Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of New England dominated American politics from roughly 1828 to 1852, the era of the second party system. Clay, who had served as defense counsel for Aaron Burr in his treason trial, was elected Speaker of the House as a freshman in the 12th Congress, and he and fellow freshman Calhoun led the War Hawks who pushed for the War of 1812. Webster, elected from New Hampshire in 1813, opposed the war because it crippled New England shipping. After the war Clay and Calhoun backed the Second Bank of the United States and the Tariff of 1816 under Clay’s American System, which Webster fought.

Webster then left Congress to argue Dartmouth College v. Woodward, Gibbons v. Ogden and McCulloch v. Maryland before John Marshall’s Supreme Court, winning for the very bank he had opposed. Calhoun served eight years as Secretary of War and became vice president, while Clay engineered the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In the 1832 Nullification Crisis Calhoun resigned the vice presidency to enter the Senate, and the three served there together for most of the rest of their lives. Their last clash came over the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state alongside a strict Fugitive Slave Act.

• The Missouri Compromise paired slave state Missouri with free Maine and drew a line at 36 degrees 30 minutes north.
• Webster argued in McCulloch that the power to tax involves the power to destroy.
• Clay and Webster each ran for president several times and never won.
• Too ill with tuberculosis to stand, Calhoun sat in the chamber while James Mason read his final speech against the 1850 compromise.
• Calhoun died on March 31, 1850, and Clay and Webster were both dead within three years.