The mill boy of the slashes
Kentucky: the dark and bloody ground
The Burr conspiracy
The duel
Emergence of a Republican ideologue
Mr. Speaker
The diplomat
"I am sick of Europe"
The ambitious politicians
The party disrupter
The great compromiser
Retirement from politics
The American system
The presidential election of 1824
The "corrupt bargain"
Secretary of State
The discouraging world of diplomacy
Abominations
A vision of the future
Enforced retirement
Presidential nominee
"Scenes of tergiversation, hypocricy, degeneracy and corruption"
A crushing defeat
Return to triumph
The great triumvirate
The emergence of the Whig party
Tragedy and defeat
The panic of 1837
The war of the titans
The triumphal tour
"Deceived betrayed & beaten"
"And Tyler, too"
The dictator
"Like the soul's quitting the body"
Texas
"The old coon is dead"
"This most unnecessary and horrible war with Mexico"
The sage of Ashland
Return to the Senate
The compromise of 1850
"My political life is over"

Among 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.