"The Great Compromiser"

In 1832 the South Carolina legislature voted to nullify a federal high tariff law originally sponsored by Clay. The state threatened to secede if President Jackson carried out his threat to enforce the law. Early in 1833 Clay piloted through Congress a compromise tariff act that smoothed over the crisis.

Clay resigned from the Senate in 1842, deeply disappointed over the failure of President John Tyler, a Whig, to support his legislative program. In 1844, however, Clay received the Whig nomination for President. He was narrowly defeated by Democrat James K. Polk. The campaign issue was the annexation of Texas as a slave state. Clay took an ambiguous stand and thereby lost vital support from both slavery and anti-slavery factions.

Clay was returned to the Senate in 1849. Again he helped head off civil war, this time by proposing the measures that made up the Compromise of 1850. They included admitting California as a state, organizing territorial governments in lands won from Mexico, and granting the South a stringent fugitive-slave law. Speaking in the Senate, Clay pleaded for national unity. He denied that any state had the right to secede, and predicted "ferocious and bloody" civil war should it be tried.