Recovering the Age of Giants: On H. W. Brands' "Heirs of the Founders"

H. W. Brands | Heirs of the Founders: Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants | Doubleday | 2019 | 432 Pages

Part biography, part political history, H. W. Brands’ Heirs of the Founders: Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants focuses on the personal and political lives of the three most prominent American politicians of the era: Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Friends, occasional allies, and always competitors, Brands’ brisk and well-written account traces how all three men devoted their lives to the Constitution and the Union it preserved. From the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr and War of 1812 to the Missouri Controversy, from the election of Andrew Jackson to the Compromise of 1850’s last-ditch attempt to maintain the Union, each man featured preeminently in every significant political event of the first half of the nineteenth century. So omnipresent were the three men that their contemporaries labeled them the Great Triumvirate. 

Prominent as all three men were, Brands weaves in many of the other contemporary personalities of note, including the cantankerous, cynical, and brilliant John Randolph of Roanoke, who famously dueled with Clay, and Andrew Jackson, who looms nearly as large as the books’ main characters. Placing these important personalities alongside the titular figures offers readers a greater understanding of the political lives of these American Giants. It also helps reveal how each member of the Triumvirate possessed a burning ambition for political office. Throughout their lives, each held positions in both houses of Congress, all three served as Cabinet Secretaries, and Calhoun even served as  Vice President from 1825-1832. As Brands makes clear throughout, however, this hunger for office did not derive from a selfish desire for power and self-aggrandizement. Instead, it emerged from the Triumverate’s belief, familiar to many in the generation that succeeded the Founders, that the American experiment in constitutional self-government demanded preservation. What makes Brands’ narrative so compelling is how it tracks the Trumverate’s conflicting notions of how to conserve the Founders’ achievement. As Brands reveals, their competing and contradictory ideas intensified their rivalry.

Driving this rivalry was how each man identified with and personified the region from which he hailed. Henry Clay, through his famous American System of protective tariffs, internal improvements, and national banking, sought to open the West to the Market Revolution’s benefits. Aiding Clay was the silver-tongued Daniel Webster. Known for his rhetorical and legal skills rather than his policy initiatives, Webster advanced New England’s interests by reframing them as American interests. In the Dartmouth and McCulloch v. Maryland cases, Webster persuaded the Supreme Court on an expansive reading of the Constitution’s powers that made the American system possible. In his famous exchange with Senator Robert Hayne, Webster’s defense of an indivisible American Union established a rhetorical foundation of American nationhood that would resonate for generations thereafter. 

It was Calhoun, however, who emerged as the figure most connected to regional identity. Early in his career, Calhoun joined with Clay in advancing the American system’s nationalistic policies. In 1828, Congress fulfilled an element of Clay’s system by enacting what was then the strongest protective tariff in American history. The result was a combination punch to the southern economy—and South Carolinian planters in particular—as cotton exports plummeted, and the prices of American and imported goods rose. The economic pain brought to his home state forced Calhoun to change his mind. No longer the defender and advocate of the American System, he became the political theorist most commonly associated with nullification and state sovereignty. In an anonymously authored work, Calhoun influenced South Carolina’s government to nullify the 1828 tariff, thus kicking off the most significant constitutional crisis before the Civil War. That Calhoun was transformed from a nationalist and into a defender of state sovereignty all the while serving as Jackson’s Vice President only adds drama to the event. This transformation, however, also carried Calhoun to become a vociferous defender of slavery. Calhoun’s infamous vindication of slavery as a “positive good,” vital to the social stability and economic prosperity of the South, helped set the stage for the growing conflict that eventually tore the Union that Clay and Webster devoted their lives serving. 

This sectional division over the expansion of slavery came to dominate American politics just as the Great Triumvirate reached advanced ages. Earlier in their careers, the group, led by Clay, brokered compromises that preserved the American union while containing slavery. As the third generation of Americans came to political prominence, their desire to protect the commitments of the elder statesmen waned. Clay’s last attempt to broker compromise in 1850 failed, as Calhoun died, and Webster, for once, proved unpersuasive. The desire to preserve the Founders’ success succumbed to regional interests over the national good. It was an ominous and sad end for the three titans of the era.

Cumulatively, Brands’ achievement is no small feat. Wedged between two of the most critical junctures in American history, the Founding and the Civil War, the first half of the nineteenth century remains veiled in mystery for most Americans. H. W. Brands’ Heirs of the Founders, however, lifts that veil and recovers for readers a rich and complex period when, as his subtitle aptly notes, giants walked amongst us.