As the Congressional leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, Clay took charge of the agenda, especially as a "War Hawk," supporting the War of 1812 with the British Empire. Later, as one of the peace commissioners, Clay helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent and signed it on December 24, 1814. In 1815, while still in Europe, he helped negotiate a commerce treaty with Great Britain. Also during his early House service, he strongly opposed the creation of a National Bank, in part because of his personal ownership in several small banks in his hometown of Lexington. Later he changed his position and gave strong support for the Second National Bank when he was seeking the presidency. Henry Clay's tenure as Speaker of the House shaped the history of Congress. Evidence from committee assignment and roll call records shows that Clay's leadership strategy was highly complex and that it advanced his public policy goals as well as his political ambition. [Strahan et al. 2000] Henry Clay helped establish the American Colonization Society, a group that wanted to send freed African American slaves to Africa and that founded Monrovia in Liberia for that purpose. Clay said concerning the amalgamation of the black and white races that "The God of Nature, by the differences of color and physical constitution, has decreed against it."[16] Clay presided at the founding meeting of the ACS on December 21, 1816, at the Davis Hotel in Washington, D.C. Attendees also included Robert Finley, James Monroe, Bushrod Washington, Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key, and Daniel Webster. Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun helped to pass the Tariff of 1816 as part of the national economic plan Clay called "The American System," rooted in Alexander Hamilton's American School. Described later by Friedrich List, it was designed to allow the fledgling American manufacturing sector, largely centered on the eastern seaboard, to compete with British manufacturing. After the conclusion of the War of 1812, British factories were overwhelming American ports with inexpensive goods. To persuade voters in the western states to support the tariff, Clay advocated federal government support for internal improvements to infrastructure, principally roads and canals. These internal improvements would be financed by the tariff and by sale of the public lands, prices for which would be kept high to generate revenue. Finally, a national bank would stabilize the currency and serve as the nexus of a truly national financial system.