Henry Clay

Statesman and rival-then-ally of John Quincy Adams, a recurring figure in James Traub’s biography John Quincy Adams (which Kyle read). Adams’s wife Louisa offered a “penetrating but notably sympathetic” read of Clay’s character: “his heart is generous and good, and his first impulse is almost always benevolent and liberal. But a neglected education, vicious habits and bad company, united to overweening ambition, have made him blush to act the better part.” The book sets Clay against Adams temperamentally: where Clay reasoned from principle, Adams (like Edmund Burke) reasoned “from what men did, not from what one wished they did,” judging Clay’s views to “smack of a dangerous unreality.” Clay is grouped with William Crawford and John C. Calhoun as men widely assumed to want the presidency — a contest from which Adams, by his “stood for rather than ran for office” tradition, conspicuously held himself apart. Clay also appears as the addressee of Adams’s ambition to “look to a practicability of a longer range than a simple session of Congress” on proposals like a national university.

Context: Henry Clay (1777–1852) was a Kentucky statesman, Speaker of the House, Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams, and architect of the “American System”; his support in the contested 1824 election helped make Adams president (the so-called “corrupt bargain”).

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — appears in Louisa Adams’s character sketch, in the contrast between Clay’s principle-driven and Adams’s experience-driven politics, among the presidential aspirants of 1820–24, and as the audience for Adams’s “longer range” legislative ambitions.