Speech of Henry Clay, of Kentucky, on Certain Resolutions Offered to the Senate of the United States in December, 1837, by Mr. Calhoun, of South Carolina

This pamphlet contains another of Henry Clay’s many Senate speeches, this one delivered in support of a particular set of legislative resolutions that Clay was advocating before the chamber. The pattern of legislative resolutions and the formal speeches that introduced or defended them was a standard feature of antebellum Senate practice, and Clay was one of the most accomplished practitioners of the form. He used these set piece addresses to lay out his positions on the great questions of the day, to build coalitions across regional and partisan lines, and to defend his record from the political attacks that came from somewhere almost constantly.

Clay’s prose in his major speeches is in the formal nineteenth century rhetorical style, dense by modern standards but carefully constructed for oral delivery to a Senate chamber and for subsequent print circulation through the partisan press. The arguments tend to be substantive, with extensive citation of historical and constitutional precedent, and the rhetorical structures are designed to leave the reader or listener with a clear sense of what Clay is asking and why he believes it matters. The particular resolutions referenced in this pamphlet would have addressed whatever was the most pressing political question at the time of delivery.

The major Clay speeches across the 1830s and 1840s tend to take up the issues he was working on in Washington. The American System of protective tariffs, internal improvements, and the national bank. The slavery question and the various compromise proposals he was advocating. The relationship between the federal government and the states. The proper role of the United States in the world. Clay’s resolutions and his speeches in support of them shaped American political debate across his long career, and his pamphlets were read widely both in his own time and in the later decades when his Whig political legacy continued to influence American thought.

For students of antebellum American politics, of nineteenth century political oratory, of the Whig Party and the development of the Republican Party that grew out of its collapse, or of the long debates over slavery and union that culminated in the Civil War, Clay’s pamphlets are essential primary sources. This particular pamphlet is one of many similar documents that fill the volumes of his collected works.