David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American (New York: Random House, 2010), 624 pp., $30.00.

Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 496 pp., $30.00.

Robert V. Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise that Saved the Union (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 200 pp., $24.00.

Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 800 pp., $35.00.

IF GREAT historians wake the dead, mediocre ones put the living to sleep. No one understood this better than Barbara Tuchman, who won two Pulitzer Prizes while conclusively disproving the elitist view of “popular history” as an oxymoron. The author of such works as The Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, Tuchman set a standard for historical scholarship that any academician might envy, and she did so without benefit of a PhD. Indeed, she declared her failure to secure the ultimate academic credential—a distinction, she archly noted, likewise withheld from Thucydides, Gibbon and Parkman—an undisguised blessing, given her desire to write for nonhistorians. In a collection of essays entitled Practicing History, Tuchman vividly conveyed her own sense of literary obligation:

In my mind is a picture of Kipling’s itinerant storyteller of India, with his rice bowl, who tells tales of ancient romance and legend to a circle of villagers by firelight. If he sees figures drifting away from the edge of the circle in the darkness, and his audience thinning out, he knows his rice bowl will be meagerly filled. . . . I feel just as urgent a connection with the reader.

Tuchman achieved fame during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when hawkish advisers pressed President John F. Kennedy to forcibly evict Soviet weaponry from the Caribbean island. JFK’s response to the hard-liners of EXCOMM was to recommend Tuchman’s instant classic The Guns of August, with its sobering account of Europe’s race to destruction in the reckless summer of 1914. Half a century later, as the superpowers clung to the narrow window ledge of nuclear standoff, Kennedy’s instinct was for caution. Tuchman supplied him with the perfect cautionary tale. Few authors can make so great a claim on posterity’s gratitude.

In filling the vital role of public intellectual, Barbara Tuchman was hardly alone. In her time the General Educated Reader, once so beloved by publishers, could savor the prose of Bruce Catton, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Robert Massie and William Manchester—forerunners of David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ron Chernow and Nathaniel Philbrick. Nor was it unusual in Watercooler America, before History became just another niche in an ever-more-fragmented marketplace, for eminent professors to share the best-seller list with their popularizing brethren. Such widely read academics as Samuel Eliot Morison, Arthur Schlesinger, Allan Nevins, Fawn Brodie and Daniel J. Boorstin approached the mass audience like students in a survey course.

What is a survey course, you ask. A century ago Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell mocked the mythical grad student who arrived in Cambridge fully prepared to devote himself to the study of the left hind leg of the Paleozoic cockroach. An exaggeration, to be sure, but also a preview of the specialization that would raise the ivory tower to new heights. What the venerable John K. Fairbank called “the infiltration of history by the social scientist” led many to dismiss narrative history of the sort championed by Ms. Tuchman. The storyteller’s art yielded to statistical analysis. Of course, it wasn’t a statistic that wrote the Gettysburg Address, or devised a polio vaccine, or refused to move to the back of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. No quantifiable theory will explain the Watergate scandal, the zeal for justice that sent suffragettes into American streets, or the genius bubbling up from Moby Dick or The Iceman Cometh.

Oscar Wilde observed that artists shouldn’t try to be popular. Rather, he declared, the public should try to be more artistic. But surely this is a false choice. Surely we can all wish for a day when history lives for the average American with a force and relevance that make it an essential part of our culture—even our popular culture. Which brings us back to the historical fraternity. Like the farmer and the cowhand in Oklahoma, the academic and the popular historian should be friends. After all, both are in the perspective business. Both enlarge our sense of self by connecting us to distant centuries and cultures remote from our own. And both confront the common enemy of historical illiteracy.

Things may be looking up. Just when you thought ignorance of the past was approaching tsunami levels, along comes a splendid class of academic historians—H. W. Brands, Annette Gordon-Reed, Sean Wilentz, Walter McDougall, David Nasaw, Beverly Gage, and the Brinkleys, Alan and Douglas, to cite only the most obvious—who aren’t afraid to be accessible. In the 1930s that archetypal literary snob Edmund Wilson dismissed Carl Sandburg and his folkloric biography as the worst thing to happen to Lincoln since John Wilkes Booth. Today no shortage of people still read Sandburg, while would-be successors still grapple with the prairie poet’s mystical protagonist, “hard as rock and soft as drifting fog.”

Last year’s Lincoln bicentennial produced a bumper crop of useful volumes on top of the fifteen thousand or so already inspired by the sixteenth president. In Ronald C. White Jr.’s elegant biography it bequeathed a worthy successor to David Herbert Donald’s 1995 masterwork. Earlier this year T. J. Stiles’s magnificent life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, won a deserved Pulitzer Prize for Biography. I could go on . . .

Might we be entering a new golden age of scholarly history, as readable as it is rigorous? An impressive quartet of recent books by Jack Rakove, Gordon Wood, Robert Remini, and David and Jeanne Heidler argue for the affirmative. Bracketing an eventful century, from pre-Revolutionary America to the eve of the Civil War, these works showcase the talents of a constitutional scholar at the height of his game, two grand old men of the academy, and a husband and wife team who write with one voice and contagious enthusiasm.

[amazon 0618267468 full] JACK RAKOVE is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and political scientist at Stanford University. He is also a bit of a rebel himself, as demonstrated in Revolutionaries, his original and comprehensive account of America’s founding that is part group biography, part cultural and intellectual history. The book might just as well be titled Evolutionaries, for, Sam Adams notwithstanding, Rakove contends that it was a clutch of (mostly) reluctant patriots, radicalized by events few could predict, who fashioned a republic from a patchwork quilt of squabbling colonies.

It is a provocative thesis, notably at odds with John Adams’s oft-quoted claim that the Revolution had taken hold in American hearts and minds long before the first blood was spilled on Lexington Green. Rakove readily acknowledges that American independence owed as much to bungling politicians in London as to any burning desire for liberty among colonials deferential to their monarch, if not his ministers. Indeed, there might never have been a revolution, he suggests, but for the firebrands of Massachusetts, and the ham-handed response of British officials to the original Tea Partiers. By adopting the 1774 Coercive Acts, intended to humble Massachusetts and dam revolutionary currents gaining force elsewhere, Rakove asserts that an overreaching Parliament “turned the episodic political controversies of the previous decade into a revolutionary crisis.”

Yet his own chronology of unrest calls into question the sequence whereby subjects became citizens. Nearly a decade before Parliament closed the port of Boston in retaliation for a harbor full of tea, mobs in that combustible town protested the Stamp Act by demolishing the elegant home of royal governor Thomas Hutchinson. Even then, however, the local criminal element was seconded by nine provincial assemblies, led by lordly Virginia, which vigorously contested the right of Parliament to tax Englishmen overseas without their consent. Repeal of the tax merely whetted the appetites of those who had discovered a taste and, more importantly, a talent for defiance. In rapid succession, New Yorkers resisted the 1765 Quartering Act compelling them to pay for the maintenance of Crown troops stationed in America. Passage of the Townshend Acts in 1767, another parliamentary attempt to impose duties from afar, led most of the colonies to adopt self-denying ordinances banning the importation of English commodities. In 1772, Rhode Island patriots (smugglers from the British perspective) burned the schooner Gaspee in Newport harbor. The flames were barely extinguished when it was suggested that the instigators of such violence might be transported to London for trial. This in turn spurred Virginia to establish its own Committee of Correspondence, the better to coordinate growing opposition to Lord North’s maladroit government. A continental tinderbox awaited only the spark of muskets on Lexington Green to ignite a military conflict at least a decade in the making.

THE WAR joined by Yankee minutemen in April 1775 unfolds mostly in the background of Rakove’s briskly written narrative. It is nevertheless a transformative experience for officers, enlisted men and sideline patriots alike. Even before independence is declared, its repercussions are hotly debated. So are the rights of individuals and the meaning of liberty in a land where approximately one in eight Americans is owned by another American. The author shrewdly assesses George Washington, man and general, as much closer in disposition to George Marshall than George Patton. His commander in chief is a patrician taught by hard experience to value the New England rabble, and a pragmatist who learns most from his mistakes.

In Rakove’s Revolution, old attitudes and allegiances are equally expendable. So Washington comes to rethink his conventional—for a Virginia planter—views about race, complimenting the African-American poetess Phillis Wheatley on her verses, and accepting thousands of black patriots into his ranks. A gouty George Mason incorporates a declaration of rights into Virginia’s new constitution. Young Jack Laurens, scion of one of South Carolina’s most prominent slaveholding families, offers to raise and equip an army of three thousand slaves, the first step to emancipation.

Then there is the legal revolution waged by Thomas Jefferson to diminish the power of a landholding oligarchy to which he belongs. Paradoxical as ever, this humanitarian-looking-down-on-humanity-from-his-Virginia-mountaintop hatches a scheme to broaden educational opportunities through a state-enforced meritocracy. Rakove’s careful rereading of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia leads him to harshly condemn the author’s impressionistic speculation about the black man, an analytical “mess” unbecoming a natural scientist, let alone a professed friend of liberty. Yet he credits Jefferson with at least trying to confront the issue of slavery, a conundrum that would bedevil his descendents and tarnish his posthumous reputation. With similar empathy Rakove depicts the dance of the moderates, men like John Dickinson and Robert Morris, who are propelled against their wishes into a world of painful, unavoidable choices between some form of accommodation within the empire or a brutal act of matricide.

IN TRUTH the most radical actions in Revolutionaries transpire after the war, as the embryonic nation moves with crablike indirection toward self-government. Rakove is at his best explaining the Madisonian agenda, profoundly hostile toward state sovereignty, that is put forward at the Constitutional Convention; the emergence of public opinion, first in legitimizing the new regime, and later in checking its alleged excesses; and the rapid, unforeseen centralization of authority in the executive. Alexander Hamilton, the psychologist, helps goad a reluctant Washington into serving as the nation’s first president. Thereafter, Hamilton, the financial visionary, establishes the public credit through tariffs and taxes, consolidating power through the assumption of state debts by the new federal government and the creation of a national bank. Jefferson, quick to smell a royalist rat, accuses his cabinet rival of betraying the Revolution by cozying up to the harlot England. As the bitter controversies roused by the Hamiltonian program polarize regions and classes, Jefferson and Hamilton serve as most reluctant midwives at the birth of American party politics.

[amazon 0195039149 full]INEVITABLY, PARTS of Rakove’s story overlap with Empire of Liberty, Gordon Wood’s magisterial portrait of Young America (1789–1815) as part of the Oxford History of the United States series; no more so than in the growing class struggles animating the new Republic. The passions kindled on this side of the Atlantic by the French Revolution reinforce divisions first opened by domestic disputes. One Boston audience, steeped in the town’s tradition of political mayhem and offended by the comic portrayal of a French character in a British play, vented its wrath by demolishing the theater.

Following in Washington’s footsteps, John Adams was forced to navigate the same treacherous waters of official neutrality and popular clamor. Devoid of his predecessor’s charisma, the squat, unmartial Adams, contemptuous of politics and saddled with a turncoat cabinet, nevertheless secured an honorable peace for his badly divided nation in 1800 after the so-called Quasi-War with France. His reward for this was involuntary retirement at the polls, and prolonged exile to his hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts. There the ex-president, an all-too-human compound of self-sacrifice and self-pity, was left to brood upon public ingratitude. His electoral sentence was only somewhat leavened by repeated opportunities to indulge himself in the favorite Adams pastime of saying I told you so. To Wood’s credit, this most easily caricatured of America’s Founders remains stubbornly true to life. The same can be said of his contemporaries. Equally adept at the large canvas and the thumbnail sketch, the author enlivens his narrative with revealing factoids, as welcome as nut clusters in a box of chocolate creams.

Already a nation of nations, fully 40 percent of white Americans in the 1790 census traced their ancestry to somewhere other than England. Their explosive fertility prompted one early demographer to forecast that by the middle of the twentieth century the United States would contain 860 million inhabitants.

Between 1790 and 1820 the individual consumption of distilled spirits doubled, to five gallons a year, or nearly three times the amount disappearing down the throats of twenty-first-century Americans.

And my personal favorite: Columbia professor and future congressman Samuel Mitchill proposed to rechristen the United States of America, Fredonia.

Failing to affix this Grouchoesque name to the young confederation, Mitchill wrung his hands over the hustling materialism which defined his countrymen long before the CNBC Nation. “From one end of the continent to the other,” he complained in 1800, “the universal roar is Commerce! Commerce! at all events, Commerce!” A dissenting view was registered, barely, by Alexander Hamilton. On the night before he died in a duel with ambitious, amoral Aaron Burr, a gloomy Hamilton confessed that he could see “no relief to our real Disease; which is DEMOCRACY.” Shortly thereafter, his Federalist Party became one of history’s few political organizations to die of consistency.

If there is an overriding theme to this eight-hundred-page historical smorgasbord, it is the pervasive egalitarian instinct that helped drive the Revolution, and shaped American politics, long before Andrew Jackson built a fabled political career on Us versus Them. If there is one individual who defines the period’s optimism, raw energy and hypocrisies, it is Thomas Jefferson. To call him the political champion of the unprivileged-but-striving “middling sorts” who crowd out their presumed betters in a land defined by social mobility is not to overlook the contradictions which have frustrated countless biographers.

In theory (and no man had more) a radical utopian, Jefferson as president adopted the utterly sensible position that “no more good must be attempted than the people will bear.” At the same time, his facility for imperishable prose was equaled by a verbal extremism that will prompt even admirers to scratch their heads in bewilderment. During the Washington administration, Jefferson classed Hamilton’s federally chartered bank as “an act of treason” against the states. Six years later, as vice president under Adams, Jefferson weighed the idea of amending the Constitution to deprive the federal government of the power to borrow. His theory that the earth belongs to the living, not the dead, was interpreted to mean that all laws, debts and constitutions should expire with each generation, or roughly every nineteen years.

An unconservative Conservative, Jefferson’s nationalism took ever-odder forms. In a hostile world, a cheese-paring President Jefferson all but disbanded America’s navy, slashed the overall military budget by 50 percent, and reduced the new nation’s overseas presence to a trio of neglected missions in London, Paris and Madrid. By contrast, when his strict-constructionist principles clashed with his continental aspirations, Jefferson and his followers proved as adept at employing the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution to buy Louisiana as Hamilton had been in justifying a national bank. For which history, not to mention virtually everyone living west of Vincennes, Indiana, duly honors the third president.

Though clearly sympathetic to the Jeffersonian impulse, Wood doesn’t shy away from presenting the Sage of Monticello in a less flattering light. His empathetic gift for writing from the inside out helps modern readers to understand the paranoia behind the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, a shocking breech of fundamental liberties, as well as Jefferson’s subsequent war on the Federalist-tinged judiciary. Particularly notable are chapters examining the origins of judicial review, the resuscitation of slavery and the separatist impulse fed by a successful slave rebellion on the island of Haiti, and the restless reforming spirit which gave rise to numberless schools, benevolent associations and missionary societies.

COMPARED TO the revolutionary generation, the Jeffersonian Republic was younger, more mobile, more evangelical and more promiscuous (premarital pregnancies attained levels unequaled until the swinging 1960s). It also was decidedly more violent. On learning that war had been declared against Great Britain in June 1812, a Baltimore mob displayed its patriotism by demolishing a Federalist newspaper office. Another, equally frenzied crowd attacked prominent Federalists jailed for their own protection, killing one revolutionary general and permanently crippling Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, Washington’s eulogist and the father of Robert E. Lee. Faithful to his minimalist principles, President James Madison suffered repeated military embarrassments, culminating in the British sacking of Washington in August 1814. But no one went to jail for criticizing the president or his conduct of the war. This is why to libertarians then and since Madison is seen as a supremely constitutional wartime leader, the UnLincoln. His contemporaries were sufficiently impressed to give Madison’s name to fifty-seven towns and counties, more than any president on Mount Rushmore.

[amazon 140006726X full]NO ONE in American history tried harder or longer to join their stony company than Henry Clay. The greatest president America never had, Clay is to the nation’s highest office what Sir Thomas Lipton was to the America’s Cup, a five-time loser whose oratorical genius proved inadequate to pass the Electoral College. As presented by authors David and Jeanne Heidler, of Colorado State University–Pueblo and the United States Air Force Academy, respectively, Clay is a man of superlatives—just thirty-four years old when, on his first day as a representative from Kentucky, he won election to the Speaker’s chair. First among equals in the Great Triumvirate of senators filled out by Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. The Great Compromiser whose parliamentary skills and winning personality repeatedly staved off disunion in the tense decades from 1820 to 1850.

Yet it is a measure of the Heidlers’ success that they rescue Harry of the West from his own legend. The quintessential patriot, in his youth Clay was embarrassingly linked to Aaron Burr’s murky conspiracy to establish a breakaway nation in the American Southwest. Best remembered as a powerful advocate for government-sponsored capitalism—his American System of publicly funded internal improvements, a protective tariff and a national bank were logical outgrowths of Hamiltonian statism—in 1811 Clay opposed rechartering the First Bank of the United States as an affront to his Jeffersonian principles. In fact, the only thing young Clay had in common with Hamilton was a duel with a political adversary on the far side of a well-placed river—in this case, the Ohio rather than the Hudson. Admittedly, he was more fortunate in its outcome.

For much of his extraordinary career, Clay was, in fact, the Great Polarizer, the second-most-divisive, and defining, figure in Jacksonian America. “I don’t like Henry Clay,” growled John C. Calhoun, “But, by God, I love him.” (Even Calhoun’s cognitive dissonance was dogmatic.) Drawing on exhaustive archival research and their own flair for narrative, the Heidlers give us Clay living; magnetic, occasionally manic, pulsing with ambition, lethally charming. They arguably come closer than anyone before them to capturing the man’s quicksilver personality, his capacity for greatness and his self-defeating hubris. We see the evolution of a raw, Virginia-trained lawyer, packaged for popular consumption as “The Mill Boy of the Slashes,” into a power-hungry Speaker of the House characterized by what one envious lawmaker labeled “the plenitude of puppyism.”

As Speaker, Clay hectored the reluctant Madison into adopting a more aggressive stance toward Britain. Having agitated for war, Clay was a conspicuous member of the negotiating team whose peace treaty confirmed American independence. One of nature’s risk takers, Speaker Clay nearly came to grief after supporting a notorious “Salary Grab” that replaced congressional wages of $6 per day with an annual stipend of $1,500. “The remarkable insularity of Washington’s political class has seldom been so vividly displayed,” the authors claim. In the ensuing uproar, Clay narrowly retained his seat—but only after promising to repeal the offending increase.

A more serious lapse of judgment led him on the floor of the House to lambaste Andrew Jackson, a rare American general to emerge from the war with his reputation enhanced, as a military despot in embryo. At the end of his three-hour diatribe, Clay sat back, immensely pleased with himself and the sensation he had created. It wouldn’t be the last time the sound of applause drugged Clay to the long-term consequences of his verbal aggression. Naturally he underestimated Jackson in 1824, when both men sought the presidency. A wiser man would have thought twice before defying his own state’s instructions to support the popular favorite Jackson over John Quincy Adams when the House came to select James Monroe’s successor. A more cunning one would have rejected Adams’s offer of the State Department, since Jefferson’s time the logical springboard to the White House.

Clay’s acceptance of the position sparked opposition charges of a “corrupt bargain” that would hound him to his deathbed. Once in office, the secretary’s kinship with the newly independent republics of South America (he was a passionate supporter of anticolonial movements there) made Clay as popular in Bogotá as in the Kentucky bluegrass. Yet an unfriendly Congress, eager to install Jackson as Adams’s successor in 1828, thwarted most of his diplomatic initiatives. Clay despised Old Hickory, his equal in charisma and his superior in reading the mood of his countrymen. But when South Carolina threatened to wreck the Union by nullifying federal tariffs, it was Clay who defused the crisis, handing Jackson one of his greatest triumphs.

Clay’s repeated attempts to gain the White House—apparently he really did say “I would rather be right than be President,” even if few believed him, then or since—foundered on personal conviction (his support of a national bank in 1832; his opposition to annexing slaveholding Texas in 1844) and inauspicious timing. In 1840 and again in 1848, his Whig Party nominated popular generals out of sheer expediency. The Heidlers make us care, intensely, about these ancient controversies. In putting a very human face on the past, they remind us that ambition, betrayal, self-delusion and jockeying for place are scarcely limited to Clay’s Washington. Tapping fresh documentary sources, the authors give us the fullest picture to date of Lucretia Clay, whom it was rumored that Henry married for her money. True or not, the Clay marriage clearly ripened into a love match. Indifferent to the marble and mud of Washington, Lucretia endured painful separations and losses that would crush a less resilient spirit. The Clays saw all six of their daughters to an early grave. Of the couple’s five sons, the eldest, Theodore, died in an insane asylum; three drank to excess; Henry Jr. died on the Mexican battlefield of Buena Vista, ironically the same engagement that launched Zachary Taylor on the road to the White House at the expense of young Clay’s richly credentialed father.

[amazon 0465012884 full]CLAY AND Taylor were fated to confront one another in a seminal test of American unity. Their clash lies at the heart of Robert Remini’s At the Edge of the Precipice, an elegant coda to half a century as the nation’s foremost interpreter of Jacksonian America. Until recently historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, Remini detects troubling parallels between antebellum Washington and today’s harshly polarized capital. Revisiting the subject of his 1991 biography of Clay, he takes us deep inside the mind and machinations of an aging statesman as he struggles to pull a final great compromise out of his hat.

The political climate was anything but encouraging. By 1850, rapid territorial expansion, a legacy of the recently concluded Mexican-American War, was prompting renewed debate over the spread of slavery. Paralyzed by partisanship, in December 1849 the House required sixty-three ballots to elect a Speaker (and twenty more to choose a clerk). Sensing their hour at hand, disunionists led by Calhoun of South Carolina organized a convention of slaveholding states to convene in Nashville the following June. Clay the nationalist was appalled. Exhausted, ill and out of favor with his party’s president, Zachary Taylor, Prince Hal found himself in more ways than one racing against time.

For all his flaws, his canine ambition and frequent bouts of petulance, Clay was an essentially constructive force. Never more so than in the tumultuous spring and summer of 1850. While his motives as the Great Pacificator, pouring the oil of conciliation on chronically troubled waters, were admirable, his tactics proved to be deficient. For in combining eight separate measures into a so-called omnibus bill balanced as on a knife’s edge, Clay succeeded only in uniting the enemies of compromise, North and South. His efforts to rally the sensible center, and to persuade a majority of senators to look beyond narrowly sectional or ideological interests, will fascinate the C-SPAN junkie. So will a supporting cast trying out for larger roles in the drama to come. A radical Senator William Seward dismissed Clay’s something-for-everyone package as “magnificent humbug.” At the other end of the political spectrum, future Confederate leader Jefferson Davis accused the elder statesman of exploiting the crisis to advance his unquenchable presidential ambitions.

Ironically, it was events beyond Clay’s control which dictated the final outcome. President Taylor, eager to admit California as a Free State and no friend to Clay’s legislative brainchild, providentially succumbed to cholera following July Fourth festivities at the unfinished Washington Monument. His successor, Millard Fillmore, showed himself far more amenable to compromise. Senator Daniel Webster, himself a magnificent ruin, braved the wrath of antislavery constituents by endorsing a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act requiring Northerners to aid in the recovery of runaways. None of this kept the Senate from initially rejecting Clay’s unwieldy omnibus. As the enfeebled lawmaker retreated to the seaside resort of Newport, Rhode Island, the task of legislative resurrection, separating the bill’s parts and shepherding each into law, was left to young Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.

Yet history rightly credits Clay as the driving force behind the Compromise of 1850, which swapped California’s admission to the Union as a Free State and an end to slave trading within sight of the Capitol in exchange for the Fugitive Slave Act and some deliberately ambiguous language concerning slavery’s future in the unsettled West. In postponing sectional warfare for a critical decade, Clay made it possible for the North to bolster its industrial supremacy, and for the political process to bring forth Clay’s fellow Kentuckian and lifelong admirer, Abraham Lincoln.

THE HEIDLERS do not exaggerate in calling Henry Clay the essential American. He remains a pivotal figure in what has been called “national greatness conservatism”—bridging the decades from Hamilton’s nation building through his own American System to Lincoln’s singular mix of Hamiltonian energy and Jeffersonian regard for the individual. Clay’s death in June 1852 evoked emotions transcending regional or political allegiances. Lincoln, then a retired one-term congressman practicing law in the Illinois capital of Springfield, wrestled with his public eulogy of the man he professed “my beau ideal of a statesman.” His speech, prepared in haste, disappointed his listeners, but no more than it frustrated Lincoln himself. “The spell—the long-enduring spell—with which the souls of men were bound to him, is a miracle,” concluded Lincoln, in words eerily prescient. “Who can compass it?”

“On his last journey home,” the Heidlers tell us of Clay:

The pounding cylinders of his locomotive joined a chorus of machined progress that had become an American expectation, a march that rarely paused for anything. It paused only briefly for Clay’s passing. Americans felt in their bones the inevitability of material improvement as they saw the future dance to the music of roaring steam whistles atop grand riverboats and heard the pinging of spikes driven for new iron rails and more locomotives. That summer evening in 1852, one of those locomotives pulled Henry Clay into the American twilight, a full moon waxing.

And you thought they didn’t write history like that anymore.

Richard Norton Smith is a biographer and presidential historian. Past director of five presidential libraries, he currently is a Scholar in Residence at George Mason University. For the last ten years he has been working on a life of Nelson Rockefeller.

Pullquote: If there is an overriding theme, it is the pervasive egalitarian instinct that shaped American politics long before Andrew Jackson built a fabled political career on Us versus Them.Image: Essay Types: Book Review