Join us Wednesday, March 3, 2027, at 7 p.m. CT for an enlightening conversation with author Dr. Anne E. Marshall on her latest book Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform.

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. Despite attempts on his life, he helped found the national Republican party and positioned himself as a staunch border state ally of Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, he served as US minister to Russia, working to ensure that European allies would not recognize the Confederacy. 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 slavery but largely on grounds that the institution 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.

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. 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 Marshall is Professor of History at Mississippi State University, where she has taught since 2006. She has served as Executive Director of the U.S. Grant Association and Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library (located in Starkville, Mississippi) since March 2022.

Marshall’s latest book, entitled Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform was published by University of North Carolina Press in September 2025. It was a finalist for the 1016 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and is the winner of the 2026 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Prize for non-fiction. Her first book was Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). She has also authored numerous articles, which have appeared in journals including the Journal of the Civil War Era and Slavery & Abolition

She received her B.A. in History at Centre College of Kentucky and her MA and PhD in History at the University of Georgia. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Marshall lives in Starkville, Mississippi with her husband, two teenagers, and one spoiled dog.

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