Henry Clay

August 10, 2015
In this nimble portrayal of “the first true American leader,” prolific biographer Unger (John Marshall) depicts Clay as a consummate politician and a champion of the union. Clay was born in Virginia in 1777. As an ambitious young man, he moved west to Kentucky to set up a law practice. Counseling Aaron Burr through high-profile legal troubles burnished Clay’s reputation; by 1806 the Kentuckian was on his way to the nation’s capital, where over the next few decades he served first in the House, then in the Senate. Unger deftly packs nearly a half-century’s worth of political leadership into this slender volume: Clay’s hawkishness during the War of 1812, his creation of the American System to promote a national economy, his several failed attempts to win the presidency, and his long feud with Andrew Jackson. Clay maintained an unassailable belief in union that enabled him to smooth over sectional differences caused by slavery, engineering the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and then the Compromise of 1850. While Clay lived, the union held. Two years after his death in 1852, Congress repealed the Missouri Compromise; in 1861 the country plunged into the Civil War, which Clay worked so hard to avoid. Unger’s political biography layers a veneer of stability over a tumultuous and divisive time in American history. Illus.