Speech of Mr. Clay, of Kentucky, on the Resolution to Expunge a Part of the Journal for the Session of 1833-1834

This pamphlet collects another of Henry Clay’s many Senate speeches in support of legislative resolutions he had introduced before the chamber. Clay was a master of the major public speech as a political tool, and his Senate addresses ran across decades of American legislative history, taking up nearly every major issue that confronted the antebellum republic. The pattern of introducing resolutions and then defending them through formal addresses gave Clay the platform he needed to articulate the Whig political vision he had helped to construct.

The particular resolutions referenced in this speech would have addressed whatever the most pressing political issue happened to be at the time of delivery. Clay’s major Senate addresses 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. His speeches in support of his various legislative packages were often the most consequential public communications of his political life.

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 the package is preferable to the alternatives. The compromise speeches in particular have continued to be studied by historians as examples of how a legislator could thread a needle between sectional positions that seemed irreconcilable on their face.

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.