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Statesmen of the American Experiment
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14110 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1988 |
3,572 Words |
| Author
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Clyde Wilson
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THE GREAT TRIUMVIRATE
Webster, Clay, and Calhoun
Merrill D. Peterson
Oxford University Press, 1987
573 pp., $27.95
Americans seem to have survived the bicentennial of the Revolution and most of the bicentennial of the Constitution--though we suffered through rather more self-congratulation and showbiz and rather less deep reflection on these events than was good for us. But if any citizens have been stimulated to serious reading in American history, to an honest effort to understand the meaning of the great experiment in federal republicanism that is America, then they ought to go from the Revolution and the Constitution to the struggle of Hamilton and Jefferson that followed the establishment of the Constitution.
From there they should go on to that great middle period that lies between Jefferson's presidency and the Civil War, a period in which the legacy of the Founding Fathers clashed and mingled with the impulses of modernization and made the formative synthesis of the America that was to be. It is perhaps just as well that this long period is immensely varied, complex, and problematic, and that it provides no focal point for celebration. A good place to begin, nevertheless, is Merrill Peterson's major new treatment of the middle period, long in preparation and written in the grand, old style of political history that has almost disappeared.
The approaches that have been taken to the middle period are many and varied, and the more we have learned the further we have moved from satisfactory synthesis. Peterson's creation of a new synthesis out of the chaos and debris of historiographical skirmishes is an achievement. He tells the story freshly, through the framework of the Great Triumvirate--Daniel Webster (1782-1852), New Hampshire-born Bostonian and representative of the Northeast; John C. Calhoun (1782-1850), upland South Carolinian and spokesman of the older South; and Henry Clay (1777-1852), Virginia-born Kentuckian and spokesman for the emerging Heartland--the Middle West, the Upper South, and middle-of-the-roaders everywhere. These three men were recognized at the time and later as the great formative forces of American politics from about 1810 until about 1850. As Peterson observes with only slight exaggeration of the end of this period: "For some forty years each had been a host unto himself, and together they had triangulated the destiny of the nation."
Each of the Great Triumvirate leaped from near obscurity into sudden fame and power. Each began his national career in the House of Representatives at the time of the War of 1812. All passed from the scene in the early 1850s as a new generation, new forces, and new ideas were coming into their stride. Each was secretary of state (Webster twice) and a senator for many years. Each retired from the Senate and was called back. In addition, Clay was speaker of the House and one of the negotiators of the treaty ending the War of 1812; Calhoun was secretary of war and vice president; Webster was a leading member of the Supreme Court bar and orator for public occasions.
Though involved all their active lives with political parties, none was a party man or a party creation in the modern sense--Clay, perhaps, came closest to anticipating this. Each was a
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