Background
Cassius Marcellus was born on October 19, 1810 in Madison County, Kentucky, United States.
farmer lawyer politician Soldier newspaper publisher
Cassius Marcellus was born on October 19, 1810 in Madison County, Kentucky, United States.
Cassius was educated at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, and at Yale, where he graduated in 1832. He studied law, but instead of practising devoted himself to a political career.
Although he was the son of a slaveholder and a relative of the Kentucky senator Henry Clay, who true to his byname (the Great Compromiser), favored only gradual emancipation, Cassius Clay was deeply influenced by the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison while he was still in college. He entered the Kentucky legislature (1835) but was defeated in 1840 on the slavery issue. He established an antislavery publication, the True American, in Lexington, Ky., in 1845 but was forced by attacks from pro-slavery Kentuckians to move it to Cincinnati, Ohio, and then to Louisville, Ky., where it was renamed The Examiner. Clay was one of the founders of the Republican Party in 1854. He served as U.S. minister to Russia (1861–62 and 1863–69) and helped negotiate the purchase of Alaska (1867). He left the Republican Party in order to support Horace Greeley in the presidential election of 1872 but supported Republican James G. Blaine as a presidential candidate in 1884.
In 1835, 1837 and 1840, Cassius Marcellus Clay was elected as a Whig to the Kentucky legislature, where he advocated a system of gradual emancipation, and secured the establishment of a public school system, and a much-needed reform in the jury system. In 1856 he joined the Republican party, and wielded considerable influence as a Southern representative in its councils.
Cassius Marcellus Clay was a member of the Kentucky House of Representatives.