Henry Clay

Henry Clay was born in 1777 in Hanover County, Virginia, during the American Revolution. His father, a Baptist minister, died when he was four. He worked as a clerk in Richmond, studied law, and in 1797 moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he became a successful lawyer and planter who held enslaved people. He entered politics and served in the United States Senate and House of Representatives, where he was elected Speaker in his first term and became a leader of the 'war hawks' before the War of 1812. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent that ended the war. He promoted what he called the 'American System' of tariffs, a national bank and roads and canals to build the economy. He served as secretary of state under John Quincy Adams and ran unsuccessfully for president several times. Known as the 'Great Compromiser', he helped arrange the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the tariff compromise of 1833 and the Compromise of 1850 over slavery in the new territories. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1852.

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Faith: Son of a Baptist clergyman; his personal beliefs are not well documented. Source: Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography (via Wikisource)