Henry Clay and the Art of the Possible

There is a house on Richmond Road, southeast of downtown, that spent fifty years shaping the American republic. Ashland, the estate Henry Clay built and rebuilt across his long career, sits behind a canopy of trees that Clay himself planted. He called the farm Ashland for the ash trees on the property.

He called himself a farmer. Mostly, though, he was the most consequential legislator the early republic produced. Clay came to Lexington in seventeen ninety-seven, a young lawyer from Virginia, penniless and sharp.

He rose with astonishing speed. By the age of thirty-four, he was Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, a position he used with a force and strategic cunning that set the template for every congressional leader who followed. He championed what he called the American System, protective tariffs, a national bank, and federal investment in roads and canals, as a program for knitting the young country together economically.

But Clay is remembered most for the compromises. In eighteen twenty, he brokered the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and drew a line across the territories to contain the question, for a generation. In eighteen fifty, already old and ill, he returned to the Senate one last time and helped draft the Compromise of eighteen fifty, the last great legislative bargain that held the Union together before it broke.

His opponents called him an opportunist. His admirers called him the Great Compromiser. Abraham Lincoln, who idolized Clay, called him my beau ideal of a statesman.

What is clear is that Clay understood something rare in politics, that the alternatives to compromise are either capitulation or war, and that the art of the possible is not a lesser art. Clay died in eighteen fifty-two. He is buried in the Lexington Cemetery, not at Ashland.

The estate itself is a museum today, its grounds still planted with trees.