Cassius M. Clay

Cassius Marcellus Clay was born on October 9, 1810, in Madison County, Kentucky, to Sally Lewis and Green Clay, one of the wealthiest planters and slave owners in Kentucky, who became a prominent politician. He was one of six children who survived to adulthood, of seven born.

Clay was a member of a large and influential Clay political family. His older brother Brutus J. Clay became a politician at the state and federal levels. They were cousins of both Kentucky politician Henry Clay and Alabama governor Clement Comer Clay. Cassius's sister Elizabeth Lewis Clay (1798–1887) married John Speed Smith, who also became a state and US politician. Their son, Green Clay Smith, became a state politician and was elected to Congress.

The younger Clay attended Transylvania University and then graduated from Yale College in 1832. While at Yale, he heard abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison speak, and his lecture inspired Clay to join the anti-slavery movement. Garrison's arguments were to him "as water is to a thirsty wayfarer." Clay was politically incrementalist, supporting gradual legal change rather than calling for immediate abolition the way Garrison and his supporters did. He thought this more likely to bring success.

On February 26, 1833, Clay married Mary Jane Warfield, daughter of Mary Barr and Dr. Elisha Warfield of Lexington, Kentucky. They had ten children, six of whom lived to adulthood:

Elisha Warfield Clay (1835–1851)

Green Clay (1837–1883)

Mary Barr Clay (Mrs. J. Frank Herrick) (1839–1924)

Sarah "Sallie" Lewis Clay Bennett (1841–1935)

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. (1843–1843)

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. (1845–1857)

Brutus Junius Clay II (1847–1932)

Laura Clay (1849–1941)

Flora Clay (1851–1851)

Anne Clay Crenshaw (1859–1945)

Later, he adopted Henry Launey Clay, believed to be his son by an extra-marital relationship while in Russia.

In 1878 after 45 years of marriage, Clay divorced his wife, Mary Jane (Warfield) Clay, claiming abandonment after she no longer would tolerate his marital infidelities.

Cassius Clay was a member of the planter class who later became a prominent anti-slavery crusader. Clay worked toward emancipation, both as a Kentucky state representative and as an early member of the Republican Party. Clay "manumitted several (but not all) of his own slaves".

Clay was elected to three terms in the Kentucky House of Representatives, but he lost support among Kentuckian voters as he promoted abolition. His anti-slavery activism earned him violent enemies.

During a political debate in 1843, Clay survived his first assassination attempt by Sam Brown, a hired gunman. Jerking his Bowie knife out for retaliation, Clay happened to pull its silver-tipped scabbard up over his heart. Brown's bullet struck the scabbard and embedded in the silver. Despite having been shot in the chest, Clay rushed Brown with his knife and split Brown's nose in half from top to bottom, left an ear dangling by a thread, and took out one eye, before the men that hired Brown managed to throw him over a tall fence to keep Clay from finishing him off.

In 1845, Clay began publishing an anti-slavery newspaper, True American, in Lexington, Kentucky. Within a month, he received death threats, had to arm himself, and regularly barricaded the armored doors of his newspaper office for protection, besides setting up two four-pounder cannons inside. Shortly afterward, a mob of about 60 men broke into his office and seized his printing equipment. To protect his venture, Clay set up a publication center in Cincinnati, Ohio, a center of abolitionists in the free state, but continued to reside in Kentucky.

Clay served in the Mexican–American War as a captain with the 1st Regiment, Kentucky Mounted Volunteers from 1846 to 1847. He had opposed the annexation of Texas and the expansion of slavery into the Southwest, but had volunteered because of Mexico's attempt to seize Texas, which it claimed as its historic territory.

Clay survived his second assassination attempt while he was in Foxtown, Kentucky on June 15, 1849, after he stabbed 29-year-old farmer and politician Cyril Turner in the stomach following a heated quarrel. Turner succumbed to his injury two days later. The knife that Clay mortally wounded Turner with along with the pants that Turner was wearing in the fight are on display at the Irvinton House Museum in Richmond, Kentucky.

In 1853, Clay granted 10 acres of his expansive lands to John G. Fee, an abolitionist who founded the town of Berea. In 1855 Fee founded Berea College, open to all races.

Clay's connections to the northern antislavery movement remained strong. He was a founder of the Republican Party in Kentucky and became a friend of Abraham Lincoln, whom he supported for the presidency in 1860. Clay was briefly a candidate for the vice presidency at the 1860 Republican National Convention, but lost the nomination to Hannibal Hamlin.