A01=Anne E. Marshall
abolitionism
Abraham Lincoln
ambassador to Russia
antislavery
antislavery in Kentucky
antislavery moderates
antislavery newspapers
antislavery reform
antislavery slaveholders
Author_Anne E. Marshall
Cassius Marcellus Clay
Category=DNBH
Category=NHK
Category=NHTS
Civil War
conservative antislavery
constitutional antislavery
emancipation
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
free soil
Free Soil Party
Horace Greeley
Liberal Republican Party
moderate antislavery
Republican Party
Russia and the American Civil War
Salmon P. Chase
slaveholding in Kentucky
slavery
Product details
- ISBN 9781469690995
- Dimensions: 25 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 23 Sep 2025
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 the institution of slavery but largely on grounds that it 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.
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.
Anne E. Marshall is associate professor of history and executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University.
