Jackson was sixty-five years old in 1832, and his health was declining. Many observers believed he would not seek a second term. With John Quincy Adams’s defeat in the 1828 election, Henry Clay had become the National Republicans’ leading figure. He looked to the 1832 election as yet another opportunity to ascend into the presidency. If he could succeed Jackson, perhaps he could undo some of Old Hickory’s more damaging policies.
Jackson surprised the field of potential candidates when he announced that he would seek a second term. The 1828 election had involved a splintering of the remnants of Jefferson’s old Democratic-Republicans. Four years later, the dissolution was complete, and new factions emerged. Jackson’s Democrats, formerly a loose association of pro-Jackson men, now formed into a recognizable political party favoring Jackson’s policies: opposition to the national bank, forcible removal of Native Americans from land in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, and opposition to proposals nullifying national laws.
Jackson’s opponents were disorganized. The Anti-Masonic Party, created to fight the spread of Freemasons, nominated a former attorney general, William Wirt, for president. The so-called Independent Party (the Nullifiers) nominated Virginia Governor John Floyd. Clay captured the National Republican nomination, but he worried that the presence of so many parties and candidates would allow Jackson to win a second term. He was right to be worried. When the votes were tallied, Jackson won 286 electoral votes, carrying 26 states, while Clay earned 49 electoral votes and carried 6 states. Wirt carried Vermont (7 electoral votes) and Floyd carried South Carolina (11 electoral votes).32
He had known disappointment in the presidential arena, but this loss was especially poignant because he tasted defeat at the hands of a bitter foe. Still smarting from the election, Clay settled back into his Senate career. He immediately faced a long-festering nullification crisis.
When Congress enacted the Tariff of 1828, southerners were upset because the measure appeared to protect northern factories at the expense of southern agricultural exports. Denouncing the “tariff of abominations,” southerners claimed the right to nullify national tariff laws and refused to enforce them. If the administration enforced the laws, southerners reserved the right to secede from the Union. Another tariff, enacted in 1832, only added to southerners’ anger. Although President Jackson was born and reared in the South and purported to be a champion of state rights, he would not acknowledge the right of a state or any of its citizens to nullify a law or secede from the Union. He promised to send troops into the South to enforce the law, if necessary. He would hang traitors, he said.
Henry Clay favored high tariffs and he recoiled from any talk of nullification or secession, but he feared that Jackson’s bellicose rhetoric only worsened the rift between North and South. Reaching out to John C. Calhoun, a South Carolinian who had started his career as a nationalist but appeared to be moving into the state rights camp, Clay again relied on his penchant for compromise to broker a deal. It appeared to be an unbridgeable chasm. For Clay to step away from a protective tariff after he had spent so much of his political career talking up the need to protect American manufacturing was almost unthinkable. Even more unimaginable was the notion that Calhoun, a stern man of principle, unyielding where the interests of the South were concerned, would agree to a compromise. Yet, something had to be done to cut the Gordian knot.33
The Compromise of 1833, coupled with the Force Bill allowing the president to enforce tariff collection, eased the crisis. Although the compromise tariff was similar to the tariff of 1832, it provided that all tariff rates above 20 percent would be reduced by a tenth every two years, with the final reductions amounting to 20 percent—the original rate—in 1842. The measure pleased everyone, and no one, as compromise measures often do. Southerners could claim that they successfully reduced tariff rates, albeit gradually, and northerners could brag that they refused to kowtow to southerners’ insistence on immediate tariff relief, and they were not intimidated by talk of nullification or secession.34
Despite his preference for compromise on large questions that might wreck the Union, Clay remained as fiercely partisan as ever. During an anti-Jackson speech in 1834, he likened his opposition to Jackson’s monarchical tendencies to the Whigs, a British political party famous for its criticism of monarchy. With the National Republicans essentially obsolete, Clay’s supporters gravitated to the notion of a Whig Party, and so they brought it to life.35
During these years, Clay contemplated retirement from elective office. He was almost sixty—a greatly advanced age at a time when life expectancy hovered around the late thirties or early forties—and he had suffered a series of personal misfortunes, including the death of his daughter, Anna. In fact, Clay was so despondent that he chose not to run for the presidency in 1836. Because Jackson was retiring and his hand-picked successor, Vice President Martin Van Buren, was hardly a formidable opponent, Clay might have eked out a victory in 1836, but he could not bring himself to enter the race.36
In his absence, the Whigs failed to unite behind a single presidential candidate. General William Henry Harrison ran in all free states except Massachusetts, as well as in the slave states of Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. Henry Lawson White, formerly a Jackson man, now realigned with Clay and the Whigs, ran for president in the remaining slave states, except for South Carolina. Senator Daniel Webster ran in Massachusetts, and North Carolina Senator Willie P. Mangum ran in South Carolina. With the wide array of Whigs splitting the party, Van Buren narrowly won the presidency.37
It would have been a good time to retire, but the Panic of 1837, a major recession that weakened Van Buren and the Democrats, convinced Clay that he should stay in Congress and ponder the future of the Whig Party a while longer. He sensed that he might have one more opportunity to grab the brass ring in the 1840 election. When party members suggested that the Whigs schedule a national convention, Clay agreed.
He knew that the nomination would not be his for the asking despite his eminence. Daniel Webster, another grand old man from the same era as Clay, initially appeared to be his strongest rival. Yet, he and Webster had been around so long that both men had collected numerous political enemies. It simply was not possible to lead a public life for decades and escape the growing animosity among the petty and the jealous. Antislavery men did not trust Clay; he was a slave owner and, in their view, too quick to compromise on matters of principle. Webster had the opposite problem. He was a darling of the New England Whigs, but men farther south feared that he was too beholden to abolitionists to be trusted in high office. William Henry Harrison, a military hero whose political views were not well known, maneuvered to grab the Whig nomination, denying Clay and Webster what each man believed to be his right.
In the fall election, Harrison defeated Van Buren—infantilized in a popular campaign song as “little Van . . . a used up man”—to become the first Whig president. Ceding leadership of the Whigs to a Johnny-come-lately was not easy for Clay. He was convinced that he could perform as president far better than Harrison, and Harrison knew of Clay’s opinion. Clay might have returned to the executive branch as secretary of state in the new administration—the president-elect had offered him any cabinet post he desired—but he would have none of it. He could not bring himself to serve a man he believed to be his inferior in every way. Instead, the post went to Daniel Webster.38
Even if he did not occupy a formal position in the Harrison regime, Clay, from his perch as a U.S. senator, expected the new president to resurrect