Heirs of the Founders

Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants- H.M. Brands
Doubleday/Random House
Release Date: November 13, 2018

Rating:
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Synopsis: In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery.
     Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal and political betrayal. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery.

      They wrestled with these issues for four decades, arguing bitterly and hammering out political compromises that held the Union together, but only just. Then, in 1850, when California moved to join the Union as a free state, "the immortal trio" had one last chance to save the country from the real risk of civil war. But, by that point, they had never been further apart.

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The debate over what  certain aspects of the Constitution: who has what authority, and how amendments should be interpreted, are not new debates.  The "second generation" of American politicians, including Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and Henry Clay, were fiercely arguing over how aspects of the Constitution should be applied before the War of 1812.  What rights did the Constitution grant states versus the federal government? How were new states to be brought into the Union?  Tariffs, taxes, and infrastructure were debated in Congress then as they are now.  Through the early 1800s Congress struggled with the idea of states rights, and what was due to individual states and different geographic sections of the country were often even more bitterly divisive than political parties are today.  Clay, Calhoun, and Webster spent forty years fighting to iron out what they saw as flaws or glaring omissions in the Constitution.  Each had personal ambitions that included the White House, each wanted to make lasting impressions on history, and each wanted to ensure the best for their region.  

A well-researched book, Heirs of the Founders works to help readers understand the battles the so-called "second generation" of American politicians fought in an effort to define the new United States of America.  Brands does a good job of leading readers through the different sides and their thinking, as well as emphasizing that then, as now, there were moderates who were willing to compromise to get things done and the more hard line groups who refused any hint of compromise.  The difference being that men like Clay often succeeded in bringing both sides to accept compromises that today rarely happen.  Brands quotes extensively from speeches each of these well-known orators gave but helps us dig deeper behind the scenes to understand what was going on.  I thought he did a particularly excellent job in exploring the complicated, nuanced, and sensitive aspects of national and individual opinions on the issue of slavery.  

Like Joanne Freeman's The Field of Blood, readers know where the country is headed.  Many contemporary Americans were surprised less by the fact that the Civil War happened and more by the fact that it didn't occur at least a decade earlier.  In Heirs we see the men who fought to hold off the break of the Union, but we also see, as they saw, that the extreme regional sectionalism of the first half of the 19th century made it inevitable.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review