Between 1818 and 1843, Clement Comer Clay served in all three branches of state government and in both houses of Congress. Clay began his public career as an officer under Gen. Andrew Jackson in the Creek War of 1813–1814. After the war he aligned with Alabama’s wealthy Broad River political faction, a group of wealthy planters, bankers, and entrepreneurs based in Madison County. Elected to the territorial legislature in 1818, Clay, a stockholder in the powerful Huntsville Bank, joined with Broad River allies to pass legislation eradicating any limits on bank loan interest rates.
Chosen as president of Alabama’s 1819 Constitutional Convention, Clay continued to support measures benefiting elites, including life terms for judges. Broad River interests in the legislature elected Clay as one of the state’s five circuit judges (the judges served jointly as the state supreme court), and the other judges chose him as the state’s first Chief Justice. After the Panic of 1819 plunged the state into depression, Clay frequently ruled on behalf of creditors attempting to collect debts. Debtors of all classes, especially small farmers, resented the unlimited interest they had to pay as a result of legislation supported by Clay. He eventually resigned his judgeship and served as an attorney for some of the largest creditors.
Clay’s support for the bank-creditor faction cost him the election in 1825, when he lost a race for Congress to Gabriel Moore, a champion of small farmers. By 1829, however, Clay achieved his ambition of winning the Tennessee Valley seat in the US Congress. Once elected, Clay switched economic allegiances, becoming a champion of small farmers, land squatters, and public land debtors. He was twice re-elected.
After three terms in Congress, Clay returned to Alabama in 1835 and ran for governor as a Jacksonian Democrat, defeating his opponent by a nearly two-to-one margin. Clay’s first message to legislators warned of abolitionism and urged that new laws be passed against slave insurrection. When the depression of 1837 settled over Alabama, Clay summoned legislators into a special session, and they enacted a measure requiring the state bank and its branches to suspend collection of debts and provide debtors with three additional years to meet their obligations. While acting as governor, he was unanimously elected to the US Senate. Clay resigned the governorship and took his senate seat in September 1837, but poor economic conditions led to a decline in Clay’s finances, and he resigned in 1841.
A large slaveholder, Clay began selling off slaves to pay his debts. He began to restore his fortune, and by 1860 he had become wealthy. He advocated secession and became an object of Unionist hostility during the Civil War. His imprisonment by Union forces occupying Huntsville in 1864 led to a decline in Clay’s health, and he died in September 1866.
Photo Caption: Clement Comer Clay by Maltby Sykes (1952). [Alabama Department of Archives and History]
This article was first featured in Alabama Heritage magazine Issue 121.
About the Author
Samuel L. Webb, a native of York, Alabama, holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Alabama School of Law and a PhD in history from the University of Arkansas. He taught history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham from 1988 to 2009 and is now an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama.
