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Nicole Etcheson, David S. Heidler, Jeanne T. Heidler. Henry Clay: The Essential American. New York: Random House. 2010. Pp. xxiv, 595. $30.00., Robert V. Remini. At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise that Saved the Union. New York: Basic Books. 2010. Pp. xiii, 184. $24.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 1, February 2011, Pages 175–177, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.1.175
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“It is natural to believe in great men,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in Representative Men: Seven Lectures ([1850], p. 9). The popularity of Jon Meacham's American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (2008) testifies to that principle. Meacham saw Jackson as a “lion,” a fighter for his country, and opens the book with the nullification crisis. Acknowledging Jackson's unprecedented use of presidential power, Meacham argues that, because Jackson was the only member of government elected by all the people, he believed himself their “champion” and “the White House, not Capitol Hill, the center of national power and national action” (pp. xx, xxiv).
Capitol Hill, of course, was occupied by Jackson's nemesis, Henry Clay, also a westerner and a slave owner although not quite so much a self‐made man as the orphaned Jackson. Clay's followers dubbed themselves the Whigs precisely in response to King Andrew's high‐handed use of executive power. In their new book David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler call Jackson a “Caesar.” Their biography of Henry Clay along with Robert V. Remini's account of the Compromise of 1850 are timely reminders of Congress's importance.
