San Antonio College Library

Clay was essentially, constructively, triumphantly American. The impetuous impulse of Clay was to let the youth, the vigor, the creative spirit of triumphant America sweep in untrammeled activity whithersoever it would, secure that a beneficent Providence would guide it. And in all these various phases Clay embodied the spirit of the West -- its nervous vigor, its all-attempting courage, its undying enthusiasm. - Gamaliel Bradford - page [v].

"Enormously powerful, intensely ambitious, the very personifications of their respective regions--Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun represented the foremost statesmen of their age. In the decades preceding the Civil War, they dominated American congressional politics as no other figures have. Now Merrill D. Peterson, one of our most gifted historians, brilliantly re-creates the lives and times of these great men in this monumental collective...

Though he was best known as a politician, Henry Clay maintained an active legal practice for more than fifty years. He was a leading contributor both to the early development of the U.S. legal system and to the interaction between law and politics in pre-Civil War America.

Speaker of the House, senator, secretary of state, five-time presidential candidate, and idol to the young Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay is captured in full in this rich and sweeping biography that vividly portrays all the drama of his times.

The spellbinding story behind the longest debate in U.S. Senate history: the Compromise of 1850, which brought together Senate luminaries on the eve of the Civil War in a desperate effort to save the Union.