Webster argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any other 19th-century lawyer, served as secretary of state first under William Harrison and John Tyler and later under Millard Fillmore, and attracted enormous crowds and a vast readership for his congressional and occasional speeches.
Clay was the principal negotiator of three sectional compromises, Speaker of the House for ten years, secretary of state for John Quincy Adams, and the leader of the Whig Party for almost its entire history. If Clay, Calhoun, and Webster were the founders’ heirs, what did they inherit? One obvious answer is the founders’ fame and prominence: they were political “giants”-and not just during their time in the Senate. The result is a lively narrative that reintroduces the senators and their political battles and goes some distance, at least, in establishing their claim to be “heirs of the founders.” A gifted storyteller, he makes good use of his subjects’ oratorical prowess with generous, well-presented excerpts from their most important speeches, supplemented with the pithy observations of several contemporary diarists and other key primary sources of the period. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin, examines the intersection of personal ambition, party politics, and sectional division in a time of freewheeling democracy and Romantic passion. In a series of short, episodic chapters, Brands, the Jack S. Brands now returns to tell the story of the “Great Triumvirate” in Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants.
Having previously explored this era in his 2006 biography, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, H.W. From the War of 1812 to the Compromise of 1850, American politics was dominated by four men: Andrew Jackson, the hero of New Orleans and two-term president and three prominent senators: Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster.
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