Henry Clay (1777–1852) was born in Hanover County, Virginia. He read law and moved to Kentucky in 1797. An eloquent speaker, he represented Kentucky in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate for most of the rest of his life. Clay’s appointment as secretary of state was controversial.
Clay had run for the presidency in 1824, but there were multiple candidates and he came in fourth. As there was no clear majority in the electoral college, the top three candidates were to be voted on in the House of Representatives, where Clay held influence as Speaker. Clay lent his support to John Quincy Adams, bypassing Andrew Jackson, who had come in first, and when Adams won the presidency, he immediately named Clay his secretary of state, a position that had often, in the past, led to the presidency. Jackson’s supporters called the arrangement a “corrupt bargain.”
Clay did have diplomatic experience. A decade earlier he had been one of the commissioners in Ghent who negotiated a peaceful conclusion to the War of 1812 with Britain. As secretary, he oversaw the settlement of twelve commercial treaties and developed economic ties with the newly independent Latin American republics. Although he encountered setbacks in disputes with Mexico over Texas—the remote Mexican province where Americans were settling—and with Britain over Oregon, his emphasis on U.S. economic expansion was a forerunner of modern U.S. diplomacy.
After his tenure, Clay returned to the U.S. Senate from 1831 to 1842 and from 1849 to 1852. His fame as “The Great Compromiser” came from his political success in working out settlements in the Missouri Compromise of 1820–21, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, and the Compromise of 1850 that attempted to settle the issue of slavery in the territories.