Cassius Marcellus Clay

The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform

Anne E. Marshall

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781469690995
• eBook ISBN: 9781469684734
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The nineteenth-century Kentucky antislavery reformer Cassius Marcellus Clay is generally remembered as a knife-wielding rabble-rouser who both inspired and enraged his contemporaries. Clay brawled with opponents while stumping for state constitutional changes to curtail the slave trade. He famously deployed cannons to protect the office of the antislavery newspaper he founded in Lexington. Despite attempts on his life, he helped found the national Republican party and positioned himself as a staunch border state ally of Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, he served as US minister to Russia, working to ensure that European allies would not recognize the Confederacy. And yet he was a slave owner until the end of the Civil War. Though often misremembered as an abolitionist, Clay was like many Americans of his time: interested in a gradual end to slavery but largely on grounds that the institution limited whites' ability to profit from free labor and the South’s opportunity for economic advancement. In the end, Clay’s political positions were far more about protecting members of his own class than advancing the cause of Black freedom.

This vivid and insightful biography reveals Cassius Clay as he was: colorful, yes, but in many ways typical of white Americans who disliked slavery in principle but remained comfortable accommodating it. Reconsidering Clay as emblematic rather than exceptional, Anne E. Marshall shows today’s readers why it took a violent war to finally abolish slavery and why African Americans' demands for equality struggled to gain white support after the Civil War.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Inheritances
• Chapter 2. Uneradicable Disease
• Chapter 3. Lamentable Inconsistencies
• Chapter 4. The True American
• Chapter 5. Fight Like a Man
• Chapter 6. The Name of Republican
• Chapter 7. Shot and Shell
• Chapter 8. Unrewarded Sacrifice
• Chapter 9. Undiplomatic Diplomatist
• Chapter 10. The Constitution and the Union
• Chapter 11. Restoring the Autonomy of the States
• Chapter 12. Lion of Whitehall
• Coda: The Legend of Cassius Clay
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index