Pottsville Offers Historical Perspective On Tariffs Debate

A crashing thunderstorm rolled across Schuylkill County on the morning of July 4, 1855. It was Independence Day in the coal capital of northeastern Pennsylvania’s southern anthracite field.

The storm eased into a steady drizzle, and the crowds regrouped at the monument's base, huddling under umbrellas and oil-canvas coats. Prayers, speeches, and a dedication address by Philadelphia politician Charles Gibbons commenced as attendees craned their necks to see the 15-foot-tall cast-iron figure atop a 67-foot column looming over Pottsville.

Who was this figure perched above the mining and railroading borough 100 miles from Philadelphia?

The people of Pottsville – more accurately, the wealthy coal operators and early industrialists who financed the monument – had become the first community in the United States to erect a statue of Kentucky U.S. Sen. Henry Clay.

Clay was the architect behind the fortunes of these early industrialists. Clay, a Virginia-born Whig who represented the slave-holding state of Kentucky, staunchly supported high tariffs that shielded Pennsylvania’s iron industry from British competition. His call for federal investment in roads and canals helped ensure that anthracite coal could reach expanding urban markets.

Beyond infrastructure and tariffs, Clay staunchly supported the Union – the nation was, he believed, inextricably bound together by the Constitution. Amid secession threats in the 1810s and 1830s, Clay stood as a bulwark in the United States Senate against national dissolution.

He played crucial roles in defusing two existential political crises. In 1833, Clay crossed party lines to work with Democrat John C. Calhoun, ending a conflict over South Carolina’s rejection of federal tariffs harmful to its trade known as the Nullification Crisis.

Again, in the Compromise of 1850, Clay exhausted himself attempting to hold the Union together as tensions grew between slave-owning southern states and the free states of the North. Though himself a slaveholder, Clay spoke about the moral evils of slavery, making him unpopular with many fellow Southerners.

The Great Compromiser died in June 1852 at the age of 75. A month later, businessmen in Pottsville began raising funds for a statue to the Kentucky statesmen whose policies had allowed Schuylkill County’s industries to flourish and helped preserve the Union.

“Here, the fruits of that great system are seen and gathered, on the soil, and under the soil,” Charles Gibbons declared of Clay’s American System during his speech at the monument dedication. Gibbons urged the crowd to look out over Pottsville’s industries and see Clay’s legacy firsthand. Clay’s statue played its part, too – its outstretched arm gesturing toward the very progress that Gibbons described.

However, the compromises that Clay crafted would not endure as long as his legacy in infrastructure and industry. Just five years after Pottsville dedicated his statue, the nation that Clay worked tirelessly to hold together fractured in the wake of the 1860 election and the subsequent secession crisis. Pottsville sent some of the first troops, known as the First Defenders, to Washington, D.C., after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861.

The nation survived the trial of civil war. Henry Clay’s statue at Pottsville faced trials of its own.

After its dedication and the years of Civil War and Reconstruction, Pottsville’s industries continued to grow and the community prospered. But the people of Schuylkill County, like most of their fellow citizens, forgot about Henry Clay but for the occasional high school history lesson on the first half of the 19th century. 

For 130 years, despite its prominent place on Pottsville’s skyline, the statue remained largely ignored. In the early 1980s, however, city engineers noticed the monument was tilting, coinciding with efforts to revitalize Pottsville amid deindustrialization.

“Has a possible solution to making downtown Pottsville more attractive been under its nose, or more accurately hovering over its head, since pre-Civil War days?” asked the editors of the Pottsville Republican newspaper in April 1983. They advocated stabilizing and cleaning the statue as part of a larger plan to reinvigorate the Schuylkill County seat.

The plan came to pass: the Henry Clay monument received a facelift in the summer of 1985, preserving the massive statue weighing 7 and a half tons, one of only a handful of Henry Clay monuments nationwide.

Recently, renewed attention has focused on protecting the monument from erosion and vandalism, keeping Henry Clay a fixture on the city’s skyline while also lighting the statue at night in the white glow of spotlights. Today, the public policy issues that Clay championed – infrastructure, tariffs, warnings of civil strife and political turmoil – have returned to the headlines.

Henry Clay’s cast-iron figure still gazes out over Pottsville from his white-washed perch, his outstretched arm forever gesturing toward an uncertain future.

Jake Wynn is a public historian and communicator. He is currently working as a tourism marketing professional in Frederick, MD. Follow his website: wynninghistory.com.