The Rage Of The Aged Lion (June 1960 | Volume: 11, Issue: 4)

The Rage Of The Aged Lion

AH article image

Authors: William H. Townsend

Historic Era:

Historic Theme:

Subject:

June 1960 | Volume 11, Issue 4

Cassius Marcellus Clay was one of the most colorful, pugnacious, and irrepressible sons of that most colorful, pugnacious, and irrepressible state, the Kentucky of old-time blue-grass tradition. Son of a pioneer Indian fighter and frontier soldier, General Green Clay, and cousin of the great Henry Clay, he was born in 1810 and he lived until 1903, surprising everyone (including himself) by dying peacefully in his bed. That hardly figured; in his ninety-three years he never ran away from a fight, and he got into many fights in a time and place when most fights went to a finish.

For twenty years before the Civil War, “Cash” Clay was that rarity, an outspoken antislavery leader in a slaveholding state. He had inherited many slaves and he set all of them free, and once when he was making an emancipationist speech a heckler asked whether he would help a runaway Negro. Clay retorted: “That would depend on which way he was running.”

Founding an antislavery paper, the True American, in Lexington, Kentucky, he prepared for trouble. He lined the street door with sheet iron, installed two brass cannon loaded with musket balls and old nails at the top of the stairway, kept a stand of rifles and muskets handy, and put two barrels of black powder, in a corner of his editorial office. The staff was instructed that if a mob ever stormed the place and, against the probabilities, managed to reach the second floor, all hands were to flee via an escape-hatch in the roof: Clay himself would stay behind to drop a match in the powder and blow the place to fragments. The fact that it never became necessary to do all of this made no difference; the setup simply expressed the way Clay met life’s challenge.

By 1860, after surviving various personal encounters (in which, he established an enduring reputation as a bowie-knife fighter of vast capacity), Clay was so well known as an antislavery leader that he got 101 votes for the Republican vice presidential nomination in the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for the Presidency. He stumped the Middle West for Lincoln in the campaign, and in the dark April of 1861, when Lincoln sat in the White House amid rumors that Confederate forces would march on the defenseless capital to dispossess him, Clay organized a battalion of young roughs to guard the White House and the Washington Navy Yard. To show his gratitude, Lincoln presented him with a massive Colt revolver—a weapon that Clay later put to good use. He also commissioned him a major general of volunteers, although to Clay’s regret he never actually commanded troops in combat. A little later Lincoln appointed him minister to Russia.

As a diplomat Clay probably was miscast, but his experience in Russia at least contributed an unusual chapter to the history of American diplomacy. It also, indirectly, led to a postwar episode which somehow expresses the essential character of this stormy Kentuckian; and in the following article