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I now present to you, the first in the series of Great Men sections. These sections will chronicle the efforts of the people that shaped the Union throughout its history. The first such person is Henry Clay.

Great Men, Section 1: Henry Clay

Henry Clay was a great statesman and orator who served in the United States Senate. Born in Virginia in 1777, Clay's family moved to Kentucky soon after where he studied law. During the 1790s and early 1800s, Clay established a lucrative law practice in Kentucky including high profile cases such as successfully defending Aaron Burr in 1806 when he was indicted for planning an expedition into Spanish territory. Along with his success in his legal career, Henry Clay was also influential in Kentucky state politics. Clay was so influential that in 1806, he was selected by the Kentucky legislature to represent Kentucky in the United States Senate during the remainder of John Adair's term, despite being too young to constitutionally serve as a United States senator.

Henry Clay's political career was much more successful and lasted longer than his career practicing law. After his serving in the Senate in 1806, Clay was elected to the House of Representatives in 1811. The first day of his first session in Congress, Clay was elected Speaker of the House. Clay was reelected to the House and to the speakership five time during his fourteen year tenure in the House of Respresentatives. While Speaker, Clay transformed the position into a position of power and manipulated the committee memberships to give the War Hawks control of the important House committees during the War of 1812. Clay took the lead supporting the war as the head of the Democratic-Republican Party and served as a peace commissioner at the Treat of Ghent in 1814. During the remainder of his service in the House of Representatives, Clay was a founding member of the American Colonization Society, advocated the American System, and helped gain Congressional approval of the Missouri Compromise.

Probably Clay's defining moment while Speaker of the House was his manipulation of the results of the election of 1824. While Clay had gotten the fewest number of electoral votes, no candidate obtained a majority. Thus, the election went to the House of Representatives. While Jackson had won the most votes and the popular vote, Clay did not want to see Jackson become presdient. And Clay could not be elected as only the top three candidates were eligible in the House, and Clay had come in fourth. So as Speaker of the House, he gave his support to John Quincy Adams, who won the election. Adams appointed Clay as Secretary of State, which Jackson was enraged at and called a 'corrupt bargain'. This was a major point in the election of 1828, and was one of the reasons that Jackson defeated Adams for the presidency that year[1].

After this election, Henry Clay served as a senator off and on for much of the 1830s and 1840s. Clay was an influential voice during both the presidencies of John Calhoun and William Henry Harrison. Clay served as a moderating force to Calhoun and as internal competition to Harrison, although Harrison accepted some similar policies as Clay such as the American System and the Third National Bank. However, the two broke with each other during the election of 1844. Clay was frustrated by Harrison's increasing resistance to his influence, and after losing the Whig nomination to Harrison, Clay never supported Harrison. This led to Harrison's loss to James K. Polk, but it also led to the end of Clay's Congressional career. Still, Clay is considered one of the great orators of the Senate and along with Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun form the Great Triumvirate which dominated the Senate in the 1830s and 1840s.

For the last years of his life, Henry Clay spent much of his time in Lexington where he set up a moderately successful realty office. In 1853, Clay visited Liberia, the product of the American Colonization Society, and caught yellow fever. Clay died two months after he returned to the United States. Henry Clay was the second person to lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda after Andrew Jackson.

[1] Everything up to about here is OTL.