The following post is part of a series on the rise and fall of the self-made man in American culture.
Stories like those of Franklin and
Hamilton dramatized the power of the American Revolution to transform the lives
of Founding Fathers, but they were hardly the only ones to benefit from the
changes it wrought. The most unvarnished form of possibility took the form of
territorial expansion, as the destruction of the Native American balance of
power with the French and English allowed Americans to push into places like
Ohio, Alabama and Florida. Washington described the United States as an “empire
for liberty,” but indigenous leaders from Pontiac to Osceola, who led military
resistance to such expansion, would no doubt agree that the nation was really
about liberty for empire. Nor were Native peoples consulted in the complex
string of real estate transactions that resulted in the Louisiana Purchase.
White Americans had vast new territories into which they could bring their
families – and in some cases, their slaves – for a quest in which geographic
lateral mobility became demographic upward mobility.
The Revolution’s aftermath loosened
political strictures as well, particularly in new states that in turn diluted
the power of Federalist elite, which controlled the U.S. government in the
first decade of the nation’s existence. By the 1830s, the elective franchise,
still largely limited to white men, was nevertheless the most expansive in the
world, laying the foundations for mass politics and modern political parties.
And then there was the transformation of
the economy. The opening of Samuel Slater’s water-powered mill in Pawtucket,
Rhode Island in 1790 marked the opening phase of the Industrial Revolution in
the United States. It’s important not to exaggerate its impact at the time –
the nation remained overwhelmingly agricultural, and it would be decades before
railroads, factories, and banks became facts of everyday life for ordinary
Americans – but the outlines for new vistas of opportunity (as well as new forms
of economic threats) were taking shape in ways that were increasingly apparent
to the people who experienced them.
As we’ve seen, Thomas Jefferson and
Andrew Jackson became vivid emblems of the self-made man in these
nation-building years. But as we’ve also seen, they were in some important
respects backward-looking, championing versions of the idea that were perceived
as in possible danger, sometimes giving their rhetoric a defensive tone.
Hamilton, by contrast, was forward-looking, at least in terms of his vision of
the American economy; he was comfortable with the idea of nation built on
manufacturing, banking, and urban concentration. The problem with the
Hamiltonian vision is that it lacked the democratic flavor, the egalitarian
tone, necessary for such ideas to thrive in the nation’s emerging political
culture – one in which flavor and tone may actually have mattered more than
content. The man who came closest to successfully addressing this problem in
the first half of the nineteenth century was one of the best known, and least
remembered, politicians in American history. His name was Henry Clay.
Like a lot of politicians of his era,
Clay puffed up his Everyman credentials, and like virtually all of them, his
claim on that status is relatively weak. He was born in 1777 to lower-tier
gentry in Virginia. After his father’s death, Clay’s mother remarried and
relocated the family to neighboring Kentucky – in those days the Virginia
frontier. The path westward had been blazed by the legendary Daniel Boone, the
son of Pennsylvania Quakers who had first explored the territory in the late
1760s amid the military tumult of the era (he fought in the French and Indian
War as well as the American Revolution). By the 1780s Boone had become a
leading figure in the territory, which quickly attracted sufficient population
to be admitted along with Vermont as the first two new states to follow the
original 13 colonies.
For much of his youth, however, Clay had
stayed behind in Virginia. His
stepfather procured a job for him as secretary to Jefferson’s old mentor,
George Wythe, who helped train Clay to become a lawyer. In 1797 he relocated
near the rest of the family in the rapidly growing town of Lexington, Kenucky,
where he settled down, married well, and started a large family. Clay was soon
renowned as one of the most effective attorneys in the state.
That’s not all he was renowned for. As
was common for a man of his station, Clay loved horses, whiskey and cards. His
vitality was matched by his social skills, which proved to be a major asset as
his true passion – politics – came into focus. Clay was elected to the Kentucky
legislature in 1803, and in turn elected by the legislature to finish out the
term of a U.S. senator. In order to take the job, which was for less than a
year, Clay had to sidestep some political complications. The first was his age:
he was only 29 at the time, months short of the Constitutionally mandated
minimum age of thirty. (Nobody seems to have noticed.) A bigger problem was
Clay’s decision to represent former vice-president Aaron Burr, who stood
accused of conspiracy in Kentucky for an alleged plot to foment war with
Mexico. Clay liked Burr and helped him get acquitted of that charge, which was
only one of a much more complex plot involving the creation of a rival republic
between the United States and Mexico. Clay was apparently unaware of the depths
of Burr’s machinations. But at the very least the optics were bad, given that
Clay was a staunch Jeffersonian and Jefferson hated Burr, notwithstanding their
shared hatred for the now-deceased Hamilton. Clay distanced himself from Burr
as soon as he decently could, averting disaster for his political career before
it had barely begun.
Even in this initial short-term role as
a Senator, Clay made a splashy impression. He was a favorite of First Lady
Dolly Madison and a fixture on the Washington social circuit. Clay returned to
Kentucky in 1807, and survived a duel of his own over an opponent’s mockery of
his proposal that members of the state House of Representatives, of which he
was now speaker, only wear suits made of homespun in protest of British naval
and commercial policies. In 1810 Clay was again chosen to fill the unexpired
term of a U.S. Senator. His ascent was effectively completed when, the following
year, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and promptly chosen
as Speaker of the House – a feat unequaled before or since. In 1813-14 he was
one of the key negotiators in forging the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of
1812. He and his colleagues typically finished a night of socializing just as
John Quincy Adams, the son of Founding Father John Adams, was getting up.
Clay came of age politically in a
transitional moment in American history. The Federalists were fading, but no
effective opposition to the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans had taken shape
during the administrations of Jefferson, James Madison, or James Monroe. Some
political tensions were generational, others regional, but they had not
solidified into new parties. One of Clay’s allies in this phase of his career
was his later rival, John Calhoun of South Carolina; the two were among the
leaders of the so-called War Hawks advocating a hard line with Britain.
In many respects, Clay was a mainstream
politician, but not all his views were quite in step with the majority of his
colleagues. Take his stand on slavery. Clay hailed from a slaveholding state,
and owned slaves himself. But he was among the charter members of the American
Colonization Society when it was founded in 1816. The ACS promoted the end of
slavery via the purchase of freedom for slaves and the establishment of an
American colony in West Africa, dubbed Liberia, where they could be
repatriated. Though antislavery, it was hardly an abolitionist organization; Jefferson
was another charter member of the club, which reflected the largely southern
orientation of antislavery activity in the early decades of the century. Nor
did it amount to much. Perhaps for that reason, Clay paid no serious price for
his public position on the issue. But it was not exactly a typical one.
The heart of Clay’s political identity
was his economic program, which attracted passionate followers but which also
sparked opposition. To put it simply, Clay became the public spokesman for the
self-made entrepreneur. Among the most important aspects of his vision was
support of the Bank of the United States, an institution founded by Hamilton in
1791 to serve as the repository of the nation’s financial assets and a source
of liquidity in the economy. Long hated by Old Republicans, its charter expired
in 1811. But Clay was at the forefront of the Madison administration’s effort
to revive it as part of a larger effort to spur national economic development.
He was also prominent in pushing for tariffs on foreign goods, which would make
them more expensive and thus promote American manufacturing as a lower-cost
alternative. Clay was hardly alone in advocating such measures; New England
allies like J.Q. Adams and Daniel Webster were part of this ideological
coalition, as was – for a little while longer – Calhoun, who by the 1830s
became the darling of the South Carolina plantation elite.
It is one of the ironies of antebellum
politics that while the Federalist faction led by Hamilton was dead by the
1820s, Hamilton’s ideas were resurrected within what was still a Jeffersonian
political universe, one in which even figures like the son of his old rival
Adams could operate comfortably as a diplomat in the Jefferson and Monroe
administrations. Perhaps even more ironic is that Clay, who came of age as a
staunch Jeffersonian, nevertheless became as a latter-day Hamiltonian. The
difference – and it was a key one – is that Clay embraced such policies without
the condescension and hostility that had characterized the Federalists. To be
sure, this didn’t win over everyone – Old Republican John Randolph complained
Clay “out-Hamiltons Hamilton.” [Heider 3077] But Clay’s social skills and
penchant for finding common ground gave him an effectiveness that would result
in his nickname “the Great Compromiser” – a moniker that was largely, though
not entirely, admiring.
Of course even allies compete. In 1824, Adams, Clay and
Calhoun all nursed presidential ambitions (Calhoun, who was the least
competitive, deferred his). But all three found themselves facing the
unexpectedly powerful candidacy of Andrew Jackson, who received the most votes
in the election, though not enough to clinch the Electoral College. Adams
prevailed in that tally, apparently because Clay threw his support in exchange
for appointment as Secretary of State (a move bitterly attacked by Jacksonians
as a “corrupt bargain”). In 1828 Jackson trounced Adams, and ushered in a new
era of American politics known as the Second Party System. Jackson’s political
coalition claimed the mantel of Jefferson and became known as the Democrats.
Clay became the leader of the
opposition, known as the Whigs, a name that harkened back to the reformist wing
of a British party that had provided much of the ideological justification for
the American Revolution. Though it was not solely his, Clay became famous for
articulating a program that would be forever associated with him and known as
“the American System.” The core idea involved the national integration of
sectional difference whereby the South would produce raw materials for Northern
industrial production. Meanwhile, high tariffs would product American
manufacturing, and finance the development of a national infrastructure of
roads, canals, and rail, stitching East to West (Clay, befitting his a home
state that still had a whiff of the frontier, was known also as “Great Harry of
the West”). Clay’s confrontation
with Andrew Jackson would culminate in an epic political fight over the Bank of
the United States, which Clay essentially dared Jackson to shut down, and which
Jackson did (thereby damaging the U.S. economy, though not until he had left
office).
What matters most for our purposes is a
speech that Clay, now back in the Senate, delivered in February of 1832 while
running for president. An epic three-day disquisition, “In Defense of the
American System” ranged widely over a series of topics, most of them too arcane
to be remembered. But at one point in his address, Clay uttered a sentence
invoking a phrase that became durably famous. “In Kentucky,” he said, “almost
every manufactory known to me is in the hands of enterprising self-made men,
who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor.”
What we have here is a turning point in
American history. It’s not simply Clay’s use of a term – whether or not he
coined it, “self-made man” would be forever associated with him – but also that
he was calling attention to, and promoting, a fundamental realignment of what
success meant in the United States. This becomes plain in the diplomatically
phrased ensuing sentences, which pointed to an emerging divide in the nation
(typified by the drift of his erstwhile ally Calhoun into an opposing camp).
“Comparisons are odious, and, but in defence, would not be made by me,” Clay
said, responding to perceptions of industrialists as representing a new breed
of economic tyrants. “But is there more tendency to an aristocracy in a
manufactory, supporting hundreds of freedmen, or in a cotton plantation, with
its not less numerous slaves, sustaining, perhaps, only two white families –
that of the master and the overseer?”[senate.gov]
In the years to come, such rhetorical questions would be the
bread and butter of Whig politicians. But again, Clay was a somewhat odd
standard-bearer of this new gospel. Whether or not every “manufactory” in
Kentucky was in the hands of self-made men, Clay’s home state was not, nor
would ever really be, an industrial heartland. Clay was the first American
politician to articulate a compelling basis for antislavery in the United
States – one rooted in economics rather than morality – but he remained a
lifelong slaveholder. Such elements in his background helped make him a
uniquely effective in brokering deals like the Compromise of 1820 (a.k.a. the Missouri
Compromise) and the Compromise of 1850, both of which forestalled a Civil War
relatively few Americans at the time regarded as desirable or inevitable. But
Clay’s tendency to split the difference and prevaricate – most vividly on
display in 1844, when he refused to take a clear stand on a Mexican War critics
regarded as a bonanza for slaveholders – undermined the sense of consistency
and trust that he needed to achieve his dream of becoming president, a quest in
he failed to attain in a total of four attempts between 1824 and 1844. By the
time of his death in 1852, the Whig Party had stretched to the point of
collapse over slavery. Dead in the South, it splintered into fragments in the
North, the various strands eventually coalescing in the formation of the
Republican Party in the 1850s.
As we all know, the Republicans would
come to be known as the party of private enterprise. But they began their life
in the body politic by promoting business as a civic activity supported and
sustained by government intervention. Perhaps more important, this emerging
business culture was justified in terms of the way it functioned as an
alternative to a plantation economy that turned inward, away from a government
it always regarded with suspicion, because government seemed like the only
force potentially great enough to take slavery away.
Hamilton and Clay, then, were prophets
of a new day. But the man who more than any other embodied not only the
emergence of a new economic order – the man who in the popular imagination
embodied the essence of the self-made man in the eyes of most Americans – was
Abraham Lincoln. In our day, the self-made man is typically conceived as a
private sector entrepreneur. But even those who see the archetype as a
fundamentally commercial one make room for Lincoln, who resounds through the
ages as the quintessential example of the poor boy made good, in just about
every sense of the term.
Next: A. Lincoln, Henry Clay man
