“A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, ‘Huh. It works. It makes sense.’ ”
                                                           - Barack Obama

I graduated from a high school named for the man who was, perhaps, Kentucky’s greatest statesman, The Great Compromiser, Henry Clay.  This may be one of the reasons I’ve always felt the best way for people with disparate views to successfully live together is by learning to compromise.  Never has there been a greater need for the art of compromise than today in Washington.

To many people, Henry Clay is best known for his 1839 declaration on the floor of the Senate, “I had rather be right than President.”  Some will say he must have been right almost all the time because he took aim at the presidency five times, never succeeding.  But whether he was right or not, Clay’s most admirable statesmanship came from his ability to negotiate compromise. 

Henry Clay’s first major compromise was the negotiation of the end of the War of 1812.  Between the beginning and the end of the war, Clay found himself in somewhat opposing positions.  In 1810, he was the leader of the Congressional War Hawks of whom a Federalist politician once commented, “Henry Clay was the man whose influence and power more than that of any other produced the War of 1812.” 

By 1814, under the strain the war placed on the young nation, and with Napoleon defeated leaving the British with more forces to send against the Americans, even Clay, the radical War Hawk, was ready for the war to end.  He accepted a position on the five-member American delegation sent to Europe to negotiate peace. Although he did not always see eye-to-eye with the other U.S. diplomats, Clay was a shrewd and stubborn spokesman for the American position and it was largely his ability to convince those around him to compromise that produced the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war.

Although he was unable to thwart the eventual storm of Civil War, between 1820 and 1850 he successfully guided the nation away from that conflict three times.  His was the hand that wrought the Missouri Compromise in 1820, allowing the tensions over slavery to pull back, at least for a while, from the brink of conflagration.

In 1833, Clay brought abouth The Compromise of 1833, an American tariff measure passed by Congress as a compromise for the high tariff act of 1828.  The 1828 act had caused intense dissatisfaction throughout the South and had brought about nullification by South Carolina and the threat of secession.  For the second time, Clay was instrumental in pulling the nation back from the brink of Civil War.

In the 1840’s, after the United States acquired most of the present-day Southwest as a result of the Mexican-American War, tensions over slavery again threatened to escalate into Civil War as North and South debated the extension of slavery into the newly acquired territories.  When California applied for statehood in 1849, the situation became a powder keg with a burning fuse.

To settle the differences between North and South, Clay, now a U.S. Senator, introduced a series of resolutions in the Senate with the express purpose that some would gain support from the North, while the South would support the others.  After some initial debate, the Senate formed a special committee with Henry Clay as chairman.  Seven months of debate took place before Northerners and Southerners finally agreed to a compromise and the committee submitted to the remainder of the Senate a series of measures based upon Clay’s original proposals.

Although these measures were rejected by the Senate, Clay continued working.  Enlisting the aid of Abraham Lincoln’s nemesis, Stephen Douglas of Illinois, Clay was eventually able to fashion the Compromise of 1850, again averting Civil War.

Henry Clay was one of the leaders of the Whig Party, which became Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party.  And today, Republican politicians are fond of extolling the virtues of their “Party of Lincoln.”  Perhaps if they were to also extol the virtues of the “Party of Henry Clay,” they could find the wherewithal to do more than giving mere lip service to “bi-partisanship” and, in doing so, resurrect the stewardship for the United States practiced by both Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln.