Cassius M. Clay

Keven Mcqueen

Description

The emancipationist Cassius M. Clay has long been one of Kentucky's most controversial and misunderstood figures. This new biography examines his important, though undervalued, place in history from the anti-slavery movement to his role as Lincoln's minister to Russia during the Civil War. Along the way the many fights, romantic entanglements, and political battles of Clay's life are explored. The author, a former guide at Clay's mansion, White Hall, unearthed long-forgotten documents such as newspaper and magazine articles, interviews with Clay, and family letters. As a result, this book contains much information found in no other Clay biography and therefore debunks many long-standing myths. In addition to the biography of Clay, the book contains a room-by-room tour of White Hall, several informative appendices, and a collection of ghost stories concerning Clay's mansion, making Cassius M. Clay: Freedom’s Champion ideal for both history buffs and the public at large.

Sujets

• Historical
• Lettres et linguistique
• Cassius M. Clay
• Biography
• Cassius Clay (disambiguation)
• White Hall
• Autobiography
• Civil War
• Abraham Lincoln

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 16 juin 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781618587879
• Langue: English

Extrait

TURNER PUBLISHING COMPANY
Publishers of America’s History 412 Broadway • P.O. Box 3101 Paducah, Ky 42002-3101 [phone]
 
By: Keven McQueen
Illustrations by: Kyle McQueen
 
Publishing Consultant: Douglas W. Sikes
Designer: Emily Kay Sikes
 
First Printing A.D. 2001
Copyright © 2001 Keven McQueen
All rights reserved
Publishing Rights: Turner Publishing Company
 
This publication was produced using available material. The publisher and author regret they cannot assume liability for errors or omissions.
 
 
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced without the express written consent of the publisher and/or author.
 
Library of Congress Catalog No. 00-111863
9781618587879
LIMITED EDITION
Printed in the U.S.A.
Table of Contents
Title Page Copyright Page Dedication PART ONE: THE MAN PART TWO: THE HOUSE PART THREE: THE LEGEND APPENDIX ADDITIONAL CLAY DECENDANTS BIBLIOGRAPHY: THE MAN BIBLIOGRAPHY: THE HOUSE ABOUT THE AUTHOR INDEX
This book is dedicated to the memory of Nadine Casteel McQueen (1941-1982).
Special thanks to my colleagues, past and present, at White Hall and in the English Department at Eastern Kentucky University.
“The Champion of Liberty” Lithograph and published by N. Currier, 1846, from a daguerreotype by Plumbe .
PART ONE: THE MAN
H e was one of the few Southern emancipationists in the years preceding the Civil War. He was in President Lincoln’s cabinet as Minister to Russia. He was a fiery orator, a bold duelist and fighter, a celebrated soldier, a controversial newspaper editor, a shrewd politician, and one of the most lauded and reviled men of his time. Yet, Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky is today one of history’s inexplicably overlooked figures.
This remarkable man, a first cousin (once removed) of the more famous Henry Clay, was born in the master bedroom of his ancestral home, Clermont, in Madison County, Kentucky, on October 19, 1810. His father, Green Clay, was a remarkable man in his own right.
Green Clay (1757-1828) was originally from Powhatan County, Virginia. While still a teenager, Green struck out for the wilderness of what was later to become the state of Kentucky. In fact, he was one of the state’s earliest explorers, and his adventurous spirit was on a par with that of the more famous Daniel Boone, alongside whom Green fought Indians at Fort Boonesborough, also in Madison County, Ky., in September 1778. A few years previously, Clay had also fought as a soldier in the Revolutionary War. As Green Clay grew more politically prominent, he served several years in the Kentucky Legislature.
Clay was also quite the businessman. He was a land surveyor at a time when the job was prone to a number of occupational hazards, such as fighting off attacks from Indians and wild animals. Due to the scarcity of printed currency in those days, surveyors were entitled to take half the land they surveyed as payment for their services. Green Clay made sure his land claims were legally binding, unlike other early Kentucky explorers who died in poverty, or— like Daniel Boone— spent considerable time in court fighting losing battles to get back land that was rightfully theirs.
The government also gave Clay much real estate through land grants as a reward for having served nobly as a Brigadier-General in the War of 1812. Clay ended up owning many thousands of acres of land across Kentucky— 40,000 acres in Madison County alone. He owned a large piece of Fayette County, and all of Bourbon and Clay Counties. He also owned sizable portions of several other states, including Ohio. Tennessee, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, and Arkansas.
Not merely content to own land, Green Clay also found clever ways to make the most of his holdings. He owned toll roads, the Clay’s Ferry on the Kentucky River, and even distilled his own liquor to be served at taverns he also owned. As a result, the former impoverished teenage explorer was, by the time of his death at 71, one of the wealthiest men in the state, if not the wealthiest.
On March 14, 1795, Green Clay married Sally Lewis (1776-1867), who was to bear him seven children, of which Cassius was the youngest surviving child. (See Appendix B for a list of Cassius’s siblings.) Sally was a strict Calvinist Baptist who reared her children to be scrupulously honest and to fight for what they believed was right— lessons that young Cassius obviously took to heart. He later wrote of his mother: “With her, truth was the basis for all moral character.”
For a few years, Green and his family lived in a log cabin on a 2,250 acre piece of land he owned a few miles from Fort Boonesborough, very near the Kentucky River. (In later years, Cassius used the still-existing cabin as an office until it burned down in 1864 along with many of his personal papers.) However, in 1798, Green Clay decided to build a house befitting his stature in the community.
The new house was named Clermont; it was a two-story brick Georgian house complete with real glass windows, an attic, and a basement— a mansion in a region where most settlers were still living in log cabins or crude wooden structures. Clermont was built using slave labor, for Green Clay was also one of the largest slaveowners in the state.
Glimpses into Cassius’s youth may be found in a couple of extant letters he wrote when he was a child to his eldest brother Sidney Payne Clay, who was attending college at Princeton. New Jersey. They are presented as written, charming errors in spelling and grammar intact. In the first, written when he was eight, Cassius discusses school, his pets, and an overheard adult conversation, among other matters of interest to a child:

January 25th 1819
Dear Brother
I have left Richmond and I am now living at home. [Brother] Brutus and myself are going back to school to Philip R. Denham at my Fathers old school house. [Sisters] Paulina and Sally Ann are living at home. They are all well at Mr. Smiths. Sister cooks very poor. Your trees are growing very well and some are high as the fence. Pen is fat and lazy. Gunner is a pretty good dog. Father is got Sound from Aunt Patty. He thinks he is the best dog in the state. Capt. Rodes and Col. Irvine is decided there is so much paper money its not worth much a count. Your sweet heart Susan is married. I want to see them fish and curiosities you wrote to me about. I am going to school this morning and I have no time to write any more.
 
Farewell brother. Cassius M. Clay .
The second letter, written by Clay when he was nearly ten, offers a child’s perspective on plantation life at old Clermont:

Madison County, June 11, 1820
Dear brother,
I have not ben to school for five weeks past and I expect to go to school [illegible] Mr. Quin next week. When I left school last I was cyphering in the rule of reduction. I was reading to day about that big turkle [turtle?] that you was telling me about in your last letter. Father sold one hundred one nine sheep for one dollar a peace. Your trees are growing very pretty indeed. Them that were planted in the meadows are plenty big enough to set out. They are higher than the fense.
Pen and Gunner and Sound is all a live. Pen is very old and lazy. Sound is very sharp. Gunner hunts very well. Mr. Durbin still does business for father. Samuel Osten is the oversear now. Ambus Christopher still lives at the far quarter.
Father has three pecon trees a bout one foot high. Your seader trees that were planted by the carriage house are all dead but one that is as high as my head. It is so thick that I cant hardly sea thugh it. Your weeds that were set out in the tulip bed are growing very pretty.
Father has built him a big new stone barn for to put rye and wheat &c. Kitty and Jack and his family now lives at the pond. Father [had] big gate [set] up by Harners house to come through the rye field to the stiles and another one by the garden to come in the yard. Woric and Nanny and hur family now lives at the old cider press. Joe still works in the black smith shop. Two of fathers big [illegible] trees are dead. Fathers pond had a plenty water last summer for stock when people in town had to buy water for to drink.
But childhood at Clermont was not completely idyllic: the institution of slavery left young Clay with mixed emotions. In his Memoirs (1886), Cassius related that even as a child, he felt slavery was morally wrong, but he accepted it as the way things had to be. However, he was badly shaken by an incident that took place when he was a small boy. A slave girl named Mary, who had been his playmate, stabbed to death a cruel overseer named Payne in a panic after he threatened her. Everyone agreed Mary had acted in self-defense; indeed, she was even acquitted by a jury of white men. Nevertheless, Cassius’s brother Sidney (an emancipationist himself), who was in charge of the farm at the time, was pressured to “sell her down the river” to a plantation in the deep South. Some form of punishment was felt to be in order, even in a case of self-defense. The stark injustice of Mary’s fate was to affect Cassius’s opinion of slavery in later years.
As Cassius grew up, he developed into a strikingly handsome and impressively strong young man. He weighed 215 pounds and was six feet three inches tall, making him roughly seven to nine inches taller than the average man of that era. He enjoyed fishing and hunting. A superior athlete, he excelled at wrestling, boxing, football, baseball, and more obscure sports such as bandy-ball and tripball. Young Clay also became an expert in the use of weaponry, mastering the rapier, the broadsword, the dueling pistol, and the rifle. He would remain a crack shot his entire life; he boasted in his final years that at age 86 he was able to shoot at a distance of eighty yards two wild dogs that were menacing his sheep.
Clay’s first taste of higher education began when he attended Jesuit College of St. Joseph in Bardstown. Ky. His Memoirs indicate that he en