Booknotes: Cassius Marcellus Clay

New Arrival:

• Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform by Anne E. Marshall (UNC Press, 2025).

From the description: "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 [the True American] 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."

Clay's political support for Lincoln was rewarded with an appointment as US ambassador to Russia, a major part of that role being "to ensure that European allies would not recognize the Confederacy." Sandwiched between his important diplomatic work in St. Petersburg was a relatively brief interlude as a Union general that was, at least by my recollection, pretty unremarkable.

Of course, Cassius M. Clay is also widely remembered for being the birth name of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali (who famously rejected the family name his father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Sr., passed down to him).

According to Clay's new biographer, historian Anne Marshall, the reformer's abolitionist reputation is largely misplaced. More from the description: "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."

In Marshall's view, Clay was "emblematic rather than exceptional," and her study Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform "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."