Henry Clay and Me
You might be surprised to see the name “Henry Clay” as part of a series of blog posts documenting my relationship to Presidents of the United States. But our sixth President (and the expected subject of this week’s post) John Quincy Adams was the son of our second President, John Adams. I explored my connection to John Adams in the second week on this project. Exploring my connection to this family again wouldn’t be very interesting.
So why have I replaced him with Henry Clay this week? The best answer is that JQ would not have become president in 1824 without the assistance of Henry Clay, so I though Clay would be a good person to explore this week
Just as a “heads up,” I’ll be doing three things in this essay: explaining the 1824 presidential election, evaluating my connections to Henry Clay, and talking about migration patterns for early Kentucky pioneers.
Let me remind you what happened in the 1824 Presidential election.
James Monroe’s second term was ending. Although there wasn’t yet a legal bar to a President being elected to more than two terms (that wouldn’t happen until the 22nd amendment was ratified in 1951), presidents up to that point had followed George Washington’s example and stepped down after their second term in office.
The political party system had fallen apart after the War of 1812. The Federalist Party ceased to exist, and two wings of the Democratic-Republican Party were beginning to stake out their positions on the political spectrum. Four nominees were on the ballot (and won electoral votes – William Crawford of Georgia, Henry Clay of Kentucky, John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. They were all part of the Democratic-Republican Party. To complicate matters, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina was the Vice-Presidential candidate for both Adams and Jackson
When the Electoral votes were cast, Jackson got 99, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay 37. There were a total of 261 Electoral votes up for grabs, and none of these candidates had achieved the required majority – 131 – to be declared the winner.
After the debacle that was the Election of 1800, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution changed the way the Electoral vote process worked. So in this situation, the person with the lowest number of electoral votes (Clay) was dropped from consideration, and the other three names were presented to the House of Representatives for a “contingent” election, in which each state had one vote. There were 24 states at the time, so the winning candidate had to get 13 votes to be declared the winner.
Crawford was in poor health and his policy positions made him less popular than the other two candidates. Although he received the votes of four states – Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia -- the real battle was between the two men who had received the largest number of electoral votes, Jackson and Adams.
Jackson and Adams were fighting over the other 20 states. This is where the back-room shenanigans began. In a series of events dubbed “The Corrupt Bargain,” Clay offered to support Adams by telling the three states where he had won the electoral vote – Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri to cast their votes for Adams. In exchange, Adams would appoint Clay to be his Secretary of State.
What’s important about this is that the position of Secretary of State had been the preferred position for someone planning a run for President – Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Adams had all held this position before becoming President. Clay really wanted to be President, so this seemed like a good deal to him.
Add to this the fact that Clay detested Jackson, saying at one point "I cannot believe that killing 2,500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy." In addition, both Clay and Jackson were representatives of the West at the time – and both Adams and Crawford were identified with more traditional values associated with the eastern part of the country.
After this bargain was struck, Jackson received only seven votes in the House of Representatives, Crawford won four, and Adams won 13 – just enough to squeak by to victory.
Jackson was furious, and he immediately began to campaign against Adams, expecting to defeat him in 1828. He did.
Meanwhile, Clay never won the presidency, although he was the nominee of the National Republican Party in 1832 (he was defeated by Jackson) and of the Whig Party in 1844 (he was defeated by James K. Polk – another Tennessean and a protégé of Jackson. He unsuccessfully sought the nomination two other times – in 1840, when the Whig Party nomination went instead to William Henry Harrison, and in 1848, when the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor.
Now, with that out of the way, I’ll go back to my connection to Henry Clay.
How well does this relationship hold up? I can tell by looking at the first 10 names – from me through Mary Pendleton – that this is a solid connection. There are a few places where the trees disagree, but I have been able to resolve these discrepancies. For example, Isabella Pendleton’s mother is identified as Mary Taylor in WikiTree and Mary Pendleton in Geni. I’m okay with that – Mary Taylor was her given name and she married Henry Pendleton, so that’s good.
WikiTree and Geni both show that Mary Taylor married twice – first to Henry Pendleton and then to Edward Watkins. I connect to Mary Taylor through a child she had with her first husband, Henry Pendleton; Henry Clay descends from Mary Taylor through a child she had with her second husband, Edward Watkins. WikiTree and Geni agree that Mary and Edward had a child named Sarah – or maybe Sarah Elizabeth – or Mary Sarah – so that’s my problem. As I’m building my parallel tree on Ancestry, I’m finding contradictory information about her first name. Every source agrees, however, that Mary Sarah Elizabeth Watkins married John Clay, whose son (also named John Clay) was Henry Clay’s father.
This connection gets an A* (with an asterisk for the name confusion).
However, Geni also shows me another connection – this one through a direct blood relationship. I was excited about this at first.
This starts out the same as the earlier connection as far as my 2nd great-grandmother Mary Ann Botts. However, although the earlier connection moves through Mary Ann’s father Joshua Mills Botts, this connection moves through her mother, Tabitha Allen (Walton) Botts. I’ve included her birth name here – her father was William Walton, as this chart shows.
However, the next link is the source of the problem – and the reason why WikiTree (and my Ancestry tree) didn’t have this connection. Mary Ann Hobson Walton (the daughter of Elizabeth Woodson Hobson on this chart) married a Walton, but it was Robert, not William. This makes sense. Tabitha Allen Walton was born in 1816, and it is unlikely that her mother would have been the 64-year-old Mary Ann Hobson (born in 1752).
Part of the confusion in this family line is what genealogists call pedigree collapse – when cousins intermarry, uniting two lines from a single common ancestor.
I’ve done a lot of research on this branch of my family tree, and I’m pretty sure that Geni got it wrong this time. I’m listed as a profile manager on this tree, so I can apparently edit it to reflect the correct connection. I’m not going to do that today – I want to verify everything a couple more times and contact the other profile managers before I make any changes. The bottom line – this is not a good connection.
It’s easy to understand the source of this confusion. As I mentioned earlier, the Waltons were a prolific bunch, and they tended to use the same names from generation to generation. I have nine people named William Walton in my tree:
3rd great-grandfather William Walton (1784-1862)
2nd cousin 6x removed William Walton (1777-1877)
2nd cousin 5x removed William Walton (1837-1869)
6th great-uncle William Walton (1700-1747)
5th great-uncle William Walton (1738-1811)
1st cousin 7x removed William Walton (1730-1806)
3rd great-granduncle William Walton (1827-1887)
1st cousin 4x removed William Walton (1843-1911)
10th great-grandfather William Walton (1570-1628)
And in case you were wondering – I also have several John Waltons – including John Walton Sr (1709-1793) and John Walton Jr. (1738-1793). Yes, my 5th great-grandfather is John-Boy Walton. And they lived in the area of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Cue the theme music.
I found one source that helped me understand my Walton family in Virginia and gives me confidence that my tree is correct.
Unlike many old family histories, this 2005 book was written by a professional genealogist and historian and contains footnotes and references. I was surprised to find this book in my local genealogy society library, so I was able to take copious notes from it and then refer to it during later visits to the library. I trust what I found in this book, which supports the analysis I’ve provided in this essay.
I also want to point out the migration pattern these families have in common – my Botts and Walton ancestors, along with my Clay no-longer-relatives. They were all born in Virginia and relocated to Kentucky in the last decades of the 18th century. This was the frontier at the time.
These families would have all traveled to Kentucky via the Great Valley Road and Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, as shown on this map.
Pretty interesting.
Amazing!!!