Clay claimed to be “mortified” at Harrison’s rebuke. The president’s resistance left him fuming, unsure of how he could direct the Whigs from the sidelines. The men eventually reached an uneasy accommodation, but it was short-lived. The sixty-eight-year-old Harrison died suddenly after only a month in office. In his place stood John Tyler, the first vice president to ascend into office upon the death of his predecessor.40
The new president was determined to step out of Harrison’s shadow and demonstrate his independence. If Clay had experienced troubles with Harrison, Tyler was even worse. Initially, though, the relationship between the two men appeared promising. Harrison had called the special session of Congress that Clay had requested. With Harrison dead, the session continued. President Tyler signed a measure repealing Van Buren’s Independent Treasury Act, which had allowed the government to conduct financial transactions through the U.S. Treasury and sub-treasuries in the absence of a national banking and financial systems. Clay had urged the repeal as the first step in rechartering a national bank. Congress passed a bill creating the new bank, as Clay recommended, but Tyler vetoed the measure, arguing that the bank was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court had held that the bank was constitutional, and the original institution had existed for four decades. No matter; Tyler was a strict constructionist, and apparently something of a contrarian. Tyler vetoed a compromise measure as well.41
Clay was upset at what he believed to be the new president’s impetuosity. Consequently, Tyler and Clay became locked in a battle for leadership of the Whigs. Despite their standoff, Congress and the president managed to enact part of the Whig agenda. They passed the Preemption Act of 1841, which allowed settlers derisively known as “squatters” on government-owned lands the right to purchase 160-acre homesteads at a minimum price without going through an auction. Tyler also signed a bill that allowed for bankruptcy protection for individuals, a relief measure aimed to alleviate suffering brought on by the Panic of 1837.
Tyler’s resistance to the Whigs’s efforts to increase the protective tariff further exacerbated his rift with Henry Clay. After the president vetoed several bills to raise the tariff, he signed a measure to retain the lower level. He also pocket-vetoed a measure to continue a distribution program whereby states received revenue from land sales from which they could fund infrastructure projects and make other investments. It was clear that John Tyler, elected on a Whig platform, did not share the Whig ideology.42
Disgusted with the Faux-Whig incumbent, Clay anxiously looked to the 1844 presidential election. With Harrison dead and Webster sidelined—he had resigned as secretary of state a year earlier—the Kentucky senator was the only elected official with the gravitas to lead the party. Perhaps Tyler, already contemplating the creation of a third party, could be dumped and a faithful Whig—such as Clay himself—could be substituted in his place.
The political scene was changing fast by 1844. With the rise of anti-immigrant nativism and the pressure to annex Texas as part of the United States, the Whigs struggled to adapt. Clay sought to play to the party’s strengths by focusing on economic issues. In his view, the Whigs could point to strong policies that were helping the country recover from the 1837 recession. Whatever else it did, the party must avoid discussing Texas annexation, a subject that would anger one or another faction. Southerners wanted guarantees that Texas and other new territories would be open to the expansion of slavery while northerners resisted these efforts. Clay had already suffered political reversals over the slavery issue, and he was not willing to sacrifice his ambition again on the altar of freedom. Alas, after President Tyler negotiated an annexation treaty with Texas, Clay could not avoid the issue. He announced that he opposed annexation.43
Clay won the Whig presidential nomination in 1844, but his opposition to Texas annexation hurt him politically. He had expected to run against Martin Van Buren, who also opposed annexation, but, to his surprise, he faced the Democratic Party’s nominee, James Knox Polk, a dark horse candidate. Polk announced that he favored annexation. Clay found himself in an untenable position. He began to temper his opposition, which aggravated his supporters and yet failed to win new converts, most of whom had distrusted Clay for much of his political career. Clay’s track record simply was too long and well known. Polk, a relatively unknown politician despite having previously served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, promised that he would annex Texas and secure Oregon from Great Britain, thereby satisfying Americans who believed that territorial expansion was in the national interest. This concept became known as Manifest Destiny, the belief that American expansion across the continent was inevitable and justified. In this rapidly shifting terrain, the stodgy old-time politician, Henry Clay, lost to the more agile Polk in the general election. It was a close matter. Had a few thousand votes here and there swung the other way, Clay could have squeezed out a victory.44
Bitter and exhausted, he retired to his Kentucky estate to focus on his law practice and retire debts accumulated during his long public career. Clay remained vitally interested in national affairs, however, especially as the United States engaged in a war with Mexico over disputed territory. During the 1844 campaign, he had warned that Polk, if elected, probably would initiate a war with Mexico, and his prophecy came to pass. Clay’s own son died in the war, adding to the heartache of a personal life where many of his children did not live to old age.45
Late in 1847, Clay delivered a speech arguing against the war with Mexico and harshly criticizing President Polk. In his scathing indictment of the administration, Clay warned that acquiring land from Mexico would upset the balance between free states and slave states, which he thought unwise and potentially calamitous. Observers understood that Clay was now running for president in 1848. He was seventy years old and in ill health, apparently suffering from tuberculosis, a common nineteenth-century ailment. Yet, the Whigs had performed well in the midterm elections, and Clay thought he might have one more presidential campaign left in him. To clear up any ambiguity, he even offered a public statement that he would run for president. At the time, candidates were expected to be circumspect in their presidential ambitions; consequently, Clay’s frank admission of his political intent struck many voters, even Clay supporters, as unseemly.46
He had been in this position before. Once again, Henry Clay, his party’s most renowned and accomplished statesman, returned to the U.S. Senate, but he was denied the Whig presidential nomination. General Zachary Taylor, a general officer fresh off his victories in the Mexican War, won the nomination on the fourth ballot during the 1848 Whig National Convention. Having tried and failed to win the presidency so many times, Clay was bitter and disheartened by the loss. General Taylor went on to capture the presidency in the fall election, but he did so without Clay’s help. The grand old Kentucky gentleman did not stump for the Whig ticket that year.47
Clay again flirted with retirement, but he had one last issue to confront from his perch inside the Congress. Worried that slavery might tear the Union apart, he agreed to lead the U.S. Senate toward one final compromise. He initially remained on the sidelines while Taylor formed a cabinet and pursued a “nonaction” policy that allowed new territories to enter the Union without engaging in an extensive debate on slavery. Disgusted, Clay eventually sought middle ground to soothe tensions between northern and southern congressional representatives, but a suitable plan proved elusive. After President Taylor’s sudden death in 1850, however, the calculus changed. Clay began revamping a compromise measure to handle the lands ceded by Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which formally ended the war in 1848.48
Even before Taylor died, Clay had introduced a series of resolutions into the Senate to address the slavery question and reconcile northern and