Exploring American History

Henry Clay and American Compromises – 1824 – 1833

March 31, 2026

Union Trembles: Nullification Crisis

Riding his rising political stardom, Henry Clay ran for President in 1824. Despite being a popular national figure, he couldn’t match the national popularity of Andrew Jackson and regional popularity of John Quincy Adams in New England. Clay’s platform was ideologically closest to that of Adams and thus he decided to align with him when the election was being decided in The House of Representatives. It is widely known that engaging in the “corrupt bargain” hurt his national image severely and permanently.

Henry Clay’s appointment as Secretary of State. 7 March, 1825. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mcc.007/

Even though the Constitution gave Congress explicit powers to set the outcome of the election, it would have been prudent of Henry Clay to consider the optics of going against the outcome of the popular vote. Jacksonian Democrats cast him as a manipulator, and that image pursued him for the rest of his career. Despite that, you can’t blame the Kentucky Congressman for the lack of trying. He ran in the general election for President two more times. In 1832, he challenged Andrew Jackson, the man he bitterly disliked. He ran as a candidate from the National Republican Party, a party that was formed by the Adams-Clay wing of the Democratic-Republican Party created in opposition to Jacksonian Democrats. It was the first meaningful opposition party since the Era of Good Feelings. Henry Clay ended up with 37.4% of the popular vote and carried six states. That wasn’t a very good performance. It was partially because the vote that opposed Jackson was split between Clay’s National Republicans and the Anti-Masonic party, another anti-Jacksonian party, a more radical one, that did not want to cooperate with Clay. After the election, Henry Clay and other members of National Republican and Anti-Masonic parties formed the new Whig Party. Candidates from this party would have much better luck in future elections.

“The American System” and Tariff Wars

For a moment, let’s go back a decade and a half. As the War of 1812 came to an end, tensions between British and American manufacturers remained. In an effort to capture the American market, the British flooded it with cheap high-quality goods. In response to that, in 1816 U.S. Congress introduced protective tariffs to keep American goods competitive. Henry Clay played an instrumental part in the passage of these tariffs by coming up with “the American System” – a vision that rested on three coordinated policies: protective tariffs, a strong national bank, and investment in infrastructure. The American System became a cornerstone of U.S. domestic policy for the next two decades. In many ways, it co-opted old Federalist policies championed by Alexander Hamilton, which laid the foundation to the future strength of the U.S. economy. The American System, in its turn, reignited it by continuing similar policies. In 1816, The Second Bank of the United States was chartered. After a few years of its existence, it managed to bring sanity to monetary policy by strictly regulating state banks, reducing inflation, and enforcing financial discipline throughout the states and their own central banks. Northern industries benefitted from tariffs levied on foreign goods like iron, wool, and textiles because it protected the very same goods it manufactured from cheap foreign competition. On the contrary, while the agrarian South was exporting raw cotton to Great Britain, it was also importing finished textiles and woolen products from abroad. Those imports became a lot more expensive because of the Tariff of 1824. While southern states were generally supportive of the 1816 tariff, they came to really hate the 1824 Tariff as it adversely affected their economies.

As if that wasn’t enough, then came the Tariff of 1828. It was levied on mostly the same goods as its 1824 counterpart except the rates were much higher, up to 38 percent on imported goods and 45 percent on imported raw materials. In fact, that tariff wasn’t even supposed to pass the vote in Congress. Jacksonian Democrats crafted a bill so extreme in nature that they were near certain that it wouldn’t pass. According to their plan, southerners would uniformly oppose it, but due to Jackson’s great popularity in the South, they would vote for him in the election anyway. At the same time, northerners would not support it enough for the bill to pass, but it would shore up support for Andrew Jackson in northern states in the presidential election year. To everyone’s surprise, the bill was passed and signed into law. It helped Jackson’s cause, but predictably it ended up harming the southern economy even more.

Jackson won the election, but contrary to southerners’ expectations, he did exactly nothing about lowering the tariffs. His attention was devoted to the Bank War instead, which resonated enough with his southern base to propel him to an easy re-election in 1832.

Negro Seaman Act

In the election of 1832 there was one state that had not had a single vote cast at the ballot box, but simply had its eleven electoral votes awarded by the state legislature. That state was South Carolina. Today this approach sounds bizarre, but at the time it was not out of the ordinary. South Carolina kept awarding electoral votes through its legislature until 1868 when Reconstruction Acts passed by the U.S. Congress forced it to switch to popular vote. In fact, the South Carolina legislature essentially had dictatorial powers in the state: on its own it elected governor, it appointed U.S. senators and nearly all state and local officials including judges, sheriffs and militia officers, and of course, it controlled presidential electors by appointing them directly. It’s not hard to see why South Carolina was doing this. The state’s political elite feared mass democracy and used legislative selection as a safeguard against unpredictable outcomes. South Carolina had long traditions of wealthy planter paternalism unlike anywhere else in the Antebellum South. That resulted in laws unmatched in repressiveness by any of its neighboring states. One such law was Negro Seaman Act enacted in 1822. This draconic law mandated that any free Black sailor on a ship docking in any South Carolina port would get arrested for the duration of that ship’s presence in the port. Justification for that was fear that free Black sailors, if given the chance to step ashore and mingle with their slave counterparts, would instigate a slave rebellion such as one allegedly uncovered shortly prior to the passage of the law. Furthermore, the cost of their arrest would have to be covered by the ship, and if it wasn’t, the sailor would be sold into slavery. Negro Seaman Act was a law unique in its overreach. Prior to it, there was no other law in the Antebellum South that had a codified requirement of a preventative arrest of a free Black person.

Lo and behold, the law was enforced in practice soon after its enactment. In August 1823, British merchant ship “Homer” docked in Charleston. Among its crew was Jamaican sailor Henry Elkison. Charleston sheriff Francis G. Deliesseline promptly arrested Elkison and led him off the ship in chains to be jailed. While Elkison was in jail, the captain of his ship hired a lawyer in Charleston and sued the state. The case went to a federal judge who invalidated not only the arrest, but the entire law used to carry it out. Elkison was thankfully freed, however, South Carolina refused to comply with the judge’s ruling and kept enforcing the Negro Seaman Act until 1861. This defiance of the ruling by a federal judge was a textbook violation of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. However, other than a few repeated warnings by the U.S. federal officials, it didn’t produce any consequences for South Carolina. This misguided assertion of state power over federal power was a precursor for other bad things to come.

The Greatest Debate in the History of Senate

Midway into Jackson’s second term the issue of tariffs was gaining steam in Congress and the debate on it entered the U.S. Senate chamber in January 1830. In a multi-hour speech Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina accused the North of trying to destroy the South through the policies of high tariffs and increasing opposition to slavery. Old wounds, treated but not healed during the time of the Missouri Compromise, resurfaced, and recriminations again were flying about. Hayne argued that the United States was essentially just a collection of sovereign states that had a right to disobey or “nullify” federal laws they didn’t like. This view was known as the doctrine of nullification. Hayne was considered a surrogate of Vice President John C. Calhoun, also a South Carolinian. The fact that the sitting U.S. Vice President supported this doctrine speaks volumes about how fragile the Union was at the time. Both Northern and Southern politicians were courting the West – the swing region of that era. The South’s overtures towards the West were based on the issue of the federal government owning most of the public lands there. They argued for the ownership of those lands to be transferred to the states. Hayne made an explicit mention of that in his speech. Stopping short of directly advocating for a secession, Hayne flipped the script and accused his colleagues of New England of doing that by recollecting the Hartford Convention of 1814. Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts then rose and delivered a thorough rebuke of Mr. Hayne in a speech that lasted nearly two days. He appealed to national unity and stated that a strong national government is a product of the will of the people, attacked the doctrine of nullification and reaffirmed the notion of American nationalism. The most memorable passage that Webster uttered made his speech what many consider the most significant one delivered in the Senate chamber: “While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children… When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in Heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather behold the gorgeous Ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured—bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as, what is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, liberty first, and union afterwards—but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole Heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” This speech was widely cited during the Civil War by media, politicians and the military on the Union side.

The Crisis

These eloquent words, while creating many new American patriots, weren’t enough to convince politicians from South Carolina to change their positions. In 1832 the South Carolina legislature executed a series of quick moves to escalate the Nullification Crisis. On November 24th, 1832, it passed the ordinance of nullification and declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 “null and void”. On December 10th, Andrew Jackson issued his Nullification Proclamation, which strongly condemned the nullifiers’ actions and essentially declared them illegal and treasonous. Then, on December 13th, Robert Hayne resigned his Senate seat in November and was promptly elected governor by the state legislature. Then, on December 28th, John C. Calhoun resigned as Vice President, and was quickly appointed by the state legislature as the Senator from South Carolina. One of the first actions of the new governor Hayne was to call up roughly 10,000 state militiamen in order to block the ability of federal officers to collect tariffs at South Carolina ports and be ready to defend Charleston in case of federal intervention, which Andrew Jackson threatened. On January 16, 1833, Jackson submitted to Congress a Force Bill which authorized the deployment of U.S. Armed Forces to South Carolina. The situation was critical and military conflict was near certain.

At that time, Henry Clay was coming off his rough loss in the 1832 election. In early 1829, he left the office of the Secretary of State and was practicing law in Kentucky while rebuilding his political base. In 1831 he was elected to the Senate by the Kentucky legislature, so he was back in the Senate after a twenty year absence. His career ambitions were still alive and well. In 1832 he ran for President, using the American System as the staple of his platform. The American System was popular, but only in parts of the country. The central bank and stability of the currency was a big part of the American System. Henry Clay was a strong proponent of The Second Bank of The United States, the central bank at the time. The bank’s charter was to expire in 1836 (it had been chartered in 1816 for 20 years). Andrew Jackson was successful in portraying the bank as an elite corrupt institution. Jackson’s overwhelming national popularity sold the public on the idea, and the bank’s charter was not renewed. This subsequently contributed to the Panic of 1837 and a following long economic recession, which fell on the lap of Jackson’s successor Martin Van Buren. Jackson himself “had left office more popular than when he entered it.” It is fair to say that had Clay been elected instead of Jackson in 1832, many economic troubles that hit the United States during Van Buren’s term might have been avoided or at least reduced in impact, but we’ll go into more details about that in the next post.

Roughly around the beginning of February, 1833, about two weeks after Jackson’s Force Bill was submitted, Henry Clay privately reached out to John C. Calhoun to start negotiating a compromise. Despite the fact that there was no incentive for Calhoun to negotiate, as his position was entrenched since South Carolina had already nullified all the tariffs, he also realized that a compromise legislation was the only way to avoid military confrontation. Clay, on his end, was afraid of the growth of presidential executive power and wanted to act before Jackson would get even more authority. He also wanted to preserve some sort of tariff protectionism and didn’t want to get rid of it completely for the sake of avoiding conflict. As a result, Clay’s final proposal was to bring the tariff rate down in small reductions over the period of nine and a half years, at which point the rates would sharply drop to approximately 1816 levels. Calhoun and his allies in the Senate were eager to avoid a bloody war in their state and thus accepted the compromise. Both Force Bill and the Compromise Tariff Bill were passed by the Congress on the same day, March 1st, 1833. However, the latter effectively made the former moot. Ten days later, on March 11th, the South Carolina legislature repealed the ordinance of nullification.

The war was avoided through the skillful political maneuvering of Henry Clay. While negotiating the compromise, he was in support of the Force Bill, which earned him a fresh round of accusations of being “two-faced”. However, the Force Bill was an important measure needed for the demonstration of federal authority, so Henry Clay understood that its presence was vital in the process and thus supported it as well. This allowed President Jackson, whose favorite approach was coercion, to also save face in the crisis. In addition, the “two-faced” accusations referenced Clay’s support of 1798 Kentucky and Virginia resolutions early in his career, where he supported nullifying Alien and Sedition Acts in almost identical fashion South Carolina wanted to nullify tariffs 34 years later. While Clay’s views obviously had evolved since then, this disparity in views did not help his image. Despite that, he persevered in his quest for a compromise, which cemented his “great compromiser” reputation on the national stage and made him the intellectual center of the emerging Whig Party. He had more to do for the country, and we’ll go into that next time.

Henry Clay and America’s Compromises – 1804 – 1820

August 16, 2025

July 11th, 1804. A duel between the sitting U.S. Vice President, Aaron Burr and former U.S. Secretary of Treasury, founder of the First Bank of The United States, military general, founder of U.S. Coast Guard, and the man generally credited with putting the juggernaut of U.S. economy on its feet, Alexander Hamilton, ends in latter throwing his shot and former shooting the latter in cold blood. The occurrence sends shockwaves through the young nation. Two years later, Burr gets arrested on federal charges of conspiracy and stands trial in Richmond, Virginia. A young lawyer named Henry Clay defends him and gets him acquitted. Nonetheless, Burr’s political career is finished, and he ends up leaving the country to avoid additional trials on charges by individual states. Henry Clay, whose career is mildly overshadowed by his association with Burr even despite him later being convinced about Burr’s guilt, has four failed presidential runs and takes part in the Corrupt Bargain after the scandalous election of 1824. But despite his underachievements in the elections, in the next 50 years after Hamilton’s death, it is Henry Clay who embodied the spirit of America like no other politician. That spirit was the spirit of oblique and difficult compromise.

Portrait of Henry Clay as Speaker of the House, painting by Matthew Harris Jouett, 1818 – Public Domain.

Henry Clay was born in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1777. After studying law under the wing of George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a mentor to Thomas Jefferson, he was admitted to the Virginia Bar in 1797. That year he moved to Kentucky and in 1799 he married Lucrecia Hart, daughter of Colonel Thomas Hart, one the early Kentucky settlers and a prominent businessman. With newly acquired connections, Clay’s law practice grew together with his own standing in the community (defending Aaron Burr for free in 1806 probably helped with that). In 1803, he got elected to the Kentucky state legislature and immediately became one of its most influential members. Such was his influence that despite him being younger than constitutionally mandated age of 30, Kentucky legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1806 to fill a vacancy for a two month remainder of an unexpired term. The same thing happened in 1810, this time for over a year. After two brief stints in the Senate, Clay decided to run for the House of Representatives from Kentucky’s 3rd district and won unopposed. On March 4th 1811, at the start of the new Congress, Clay was elected Speaker of the House. To this day, Henry Clay holds the distinction of the only Speaker in history who was elected on the first day of his first congressional term. As Henry Clay’s political stardom was affirming itself, so did the division lines of the Union.

In the first decade of the 1800s, America found itself entangled in Great Britain’s affairs yet again. Napoleonic wars in Europe were in full swing, and the British were trying to disrupt France’s emerging trade with Americans by intercepting American vessels and impressing many from the captured crew into the service with the British Navy. In response, Congress passed the Embargo Act in 1807 banning all imports from Great Britain and subsequently all exports as well. Even before the passage of the Act, it was clear that it would hurt the economy of Northeastern states the most, because they heavily relied on textile and other manufacturing imports from Great Britain. But since Northeast was the political base of the Federalist Party, President Jefferson, who, just like the majority in Congress, was Democratic-Republican, signed the Act without hesitation. Crippled economy of Northeastern states limped along through the subsequent War of 1812. With no end of the war in sight in December 1814, some disgruntled Federalists, including sizable delegations from Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, met in Hartford to decide what to do about their grievances. The convention produced a document that proposed a number of changes designed to even the playing ground between Federalist north and Democratic-Republican south, such as removal of the three fifth compromise, requiring two thirds majorities in Congress to admit new states and to restrict foreign commerce, and limiting presidents to one term.

Union Trembles: The Prelude

No one knows how raucous these proposals would have been because the timing of that convention couldn’t be worse. Earlier in 1814, Henry Clay traveled to Ghent, Belgium, as part of the team led by John Quincy Adams, to negotiate the peace in the War of 1812. Negotiations resulted in the peace treaty being signed on December 24th, 1814. In the realities of the early 19th century, the news took about a month to travel across the ocean. In that time, outnumbered American forces led by General Andrew Jackson won a huge victory at the battle of New Orleans on January 8th, 1815. Also unaware of the Ghent peace treaty, the delegates at the Hartford convention kept it going until January 5th, 1815. They were totally unsuspecting that the hated trade embargo against Great Britain was about to vanish in accordance with the new peace terms. The news of American victory in New Orleans spearheaded the patriotic feelings throughout the country, and the news of the secretive Federalist gathering in Hartford, which came out at the same time, was less than welcome. The public latched onto the conspiracy theory that at the Hartford convention the Federalists planned to secede and form a new country out of New England states. Historians couldn’t find any evidence of that, but the perilous light of treason had been cast, and the Federalist Party never recovered from it. It effectively disappeared from the national stage while the Union persevered, hardly batting an eye.

While the Hartford Convention can hardly be considered an upheaval, it was the first occurrence when a number of American states expressed significant grievances with the Union itself.

Union Trembles: Missouri Statehood

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson did what many consider his greatest presidential accomplishment: he nearly doubled the territory of the United States by purchasing the 829000 square miles of French Louisiana territory west of the Mississippi River. It was an extraordinary achievement indeed, not just because of the sheer size of newly acquired land, but also the purchase price. The American delegation in France was only authorized to purchase the city of New Orleans for a maximum of $10 million. It was at that time however, that Napoleon decided to give up his plans for the empire in the New World, and with the ready buyer at his door, he impulsively let his whole vast territorial possession go for an astonishing price of $15 million (roughly translating to just seven cents per acre), which Americans didn’t think twice to accept.

It was only a matter of time for the new states to be carved out of the newly acquired territory, and that presented a bit of a time bomb. The United States was founded on a delicate balance of power between free states and slave states, with the latter heavily reliant on the reprehensible three-fifth compromise. Other than the ugly concept of valuing a human life for less than what it is, it gave slave states unfair advantage by giving them hundreds of thousands of free votes. That in turn led to slave states being overrepresented in the House, and with the additional help of sympathizers from the North, slaveholding interests were always protected in the U.S. Congress. Free and slave new states were being added to the Union in equal numbers since 1792. That year, Kentucky, a slave state, and Vermont, a free state, were added followed by Tennessee, a slave state, in 1797, Ohio, a free state, in 1803, Louisiana, a slave state, in 1812, Indiana, a free state, in 1816, Alabama, a slave state, and Illinois, a free state, both in 1819.

This was when the territory of Missouri petitioned Congress for statehood as a slave state. It was the second state carved out of the former Louisiana territory, but unlike the state of Louisiana, admitted in 1812 and located in the Deep South, it was situated squarely in the middle of north and south. It was the moment for the northern members of Congress to draw the line: if slavery was not restrained here and now, it would be given a free entry into the entire former territory of Louisiana thus irreversibly changing the fragile balance. At the moment, there were 11 free states and 11 slave states. While voices against slavery were getting louder, southern states didn’t mind slavery as long as it brought them economic benefit. King Cotton was making southern states quite prosperous, but its overproduction depleted the soil and made westward expansion ever more desirable, and with it the continuous reliance on slave labor, which at the time had been a part of the picture for nearly two centuries. The territory of Missouri in particular had traditions of slavery since 1720, and its slave population was rapidly growing since 1793, the year of cotton gin’s invention. Requiring Missouri to somehow disengage from slavery in order to join the Union set the stage for a collision course. And it took no time for Congress to get into it. Shortly after the floor was open for debate on Missouri statehood in February 1819, representative James Tallmage Jr. of New York, a Democratic-Republican, introduced an amendment requiring no further introduction of slavery as well as all children born after the admission to be free at the age of 25, both as a condition for admission. This split Democratic-Republicans for the first time since the start of the Era of Good Feelings, with Northern Democratic-Republicans teaming up with the remnants of the Federalists, and Southern Democratic-Republicans uniting in opposition. Rancorous debate ensued with both sides threatening civil war. Threats of disunion were flying about rampantly and aggressively. Tallmadge proclaimed: “If a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it come!” The House narrowly passed both of his resolutions, however, they failed in the Senate, and the fate of Missouri statehood and the Union itself hung in the balance. However, the Congress was ending its term at the time, and it was up to the next Congress to decide the fate of this legislation.

After returning from Belgium, Henry Clay dove right back into serving in the House, where he was elected speaker again in 1815. He had an incredible run in the House where he was elected seven times between 1810 and 1824 and served as a Speaker of the House until 1820, including the time of Missouri Statehood debate, and then again in 1823-1825. A slaveowner himself, Henry Clay held, shall we say, complex views on slavery. Kentucky, Clay’s home, was a slave state, but it maintained strong economic ties with the North. In the Civil War, Kentucky ended up as a border state, and even though it declared neutrality at first, it ultimately decided to stay with the Union and generally had no qualms about letting slavery go. Henry Clay was certainly an embodiment of Kentucky’s border spirit. He supported gradual emancipation of slaves and a strategy of “diffusion” where slave population would be dispersed in order to not be overly concentrated in any particular area (from that perspective, situating slaves in Missouri would be a good thing).

In December 1819, the district of Maine, part of Massachusetts at the time, petitioned Congress for statehood. The Senate quickly passed a bill admitting both Maine and Missouri as well as all provisions banning slavery in Louisiana territory above 36’30” line (Missouri’s southern border). Henry Clay took that bill up for a vote in the House. Despite him bullying and cajoling as many members of Congress as he could into voting yay, the bill still failed. At that point, Clay formed a committee on compromise where he forced each member to take a vote on the compromise bill in the open and unsurprisingly, the passage in committee was unanimous. After that, Clay split this bill into three bills and introduced each one on the House floor separately. He used parliamentary tricks to outfox the opponents of the compromise, and at the end each bill passed: Maine was admitted as a free state, an enabling act was passed to allow Missouri to join as a slave state, and slavery was banned west of Missouri and north of 36’30” line. On March 6, 1820, President Monroe signed all three bills into law. However, this wasn’t the end of it. Missouri inserted a clause in its state constitution, written in 1820, that required the exclusion of “free negroes and mulattoes” from the state. This was a direct violation of Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. In 1821, Missouri still had to get confirmed for admission as what was passed in 1820 was just the enabling act. The controversial clause in its constitution flared the tempers again, and it threatened to derail the admission and re-ignite all the divisions. Representative William Eustis of Massachusetts introduced a resolution in the House requiring that Missouri remove the offensive language. Henry Clay moved the resolution off the House floor and sent it to a select committee on compromise, members of which he named himself. He feared that if Eustis’ resolution gets adopted, it would be not only Missouri that leaves the Union, but also Kentucky, Tennessee, and even Ohio. The committee on compromise ultimately reported that Missouri be admitted to the Union upon the fundamental condition that its legislature would not enact any law preventing any description of a person from settling in Missouri who could otherwise become a citizen of any other state in the Union. But even that wasn’t the end of it. It was now time for the 1820 election, and the question came up: would Missouri votes be counted? Missouri wasn’t technically a state yet, but every southern lawmaker basically considered it one. When setting up the order of states during the count of electoral votes, Clay, in yet another show of his political ingenuity, moved Missouri’s turn in the count to be the last believing that by the time it gets to Missouri, its electoral votes would be perfunctory. He was right: Monroe won the election by a landslide. Subsequently, on August 10, 1821, President Monroe signed the bill containing resolutions put forth by Clay’s committee on compromise after it was passed by both houses of Congress.

Henry Clay’s unexampled perseverance was a key factor that saved the country from disunion and civil war. His stature in national politics greatly improved after the Missouri Compromise as he became a politician of national caliber. He didn’t wait long to capitalize on that as he launched his presidential run in the very next election cycle. Not everyone was happy with the compromise, including Thomas Jefferson, who famously called the compromise “a fire bell in the night” and compared the debate over slavery in Missouri to a “knell of the Union.” His concerns were justified, but no one other than Henry Clay had stepped up to the plate and steered the debate towards a compromise. As it appeared, Henry Clay’s mediating skills and desire to keep the Union going would be needed on a few more occasions. We’ll discuss them in the next post.
Thaddeus Stevens – America’s Hero

July 22, 2025

One of America’s unsung heroes of the 19th century is Thaddeus Stevens. Not many people know his name, but he did more to influence your life than iPhone and YouTube put together.

Named after American Revolutionary War hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Thaddeus Stevens was born in Vermont in 1792. He was born with a club foot and limped his whole life because of this condition. At the time, having a child with a club foot was considered a judgment from God for secret parental sin. This and having an older son born with the same condition in both feet may have influenced the boy’s father to abandon his family (even though the family had more children born without any disability), and it was the mother, Sarah Stevens, that was left alone to take care of her kids. She eventually enrolled Thaddeus into a grammar school where he, after being relentlessly taunted for his condition by his classmates, grew headstrong with overwhelming desire to succeed and get an education.

Stevens eventually enrolled into University of Vermont, then later Dartmouth College, and then moved to York, PA to become a teacher in York Academy (today’s York College of Pennsylvania). At the same time he studied law and wanted to pass the bar exam. At the time, local bar had a very peculiar restriction banning anyone who “followed any other profession while preparing for admission” from becoming a lawyer. Ever relentless Stevens took the bar exam anyway but he also brought with him four bottles of Madeira wine, over which the obscure rule was happily retired by members of the board.

His law practice founded in 1816 grew and became highly successful. At some point he represented a slave owner who wanted to get his runaway slave back. Stevens won the case, but he came to regret it so much that he promised himself to never work for slave owners again. At the same time, he got involved in politics and first got elected to Gettysburg borough council in 1822 and later to Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1833.

PA portrait of a much younger Thaddeus when he was becoming well known in Pennsylvania – Public Domain.

Pennsylvania Public School Reform

A portrait of a much younger Thaddeus when he was becoming well known in Pennsylvania – Public Domain[/caption]At the time, not a single state outside of New England had free public schools. Parents had to pay tuition, and those who couldn’t had to sign a humiliating pauper’s oath. In 1834 Stevens championed a bill that reformed Pennsylvania school system and introduced free public education to the entire state. Pennsylvania free public school system was first of its kind in the United States and became a model for other states. Of course, conservative backlash against it came fast and strong. In the state election that same year many representatives who voted for that bill were defeated and the repeal of it was all but a certainty. Not to Stevens. On April 11th, 1835 he rose to speak in the chamber of Pennsylvania House of Representatives and delivered a speech of such eloquence that enough people were swayed to now oppose the repeal. In his speech Stevens showed how public school system would actually save money for the state while delivering the greater good of education to everyone. “Pennsylvania’s sons possess as high native talents as any other nation of ancient or modern time. Many of the poorest of her children possess as bright intellectual gems, if they were as highly polished, as did the scholars of Greece or Rome. But too long, too disgracefully long, has coward, trembling, procrastinating legislation permitted them to lie buried in dark, unfathomed caves.” After Stevens uttered these words, the law survived and thus free public schools were born. Massachusetts adopted a similar system five years later and other states gradually followed.

13th Amendment

Despite the enormity of credit that belongs to Stevens for the advancement of the public school system, this isn’t what he’s mostly known for. He became a fervent abolitionist and took that cause with him to the U.S. Congress where he first was elected to in 1848. While there, he joined a radical Republican caucus and was the key force behind the adoption of The Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which outlawed slavery. Passing that amendment was no easy fit, and its narrow passage in January 1865 was preceded by another passionate speech by Stevens that closed out the debate. “I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: ‘Here lies one who only courted the low ambition to have it said he had striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color.’” The amendment got the required two thirds majority in the House by mere two votes.

Reconstruction and 14th Amendment

It was no time for Stevens to stop. Lincoln was assassinated, and the country had a huge leadership vacuum largely unfilled by the reactionary president Andrew Johnson. Johnson voiced no opposition when Southern States passed draconian Black Codes which deprived the emancipated slaves of rights like owning property and conducting business. Rest of the country, eager to see that all their Civil War sacrifices were not in vain, was quite displeased and gave Republicans overwhelming majorities in the midterm election of 1866. With Radical Republican faction being the largest in the House and Stevens being its leader, he effectively became the most influential congressman. Of course, he wasted no time. Even before that election Stevens started drafting what eventually became The Fourteenth Amendment. To date it is the most litigated constitutional amendment in U.S. history. Its Due Process Clause essentially made Bill of Rights applicable to the states. The Citizenship Clause gave citizenship to descendants of slaves. Today we know this as “birthright citizenship”. The Equal Protection Clause requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people, including non-citizens, under its jurisdiction. The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868 and its ratification along with enfranchising minorities and basically cancelling Black Codes became a prerequisite for all southern states to be re-admitted to the Union. Gritting their racist teeth, they did it and The Fourteenth Amendment became law. Stevens won again, and America did with him. Blacks could now vote in the South, and through the newly obtained majorities in state legislatures in their home states they could do things like establish public school systems that Stevens fought for thirty years ago.

Stevens was in ill health even before the Civil War ended, and by 1868 he couldn’t walk and had to be carried around in a special chair. He died that year. His work largely withstood the test of time, but not entirely. Of course, we still have the constitutional amendments, but southern states found their way around them. After Stevens’ death, Radical Republican caucus lost its influence in Congress, Reconstruction ended after the corrupt election of 1876, and all southern states established poll taxes with grandfather clauses aimed specifically at blacks thus disenfranchising them again. It would only be 90 years later when that would end, but those 90 years were as dark as it gets. The Lost Cause, a whitewashed tale about the Confederacy and Antebellum South, was actively and deliberately romanticized by activist groups like The United Daughters of the Confederacy. Many cities in the South and outside got themselves statues of confederate generals (usually of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson, but some, like Memphis, TN, erected a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of KKK). Racial oppression manifested itself via rampant lynching, pogroms, and segregation. Despite the fact that the South was soundly defeated in The Civil War, it soundly won Reconstruction. Public image of Stevens in the meantime was painted as that of an extremist and a person filled with hate. Yesterday’s confederates, back in the mainstream of U.S. politics, far outweighed the influence of yesterday’s radicals and shaped the directions of public debate for generations.

Was Thaddeus Stevens an actual radical? He was simply normal. He wanted human beings to be called human beings. He fought for the underprivileged to have an even playing field with the rest of society. He left us some outstanding laws that became a part of our Constitution. Legacy of people like Stevens is so important to remember as we have to resist the tide of authoritarianism. Thaddeus Stevens – America’s hero, my hero.

Thaddeus Stevens in 1860s – Public Domain


Henry Clay ca. 1835, https://www.loc.gov/resource/pga.09077/	John C. Calhoun ca. 1845, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution – https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.90.52

Author

Henry Clay and American Compromises – 1824 – 1833

Henry Clay and America’s Compromises – 1804 – 1820

Thaddeus Stevens – America’s Hero