In the autumn of 1797, twenty-year-old Henry Clay, with a license just issued by the Virginia courts to practice law, entered the Promised Land of Kentucky to begin a great career in American politics.

It was to be not only a great career but a long and colorful one. An eloquent speaker, a man of boldly definite mind, an enthusiast for all that concerned the West and its future, Clay was temperamentally exactly suited to the mood of his adopted region. When he first took his place as Speaker of the House in 1811, the North, the South and the West were even then characterized by differing interests. As guiding spirit of the anti-British War Hawks, he identified himself strongly with the prevailing nationalist sentiments of the West.

Yet Clay was not essentially a warlike man. Throughout most of his career he labored to prevent foreign wars and to reduce internal friction that threatened civil war. Despite the fact that he was on occasion fiery of speech and that he fought two duels, he was to earn the title of "the Great Pacificator" later popularly bestowed on him. As sectional conflicts grew deeper and more clear-cut in the first half of the nineteenth century, so did the party system also evolve, providing both the means of stating conflicts and the means of making the adjustments and compromises to harmonize them. In his career Henry Clay perhaps more than any other man was to develop the necessary art of compromise which has become so large a feature of American politics. In 1820-1821 during the crisis over the admission of Missouri as a state, in 1833 during the nullification crisis and in the Compromise of 1850 his genius for moderation furnished the means of preserving the Union.

Although he failed in his ambition to become President, his success was real and far more meaningful than the mere fact of his defeat in two presidential elections, as the Republican candidate and as the Whig candidate. Clement Eaton's perceptive account reveals the life of the man in relation to the developing life of the nation.