Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,078
By This is the grave of Alexander Clay.
Born in 1853 in Powder Springs, Georgia, Alexander Stephens Clay was, well, named after the other Alexander Stephens, the VP of treason. In 1853 though, Stephens was considered relatively moderate compared to some southern politicians and also someone more connected to the growing world of industrial capitalism, so basically Clay’s family were Whigs at a moment when that was no longer tenable in the South after the Mexican War. From what I can gather, the family was middling. They owned land in Cobb County, but it’s unclear whether they owned slaves.
Clay went to the local schools and then to Hiwassee College in Tennessee, graduating in 1875. He decided to become a lawyer and moved to Marietta, Georgia, where he passed the bar in 1877. He was just doing small town lawyer stuff, necessary of course. As with so many people in this series, the law was a conduit to move into politics for Clay. He got involved with local politics, serving on the city council in the early 1880s. In 1884, he ran for the legislature and won. With one term as an exception–where I assume he lost the election–he was there from 1884 to 1890. In 1892, he moved up to the state senate. He doesn’t seem to have left any particular legislative record in the statehouse. He was just someone people liked. He became Senate president, which shows a particular skill, but other than holding the basic Democratic Party positions of racism and not spending money to help the poor, he didn’t have any particular agenda here either.
In 1896, Georgia had an opening in its senators and chose to send Clay to Washington. From everything I can see, Clay was a total backbencher with no particular legislative agenda and who people did not take particularly seriously. Georgia was happy with him, sending him back in 1902 and 1908. But his committee assignments suggest very little of power. He was on the Committee on Women Suffrage, which is at least interesting. It doesn’t seem however that he was supportive of extending the suffrage. The way I read the limited material out there on Clay is that he and other southerners were largely on that committee because they saw the women’s suffrage as a threat to larger federal intervention in voting–i.e. Black people–and was determined to delay on this as long as possible. So that seems to have been contribution to the committee, making sure it did nothing. He also chaired the Committee on Revolutionary Claims, a weird little committee that was working out historical compensation claims going back a century that had laid fallow and not paid out. This screams “give something small to the guy we aren’t going to trust anything real with.”
Clay did oppose American interventionism and imperialism. Like a lot of southerners, this seems to have been a combination of genuinely not liking the idea of America expanding abroad and a very deep aversion to allowing the darker races to have a claim to Americanness. He also made Democrats generally happy by opposing the gold standard in the great bimetallism debates of the era that had given so much energy to the Populists a few years before. He was an anti-tariff guy, again making him a very standard Democrat for the era, especially from the agriculturally-oriented South. It goes without saying that Clay was an enormous supporter of white supremacy, the end of the franchise for Black men, and everything to do with Jim Crow. He wouldn’t have had a political career otherwise, but there’s no evidence that he secretly believed in civil rights or anything like that.
In 1910, Clay was in Atlanta, he died, probably of stomach cancer. He had long had stomach issues. It might have been a heart attack that finally did him in, but he didn’t have long left anyway. He was 57 years old. I have a long standing theory that all senators are worth a post in this series. Usually that’s true. Sometimes, it’s not. This is pretty close to the latter. A total non-entity. The John Hickenlooper or Gary Peter of his era.
Alexander Clay is buried in Marietta City Cemetery, Marietta, Georgia.
If you would like this series to visit other senators elected in 1896, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. They have to be more interesting than this guy. Henry Heitfeld is in Lewiston, Idaho and Joseph Foraker is in Cincinnati. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.