MSU historian’s book explores complex legacy of Cassius Marcellus Clay
Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.—A Mississippi State University administrator and faculty member reckons with the contradictions of America’s antislavery movement in a forthcoming biography of U.S. Civil War figure Cassius Marcellus Clay.
Anne Marshall, executive director of MSU’s Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library and associate professor of history, is the author of “Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform.” The biography, set for publication by the University of North Carolina Press in September, sheds new light on Clay, a 19th century Kentucky reformer often misremembered as a radical abolitionist. Her research reveals a more complex figure—one who opposed slavery largely for its economic limitations on white prosperity rather than out of concern for Black freedom—who remained a slave owner until the Civil War’s end.
“Clay was an extremely colorful and unique character—famous for using a Bowie knife on his enemies as he did the dangerous work of speaking out against slavery in a slave state—but his politics were actually quite moderate and representative of most people who voted for the Republican Party––and against slavery––in 1860,” Marshall said. “Examining his life reveals a lot about how most antislavery Americans thought before the Civil War. It shows how they had a very specific and constitutionally bound way of imagining how slavery should end. This same thinking also limited the lengths to which they would go fight the institution, and in the postwar period, to protect African American citizenship and rights.”
MSU is one of only six universities in the U.S. to house a presidential library. The Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library contains 15,000 linear feet of documents, artifacts and memorabilia chronicling the 18th U.S. president’s life and legacy, including collections from the U.S. Grant Association, Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana and Mississippi Political Collections. The library is open to visitors Monday through Friday inside Mitchell Memorial Library. For more information, visit www.usgrantlibrary.org.
To learn more about MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, visit www.cas.msstate.edu. For details about the Department of History, visit www.history.msstate.edu.
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