Of course he got into politics.  That was his natural and inevitable field.  As early as 1806 he was sent to the Senate, and afterwards to the House, of which he was speaker for thirteen years.  Three times was he a candidate for the presidency, defeated once by John Quincy Adams, once by Andrew Jackson, and once, when victory seemed almost his, by William Henry Harrison.  That other great party leader, James G. Blaine, was to meet a similar fate years later.  Henry Clay lacked the deep foresight, the prophetic intuition necessary to statesmanship of the first rank, and some of the achievements which he considered the greatest of his life were in reality blunders which had afterwards to be corrected.  But as a compromiser, as a rider of troubled waters, and a pilot at a time when shipwreck seemed imminent and unavoidable, he proved his consummate ability, and merits the gratitude of his country.

Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were leaders in the same great party, and were, for the most part, personal friends as well as political allies.  But Webster overshadowed Clay in intellect, however he may have been outdistanced by him in political astuteness.  If Clay were the fox, Webster was the lion.  As a constitutional lawyer, he has never been excelled; as an orator, no other American has ever equalled him.  He had in supreme degree the orator’s equipment of a dominant and impressive personality, a moving voice, an eloquent countenance, and a command of words little less than inspired.  The last sentences of his reply to Hayne have come ringing down the years, and stand unequalled as sheer eloquence: 

“When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!  Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as ’What is all this worth’? nor those other words of delusion and folly, ‘Liberty first and Union afterwards’; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—­Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

The great audience that listened spellbound to that oration, arose and left the Capitol like persons in a dream.  Never were they to forget the effect of that tremendous speech.

But the last years of his life were ruined by his ambition to be President.  In spite of his commanding talents, or, perhaps, because of them, he never at any time had a chance of receiving the nomination of his party, and his final defeat in 1852, by Winfield Scott, practically killed him.