Clay wanted to run for President again in 1848, and announced his candidacy in April of that year. But after so many losses, even his old friends supported other candidates. The Whig nomination that year went to another war hero general, Zachary Taylor. This was the second time Clay was passed over by his party for a war hero general. He never endorsed his party’s nominee that year. After the election, Clay watched his fears come true as the slavery issue exploded again as the Congress debated the organization of the territory annexed from Mexico as a result of the war.
Both sides exchanged heated warnings and accusations. Civil war became a very real possibility. Clay engineered one last great compromise to prevent war and disunion. The Compromise of 1850 called for the admission of California as a free state and the division of the remainder of the new territory into the Utah and New Mexico Territories, each of which would decide the slavery issue for themselves. For the North, the slave trade (but not slavery itself) would be abolished in the District of Columbia. For the South, a stronger fugitive slave law was passed. This calmed things down, and for the time being settled the situation. Civil war was averted, and when it came ten years later, the North was considerably stronger in relation to the South, and eventually won the conflict. Had the conflict begun ten years earlier, the outcome might well have been very different.
Clay’s health failed during this last political struggle, and he died two years later. He never became President. But his leadership in times of crisis, his compromise bills in 1820, 1833 and 1850 averted violence and civil war at times when the nation could not have survived such conflicts. Without Clay and the compromises he forged, our nation might not have survived. That we are today “one nation . . . indivisible . . “ is, in large part, his legacy.
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