Anne E. Marshall will discuss her book at a Filson Historical Society event on Dec. 4 at 6 p.m.
She spoke with LPM’s Bill Burton.
This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Bill Burton: We'll talk about the paradoxes of Clay in a minute. But can we just start with the basics of who Clay was?
Anne Marshall: Clay was a Kentuckian. He was born in Madison County, just south of Lexington, in 1810. He grew up in a privileged household, a slave-owning household, and inherited dozens of enslaved laborers from his father. He went on to become a budding politician in Kentucky in the 1830s and started to speak out against slavery. As you can imagine, that didn't necessarily make him very popular in a slave state like Kentucky, so he eventually turned his attention to national politics in 1850, where he became a founding member of the Republican Party.
BB: Today, the idea of being antislavery while still enslaving people is difficult to understand. How did he address it?
AM: Most Americans who were antislavery, including Cassius Clay, were opposed to slavery for reasons that actually were more self-serving. They felt like it cut off opportunities for white Americans. In terms of a rapidly expanding country, having an economy where white wage laborers could receive a fair chance for upward mobility and compete in the workplace, a place where white landowners would have land open to them, where they wouldn't have to compete against land owners who owned slaves. That's something we just don't really think about much today.
That was sort of the main point of my book, because Cassius Clay really represents these kinds of people, this kind of thinking. He thinks that the expansion of slavery is going to be bad for white, land-owning Americans, white wage laborers. And so when think about it that way, we can see that the moral imperative of antislavery wasn't front and foremost for him, and this is kind of how he squares owning enslaved people.
BB: What can we learn from Clay that can help us in the 21st century?
AM: Cassius Clay can tell us a lot about the antislavery movement in the 19th century that we often either don't know about at all in the 21st century, or maybe have just forgotten. That is, one, that it really was the mainstream antislavery movement that spawns the Republican Party and leads to the Civil War and leads to the end of slavery. It really was a much more moderate political movement than we often think.
The other thing he can show us is that, through his own actions after the Civil War, is that the means by which freedom was supported or not supported amongst mainstream Americans was often more important to them than the ends. We can see this with Clay, because after the Civil War, he, along with lots of his antislavery colleagues, turned against reconstruction. They didn't turn against Black freedom, but they turned against the methods that the federal government had to use to reinforce freedom in the South. In the big picture, Clay can really tell us why the Civil War led to African American freedom, but it did not lead to equality for African Americans.
BB: The book is, “Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slave Holder and the Paradox of American Reform.” The author is Anne E. Marshall. Anne, thank you so much for your time.
AM: Thank you for having me.
Editor’s note: The Filson Historical Society provides support to Louisville Public Media.
