Architect or Tactician? Henry Clay and the Institutional Development of the U.S. House of Representatives Charles Stewart III
[email protected] Department of Political Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology Draft of August 24, 1998 Abstract: Henry Clay is rightly regarded as the most significant personality in the antebellum House of Representatives. Still, there is dispute about whether Clay’s genius was primarily as a legislative tactician (working to manipulate an established set of rules) or architect (working to change the rules). This essay makes the case for Clay’s position as the preeminent tactician of his day, rather than architect. On the way to making this argument I first examine the difficulties of making any firm empirical claims about the role of Clay in the institutional development of the House. I then explore three important cases in which Clay played an active role in policymaking through the use of institutional tools at his disposal—declaration of war against England, the evolution of the House committee system, and the passage of the two Missouri compromises. Some of the research in this paper was conducted in collaboration with Jeffrey A. Jenkins of Michigan State University. Architect or Tactician? Henry Clay and the Institutional Development of the U.S. House of Representatives Charles Stewart III MIT I. Introduction Henry Clay is widely regarded to be the most significant personality in the antebellum House of Representatives. He is the only pre-Civil War Speaker to be subjected to major biographies, and the only Speaker whom each generation of American historians feels compelled to reexamine (Schurz 1898; Clay 1910; Mayo 1937; Van Deusen 1937; Eaton 1957; Peterson 1987; Remini 1991).