Henry Clay, nicknamed the Star of the West and the Great Compromiser, served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. Senator from Kentucky, but he’s less known today than he was in his own time and for most of the 20th century. Time often takes a toll on the famous, even when they’ve accomplished great deeds, but Clay, a moderate politician during the turbulent antebellum decades before the Civil War, should stand as one of our perennial American heroes because his efforts in the national government consistently brought the country back from the brink of disaster. Today, when compromise seems to be a bad word in politics, Clay lets us remember that the give and take of politics is precisely what keeps a democracy alive.
He was born in Virginia in 1777, less than a year after the Declaration of Independence. As a young man, he read law in Richmond and clerked for the famous attorney and scholar, George Wythe of Williamsburg, before moving to Kentucky. Later in life, he claimed humble origins for himself, but his father (who died young) and his mother (who later remarried) firmly belonged to the frontier class known as the middling sort.
In Kentucky, Clay practiced law with extraordinary skill and attracted clients who expanded his network of political contacts and social climbers among the elite of Lexington, the seat of Fayette County in the heart of the Bluegrass region. Soon he developed a reputation for hard work and hard play: he perfected his public speaking skills, modeling himself on Patrick Henry, wooed jurors to hand down verdicts in his clients’ favor, and relaxed by playing cards, gambling on horses, and drinking.
In 1799, he married Lucretia Hart, the daughter of one of Kentucky’s leading political figures. Marriage and the subsequent birth of 11 children did not slow him down—not in his work as an attorney nor as a carouser who enjoyed nothing more than a card game lasting into the wee hours of the morning and a glass of smooth Kentucky bourbon by his side. Friends and admirers called him “Prince Hal,” a reference to Shakespeare’s Henry V. When asked if she minded Clay’s gambling, Mrs. Clay replied coolly: “Oh! dear, no! He ’most always wins.” Meanwhile, while he wasn’t in card games or at the
