Marshall reconsiders legacy of Cassius Clay in upcoming GPB
Anne Marshall, MSU History professor and executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Association and the U.S. Grant Presidential Library. (photo by Megan Bean / © Mississippi State University)
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The Filson Historical Society will host the final installment in the 2025 Gertrude Polk Brown Lecture Series on Thursday, December 4 with Anne E. Marshall, author of “Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform.” This vivid and insightful biography 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.
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 he founded in Lexington. And yet he was a slave owner until the end of the Civil War. Though often misremembered as an abolitionist, Clay was like many Americans of his time: interested in a gradual end to the institution of slavery but largely on grounds that it 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.
Reconsidering Clay as emblematic rather than exceptional, Anne E. Marshall shows today’s readers why it took a violent war to finally abolish slavery and why African Americans’ demands for equality struggled to gain white support after the Civil War.
Anne E. Marshall is associate professor of history and executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University.
“Investigating an impressive international reputation always undercut by a troubled personal life, Marshall’s biography of Cassius M. Clay opens an important conversation about the contradictions inherent in American life, belief, and political coalition-building. This is a perfect topic for the Gertrude Polk Brown Lecture Series, the Filson’s largest public forum for meaningful, informed discussion about our past and future,” said Patrick Lewis, President and CEO of the Filson Historical Society.
The Gertrude Polk Brown Lecture Series will be held on Thursday, December 4 at 6:00 p.m. at the Kentucky Center, 501 W. Main Street, Louisville. Tickets are free for Filson members and $26.22 for the public (taxes and fees included). Tickets for this event must be purchased from The Kentucky Center Ticket Service. Please call (502) 584-7777 or visit kentuckyperformingarts.org for tickets.
Initiated in 1993 as a memorial to the life of Gertrude Polk Brown and made possible by the generous support of her children and grandchildren, the Gertrude Polk Brown Lecture Series has brought both nationally and internationally recognized historians and journalists to Louisville, many of them Pulitzer Prize winners. Speakers are selected based on their overall excellence in research, writing, and speaking and are not restricted to historians.