Like John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay was one of an influential group of nineteenth-century politicians and statesmen known as the Great Triumvirate (Clay, Calhoun, and Daniel Webster). Born in Hanover Country, Virginia, Clay, in common with most politicians of the period, began his career in the law, being admitted to the Virginia bar in 1797. He moved west to Kentucky, as many lawyers did, because the opportunities for a successful career negotiating land settlements were greater on the frontier. Often described as a Jeffersonian Republican on the slavery issue as in other matters (although unlike Jefferson, Clay emancipated his slaves in his will), Clay nevertheless did not envisage a mixed and equal society as being a possibility in the United States. He advocated colonization for the nation’s free African Americans, and in 1836 became president of the American Colonization Society. It was not for his advocacy of colonization that Clay came to prominence, but for his support of internal improvements and manufacturing (that came to be termed the American System). He was a member of the Kentucky state house of representatives before being elected on the Democratic-Republican ticket to the United States Senate in 1806. Reelected in 1811, Clay served as Speaker of the House of Representatives and later as Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams. Like Calhoun, at the start of his career, Clay was a War Hawk in the War of 1812, and at that time a strong exponent of nationalist policies for the United States; unlike Calhoun, he retained that position. Indeed, in contrast to Calhoun, who sometimes exacerbated division, Clay came to be known as the Great Compromiser for his efforts to broker deals between the sections over such issues as the tariff, internal improvements, federal banks, and slavery. He supported the Missouri Compromise, which established the representational balance between the slave and free states, and the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which brought the Nullification Crisis to an end. In this regard his support for colonization may have been a factor, given that support for that endeavor, at first popular in the South, gradually - and certainly by the later 1830s - waned, to be replaced with the rather stronger sentiments expressed by Calhoun that slavery was a “positive good,” and any attempt to curb its extension an attack on minority rights. Clay’s thinking on this matter, and perhaps more his political maneuvering through the moral and material minefield that slavery was becoming, was something that Abraham Lincoln took note of when he, later, was faced with the problem of advocating abolition to an often hostile audience. Clay, like Lincoln, was adamant that slavery was “a curse - a curse to the master, a wrong, a grievous wrong to the slave. In the abstract it is ALL WRONG,” he declared in 1836, “and no possible contingency can make it right.” Nevertheless, Clay operated within the law and within the Constitution as he understood both, and was able to broker the 1850 Compromise that seemed, on the surface, to have achieved stability between North and South but which turned out to be the beginning of the end for slavery in the United States. Clay died in the year that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published (1852), having done as much as possible to hold his nation together long enough that when it did come apart, eight years later, it stood a far greater chance of surviving secession.
Alexis de Tocqueville was a French aristocrat and political philosopher whose visit to the United States resulted in two volumes on Democracy in America (1835 and 1840). America was host to a great array of European visitors at that time, including Charles Dickens, all of whom were keen to see the first republican experiment in action and to report back on its success, or otherwise, to a fascinated and sometimes skeptical world. Specifically - and one must bear in mind that this predates the twentieth century’s fascination with Michel Foucault and the social control implications of penitentiaries and asylums - Europeans were interested -not exclusively - with American variants of these, and it was ostensibly to study American prisons and asylums that de Tocqueville was able to visit the United States. Given the political upheavals in France, of course, de Tocqueville was far more interested in the broader implications of democracy in America. As he wrote, “I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or hope from its progress.” Scholars continue to debate the extent to which de Tocqueville fully understood what he saw, but certain “sound bites” from his work continue to resonate today (and indeed at the time), specifically the phenomenon that he identified (and Calhoun worked so hard to restrain) as the “tyranny of the majority.” In de Tocqueville’s opinion, the “very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute sovereignty of the majority; for there is nothing in democratic states that is capable of resisting it.” Given that de Tocqueville arrived in the United States in the midst of the Nullification Crisis, it is perhaps unsurprising that he should have devoted so much consideration to the matter, nor that Americans pored so carefully over what he wrote about them and their institutions. “When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command,” de Tocqueville observed, “but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind. Some have not feared to assert that a people can never outstep the boundaries of justice and reason in those affairs which are peculiarly its own; and that consequently full power may be given to the majority by which it is represented. But this is the language of a slave.”
Stephen A. Douglas was born in Vermont and, like so many politicians, studied law (although Douglas was also briefly a teacher in Illinois). After being admitted to the bar, he practiced in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he served in the state house of representatives. He was unsuccessful in his bid for election to Congress in 1838, but was elected as a Democrat to the House of Representatives five years later, and to the Senate in 1847, where he served until his death. He was one of the most influential politicians of his age, nicknamed the Little Giant both because of his height and because of his impact on politics. He was Chairman of the Committee on Territories, and it was through this office that he wielded such influence of the crucial political issue of the day, which was the possible expansion of slavery into the West. Along with Henry Clay, he maneuvered the Compromise of 1850 through Congress, but it was the Kansas-Nebraska Act four years later that really undid all that the Compromise had hoped to achieve. In his support for “popular sovereignty,” whereby the settlers of a territory were given the choice of whether it would be slave or free -a solution that should have pleased everyone and in fact satisfied no one -Douglas prompted a split in his own party from which it never recovered, and persuaded many Democrats to change allegiance to the new Republican Party that was in the process of pulling itself together to stand in the 1856 election. Aware of the impact of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas commented that his way home to Chicago was now lit by his own burning effigies. Nevertheless, he stuck to his political guns and his belief in popular sovereignty. In 1857, Douglas supported the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that effectively rendered the Missouri Compromise nugatory and opened up not just the Western territories but every existing state to the possibility of becoming “slave” rather than “free.” Douglas’s views on the matter were aired extensively in 1858, when his Republican opponent for the Senate seat for Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, engaged him in a series of debates - the Lincoln-Douglas debates - that addressed popular sovereignty and the future of slavery in the nation. In what became known as the Freeport Doctrine (as it was in the course of the debate at Freeport that Douglas articulated it), Douglas proposed the optimistic position that the Dred Scott ruling need not open up former free states to slavery if the population of those states refused to support legislation in favor of slavery. No “matter what the decision of the Supreme Court may be on that abstract question,” Douglas asserted, “still the right of the people to make a Slave Territory or a Free Territory is perfect and complete under the Nebraska bill.” The people did not concur. By the i860 election, the Democrats split with Douglas, achieving the nomination, but a pro-Southern faction fielded their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge, creating a fissure that allowed the Republican candidate, Lincoln, to win. This precipitated the secession of several Southern states and a four-year Civil War that Douglas did not live long enough to endure.