Henry Clay

What survives of Clay on paper is the working record of a career in Congress: speeches on the tariff and the American System, the compromise resolutions of 1850, addresses to the American Colonization Society, and a defence of his own conduct after the disputed election of 1824. Clay of Kentucky was Speaker of the House, Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams, and a senator across three decades. He assembled the settlements of 1820, 1833 and 1850 that held the union together and postponed the war, which earned him the name of Great Compromiser, and he ran for president three times without winning. He argued for a national bank, protective tariffs, and roads and canals paid for federally. He also held people in slavery while presiding over a society whose plan was to resettle free Black Americans in Liberia, and both of those sit in the record he left.