Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union

xxviii, 818 pp. A biography of the attorney who served in the United States Senate and House of Representatives, and also as Secretary of State. He was a co-founder of the National Republican Party and the Whig Party. "Among the nineteenth-century Americans, few commanded the reverence and respect accorded to Henry Clay of Kentucky. As orator and as Speaker of the House for longer than any man in the century, he wielded great power, a compelling presence in Congress who helped preserve the Union in the antebellum period. Remini portrays both the statesman and the private man, a man whose family life was painfully torn and who burned with ambition for the office he could not reach, the presidency."