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Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants by [H. W. Brands]

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H. W. Brands

Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants Kindle Edition

by H. W. Brands (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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From New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracy

In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery.
Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal and political betrayal. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery.
They wrestled with these issues for four decades, arguing bitterly and hammering out political compromises that held the Union together, but only just. Then, in 1850, when California moved to join the Union as a free state, "the immortal trio" had one last chance to save the country from the real risk of civil war. But, by that point, they had never been further apart.
Thrillingly and authoritatively, H. W. Brands narrates an epic American rivalry and the little-known drama of the dangerous early years of our democracy.

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November 13, 2018
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Lively and learned . . . Brands has produced a narrative that pulsates vigorously . . . The three senators wear themselves out and all but die on the job, their respective causes still unresolved, their long public service having earned them fame, but not the political prize for which they most lusted: the presidency (though not for want of trying).”
—Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal

“A historical spellbinder . . . A lively, vivid, and thoroughly researched account of a time when discord gripped the nation and wouldn’t let go.”
—David Holahan, Christian Science Monitor

“Brands’s easy prose and superior, simple organization makes this work an engrossing, entertaining, and educating read on issues important then that echo today in the modern debate on the limits of federal government power.”
—Robert Davis, New York Journal of Books

“They were called ‘The Great Triumvirate’—three senators whose rivalries, alliances, and work in the tumultuous battles of the 19th century profoundly influenced the course of American history. H. W. Brands tells the story of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster with verve and clarity, reminding us of a bygone age when giants truly walked the floor of the United States Senate.”
—Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

“H. W. Brands has brought us a searching and excellent account of three legendary Americans whose leadership and rivalries did so much to shape the period of our history between that of the Founders and the Civil War. Heirs of the Founders should remind those of our own time how important Clay, Calhoun, and Webster are to the nation we live in today.”
—Michael Beschloss, author of Presidents of War

“H. W. Brands, with his characteristic combination of sweep and eye for detail, tells the story—always exciting, often inspiring, ultimately tragic—of the titans who tried to guide the handiwork of the Founding Fathers through the turbulent first half of the nineteenth century. He weaves a cautionary tale for our own time of troubles.”
—Richard Brookhiser, author of John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court

"Brands uses the life stories of three consequential early-19th-century American politicians—all with unfulfilled aspirations to become president—to show how tensions inherent in the founding fathers’ vision of the country led to the calamity of the Civil War . . . This fascinating history illuminates rifts that still plague the country today."
—Publishers Weekly

"An engrossing and revealing account of personal rivalries that played out on a national scale."
—Booklist

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

January 1950

The marvelous news from the West was the last thing Henry Clay had wanted to hear. Gold! Gold in California! It set the pulse of America racing; it sent a hundred thousand brave souls to that far-off land to make their fortunes. It hastened the day when the institutions of American democracy, and not merely the American flag, would be planted on the Pacific shore. And it meant that Henry Clay—aging, ailing Henry Clay—must leave Ashland, his home and refuge at Lexington, Kentucky, and once more make the long journey to Washington.

Five years he had been at home. Five years he had sought and eventually found solace from ambition definitively frustrated. He would never be president. The White House would never be more than a place for him to visit. No one had come closer to its portal more often than he. No one had a better claim to the knowledge, temperament and character required of its residents. But the American people were fickle and easily swayed, and at the crucial moments they had turned from him to others.

He had learned to accept his fate. A statesman did what he could in his country’s service, not what he would. And it was for his country that he felt so dispirited by the news from California. Whatever it would cost him personally—in effort expended, health further compromised, obloquy endured—it would cost the Union more. Henry Clay had been born amid the American Revolution and come of age with the Constitution; for his entire adult life the Union had been his guiding star. Twice he had steered the Union between the Scylla of jealous states’ rights and the Charybdis of rampant federalism. But the turbulent seas of democracy grew more tempestuous with each passing decade. And the gold fever whipped them higher still, for the sudden peopling of California compelled Congress to rule on the fate of slavery in the new American West. California sought admission to the Union as a free state. The North demanded California’s admission, and would probably get it. What would the South demand in return? And what would the competing demands do to the creaking hull and strained rigging of the American ship of state?

The genius of Henry Clay was a knack for compromise, for finding formulas neither side loved but both sides could live with. He had conjured one such formula in the Missouri crisis of 1820, and another in the South Carolina crisis of 1833. The genius of American democracy was its ability to muddle through crises—to accept answers as tentative and let principle nod to expedience. Henry Clay had been criticized for pliant principles, but he pleaded the higher aim of preserving the Union, the guarantor of American democracy. Democracy was a work in progress, never perfect but never finished. Given time, democracy would find a way forward.

California’s gold meant democracy might not have time. With everyone else, Henry Clay had supposed that filling the territories acquired from Mexico in the recent war would take decades. The Louisiana territory had been American for half a century and wasn’t a tenth full. Clay, though a slaveholder, was an emancipationist at heart: he judged slavery a curse and looked to the day when the Southern economy would outgrow slavery, as the Northern economy had done. A few decades, no more time than had already passed since the Missouri compromise, was all that was needed.

Clay knew he didn’t have a few decades. He would be lucky to last a few years. But if he could somehow conjure another compromise, he might give the Union the time it required.

***

John C. Calhoun had less time than Henry Clay. His consumption—tuberculosis—was more advanced than Clay’s. He might have months; he might have weeks. Some days he couldn’t get out of bed. His voice, for decades the trumpet of the South, could barely rise above a whisper.

Upon the news from California, his thoughts turned to Henry Clay. The two had entered the House of Representatives together amid the troubles that sparked the War of 1812. For years they had worked in harness, defending and bolstering the country their generation had inherited from America’s founders. But ambition drove them apart, like sons contesting control of an estate they were supposed to share. Clay was the elder, in years and seniority, yet Calhoun had gifts of intellect and guile Clay couldn’t match. It was the guile that surprised most people, including Clay, who puzzled at Calhoun’s ability to advance himself—and get past Clay—without appearing to try.

But it was the intellect that brought Calhoun down. Or maybe it was the ambition, disguised as intellect. Calhoun’s political strength was his base in South Carolina, yet his strength was also his weakness. Other states insisted on what they considered their sovereign rights vis-à-vis the national government, but none were so vigilant and quick to take offense as South Carolina. The founders had left deliberately vague where the boundary lay between state and national authority; similarly blurred was who would determine the boundary and how it would be enforced. They knew that any explicit answer might wreck their experiment in self-government before it got fairly started; they left to their heirs to find a solution the country could live with. The task had been the work of Calhoun’s—and Clay’s—lifetime.

South Carolina had registered particular umbrage at a tariff that harmed planters in the state. Those planters sought an advocate, and they discovered one in John Calhoun. He penned an exegesis that would have made a medieval scholastic proud, investing South Carolina with the exclusive authority to determine its rights and privileges. The planters applauded; their respect for Calhoun grew. So did Calhoun’s own regard for his skills as an interpreter of the Constitution and a shaper of America’s destiny.

But he found he had mounted a tiger. South Carolina pushed its case to the brink of armed conflict with the national government. Calhoun took alarm: for his state, for the country, for his political future. He worked with Henry Clay to defuse the crisis; characteristically, each man claimed credit for averting civil war.

Yet where the nation honored Clay, the man of the Union, it suspected Calhoun, the guardian of his state. In serving South Carolina, Calhoun tainted himself in the eyes of America. Those who had watched him for years—and they were many, for in his prime he was one of the most arresting figures in Washington, tall and straight, with curling auburn hair and eyes of the fiercest blue—increasingly detected a change in him. His defense of states’ rights, and especially of the right most important to Southern planters, the right to own slaves, became a monomania. Where other defenders of slavery were content to call it a necessary evil, essential to the operation of the Southern economy but nothing to boast of, Calhoun pronounced it a positive good, an ornament of the South’s superior culture. As his national reputation diminished, and with it his hopes for national office, he retreated into state and section, which honored him the more. He became a Dantean figure: barred from reigning in heaven, he determined to rule in hell.

And now he found himself confronting Henry Clay again. Clay would save the Union, if he could. Calhoun would wreck the Union, if that’s what it cost to preserve slavery and states’ rights.

Coughing, Calhoun reckoned his body might stand one final battle. He would defeat Henry Clay once and for all. Or he would die trying.

***

Daniel Webster was two months older than John Calhoun and five years younger than Henry Clay. But he looked a decade younger than either man. He had never felt the responsibility that weighed on them: Clay for the Union, Calhoun for the South. Nor had ambition driven him as hard as it drove them. At least not until now.

In an age of orators Daniel Webster had no peers. Henry Clay’s words danced and laughed, setting to sound the Kentuckian’s open, engaging personality. Clay won arguments less often than he won followers; the Henry Clay Clubs that sprang up around the country revealed but the tip of his celebrity. John Calhoun’s speeches impressed all and intimidated many; his tightly marshaled arguments advanced like a Roman phalanx across the field of political battle.

But Daniel Webster had a way with words that seemed almost supernatural. Indeed, some said he must have struck a bargain with the devil to acquire such a gift. He perfected the art of persuasion in the courtroom and became the most sought after, and generously compensated, advocate of his era. The stern justices of the Supreme Court were no match for Webster; at the conclusion of his argument for Dartmouth College in a landmark case, even John Marshall—John Marshall!—wept. When Webster spoke in Congress, Washington stopped what it was doing and hurried to hear him.

Yet Webster was profligate: with his talents, his time, his earnings. Things came too easily to him. It was said of Webster that he must be a fraud: no one could be as great as he looked. “God-like Daniel,” people called him, and it went to his head. His most important speeches he prepared carefully, but lesser ones—lesser for him yet beyond mere mortals—he tossed off with scarcely a thought. As much as he earned, he spent even more. He was always in debt and in need of the income his law practice supplied. He wasn’t above taking discreet payments from powerful people whose interests he promoted in Congress.

He had the caliber to be president but not the true aim. He had come close to the White House almost by accident. Yet of the three towering figures of the age—Clay, Calhoun and Webster were spoken of as the “great triumvirate,” not always admiringly—he was the only one, in 1850, who retained a chance of reaching the summit of American politics. Which was to say, as the California crisis loomed, that from a personal perspective Daniel Webster had the most to lose.

He could easily lose it all. His Massachusetts constituents loved him, but the abolitionist movement had captured the state, and its leaders were demanding that he share their intolerance of slavery. Many abolitionists had no more devotion to the Union than the most secessionist Southerners did, if the Union demanded toleration of slavery. Siding with them risked making Webster as much a pariah outside New England as John Calhoun had become outside the South. Yet opposing them, and taking an uncompromising stand for the Union—beside Henry Clay—could cost him his political base and possibly his livelihood.

Throughout his career Webster had dodged difficult choices, and gotten away with it. His silver tongue had talked him out of one cul-de-sac after another. But he had never faced a test like this. He would have to speak as he had never spoken. He could make John Marshall weep, but to hold his home base and maintain his hopes for the presidency—to sustain his section without imperiling the Union—Daniel Webster might have to go back to the devil for a second mortgage on his soul. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B079WN7MKQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor (November 13, 2018)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 13, 2018
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 33261 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 378 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #165,393 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #23 in War of 1812 History
- #65 in 19th Century World History
- #220 in Biographies of Political Leaders

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H. W. Brands

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H.W. Brands taught at Texas A&M University for sixteen years before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is the Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History. His books include Traitor to His Class, Andrew Jackson, The Age of Gold, The First American, and TR. Traitor to His Class and The First American were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

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Mark R. Brewer

Good Not Great

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2018

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H.W. Brands is an excellent historian, highly skilled at researching a topic and at telling a tale in engaging, illuminating prose. This, his latest book, contains many of those elements, making it an enjoyable and informative read. But it is not without its problems.

One inherent problem with a book such as "Heirs of the Founders" is that it focuses on the lives of three different men--Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. It is difficult enough to compile a biography of one individual in less than 400 pages, but Brands tells the reader about these three men in only 370 pages of text. Such an approach is bound to leave out much, and that is what keeps this good book from being a great one.

For example, Brands says that Thomas Jefferson "rode the wave of opposition [to the Alien and Sedition Acts] into the White House . . ." But the Election of 1800, to which Brands is referring, was far more complex. Indeed, had there been no Three-Fifths Compromise, John Adams would have won the election outright. The compromise allowed southern states to count slaves as three-fifths of a person when determining the state's population and thus the number of representatives the state would get in the House. They would each get an equal number of electors. As it was, no candidate got a majority of electoral votes, sending the election into the House, which elected Jefferson. A simple sentence or two would have clarified the issue.

Brands brings up the gag rule but does not explain what it was. He seems to assume his reader knows. The gag rule was a resolution in the House that tabled, without discussion, all petitions regarding slavery. But Brands doesn't tell us this.

In addition, Brands makes no mention of Daniel Webster's affair with Sarah Goodrich, a young artist. The affair took place in the late 1820s, while Webster's wife was dying of stomach cancer back in Massachusetts. This behavior certainly gives an insight into Webster's character, but Brands seems to be in a hurry and so skips or glosses over many aspects of these three men and their times.

In another example, Brands does not mention Henry Clay's most famous quote--"I'd rather be right than be president." Spoken in 1838, it was seen as sour grapes by many. Nor does he mention that Clay was an inveterate gambler. Or that he could, at times, be downright nasty.

The fact that the book has fifty-nine chapters in 370 pages only adds to the rushed feeling of "Heirs of the Founders." What Brands has given us is good. But another hundred or so pages could have made it great.

111 people found this helpful

Helpful

When Giants Roamed the Halls of Congress

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2018

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University of Texas history professor H.W. Brands has written a biography of the three giants who dominated Congress in the first half of the 19th Century, namely Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster. All three were great intellects and orators who had a common dislike, for different reasons, of President Andrew Jackson.

Clay comes on the scene in 1811 where in his first term he becomes Speaker of the House. He and Calhoun would join together as the leading “war hawks” and push Madison into war against England. They would later split over the issues of tariffs, slavery and most important, the preservation of the Union. Clay would become the author of the American System based on protective tariffs, internal improvements and a national bank which made him the true heir to Alexander Hamilton. In 1820 he would put together the Missouri Compromise which delayed the ultimate reckoning of the slavery issue and thereby allowed the continued development of a growing America.

Calhoun, who served as vice-president to both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, quite a feat in its own right, became the tribune of the South. He fought tariffs, championed slavery and the ability of states to nullify federal laws they opposed which offered the theoretical basis for secession.

Webster had a brilliant career as a lawyer where he was victorious in such major Supreme Court cases as McCulloch v. Maryland, Dartmouth College and Gibbons v. Ogden. Although he is most remembered for his “Union, now and forever” speech in his Reply to Hayne, he supported New England secession during the War of 1812.

In 1850 all three of them, now all over 70, came together in the great debate over the admission of California into the Union as a free state, the treatment of fugitive slaves and the extension of slavery into the New Mexico Territory. The end result of the debate was yet another successful Clay compromise. And it was here where Webster in order to save the Union bent over backwards against his abolitionist constituency, on the issues of fugitive slaves and slavery in the New Mexico Territory, to agree with Clay. Oh to be in the Senate Gallery to hear the debate. The next best thing is reading Brands’ account. All three would be dead within two years.

Brands brings to life these three great personalities as they dominated the Congress for 40 years. It is history at its best. I only wish our current Congress had at least one Clay or a Webster and unfortunately too much of the nullification spirit of John Calhoun is alive and well in both parties today.

27 people found this helpful

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C. M. Godfrey

The Vast Historical Void

Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2019

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When called upon to recite the Presidents, many of us will name the first five and then Lincoln. That leaves ten in between. This was the era when the United States was grappling with the type of nation it aspired to be. Most of us remember the names of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun but not much else. Brands' book makes a giant leap toward filling this vast void of our historic recollection. Webster is the eloquent New Englander opposed to slavery. Calhoun is the Southerner who most clearly makes the case favoring slavery. Clay is the Great Compromiser who tries to work the middle ground in order to preserve the Union. Each of these men were great speakers and exponents of their respective positions. Much of what Brands brings forth is in their own words. Each is quoted extensively from speeches which often filled the Capitol galleries. Along the way, we become better acquainted with John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, John Randolph, the annexation of Texas and the War with Mexico. I'm grateful to the author for bringing light to these men's legacies and the era that they dominated.

21 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Philip Barbieri

Excellent

Reviewed in Japan on January 28, 2022

Verified Purchase

Wanting to know something about Clay, Calhoun and Webster, I originally order the Great Triumvirate. Unfortunately after plowing through the first 100 pages, I was so bored by all the economic jargon that I went back and found Brands' book. So much more enjoyable. Covering the same period and actors, it was a joy to read.

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