THE FILSON CLUB HISTORY QUARTERLY

Vol. 28 LOTJISVILLE, :, OCTOBER, 1954 No. 4

CASSIUS M. CLAY AND SOUTHERN INDUSTRIALISM BY DAVID L. SMILEY, Ph.D. Wake Forest College, North Carolina Paper read before The Filson Club, December 7, 1953. In pre-Civil War America, a fundamental political conflict was that between the masters of industry and the agrarian aristocrats for control of national policy.1 By the decade of the 1840's, the battle lines were clearly drawn and the contenders were involved in open combat. The Yankee employed the abolition movement as a propaganda device against the south• erner, and his war became a crusade against slavery. Through• out the ante-bellum period, Americans widely accepted the generalization that all southerners supported slavery and were therefore committed to a plantation economy. But there was one great geographic area of the South in which that stereotype did not hold: in the southern mountains resided men who owned land but who did not own slaves. Confronted with a topography unsuited for the cultivation of uninterrupted hun• dreds or thousands of acres of land, mountaineers generally did not subsist upon the income of plantation produce. Slavery, therefore, did not pay in that area and the inhabitants did not always support the institution. Hill-folk had little in common with the proverbial lords of the white-columned mansions who dominated the lowlands and who often decided policies for the mountaineers as well. There was, therefore, a difference of interest between regions of the diversified South. Cassius Mar• cellus Clay, a tall, muscular giant who grew up in the foothills of the Kentucky mountains, recognized the conflict which split his section. As the spokesman for mountain interests, and pro• ponent for an industrial development centered in the mineral• rich southern hills, Cassius Clay sought support for an ambi• tious political career. Clay was well-endowed for the task of promoting a non• agricultural economy in the southern highlands. Handsome, 315 316 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 28 agile, and strong, he won fame as a rough-and-tumble fighter who eagerly defended his unorthodox course. In addition to an admirable physique, Nature had provided him with unusual intelligence, and his father, pioneer Kentuckian Green Clay, had amassed sufficient wealth to insure the son's education. Cassius also possessed a booming voice which made him an effective orator in a day of polished rhetoric. His family name was also an asset to him. To be a Clay of Kentucky was to mark him as a leader among men. A cultured gentleman of the southern aristocracy, he was also capable of bitter tirade and of unbridled belligerence. But his most important trait was his political insight. With it he discovered the significance of Kentucky's varied topography, and he built a political career upon his discovery. In the effort to achieve his ambitions, Cassius M. Clay left a broad red mark upon the pages of southern history. The conflict which he entered was as old as the settlement of America. Since the planting of the colonies there had been an internal conflict between the gentry of the Tidewater-the narrow strip of fertile coastline extending back to the fall line of the rivers-and the equally proud residents of the back• country hills. Their interests clashed, but in most colonies, and later in the states, the political machinery operated for the benefit of the coastal gentry rather than for the hill-folk. In Kentucky the geography was reversed but the struggle was similar. The "back-country hills" were in the East, on the slope of the Blue Ridge, and the lowland plain was in the West, but there was an internal conflict between men of the two sections. The Inland Tidewater formed by the and Kentucky valleys, with its rich soil, favorable climate, and slave-owning gentry who managed plantations, resembled the Atlantic coastal plain. But in the mountains along the Virginia-North Carolina ridge there were disgruntled men who consistently voted against the agrarian interests of the Inland Tidewater. To those men, who were landowners and therefore voters, Cassius Clay made his appeal. In the mountains the plantation-type, slave-worked economy did not predominate, but the presence of minerals and water• power made manufactures feasible. An effort to win political favor by representing southern industrial interests might attract the support of mountaineers. "Now I ... propose to educate a class to make capitalists of the manufacturers of American Switzerland ... resting on nine States," Clay explained after 1954] Cassius M. Clay 317 many years of political effort. The southern mountains were, he continued, the "greatest mineral district in the world." There, in a region potentially industrial, he began his career. As he did, he participated in the conflict between industrialists and agrarians for control of national affairs.2 In Kentucky the fight involved the American System, the brainchild of the state's favorite son, . A clever attempt to synthesize interest-groups, the American System was a scheme to win support of New Englanders and of western farmers by offering assistance to industry and to the food• producer. .. To encourage the establishment of home manufac• tures-in the Ohio Valley as well as in the East-Henry Clay advocated higher and higher tariff measures. He championed internal improvements at public expense to enable western farmers to market their surplus as well as to aid commercial development in the West. For business interests all over the country, the "Gallant Harry" favored a National Bank. His was a plan which anticipated a self-sufficient economy within the country and which would bind the sections together with a golden chain of commerce. Such was the platform upon which Henry Clay had for years sought to unite the divergent interest of the Whig Party. Opposition to the scheme appeared in many areas of the South, and particularly among slave-owners. They could discover little benefit to themselves from the promises of Henry Clay's system, and they considered any tariff as a tax which fell un• equally upon them. Trusting in the soil, and in the philosophy that "Cotton is King," they sealed their ears to the siren song of the mill and of the machine. Many planters, therefore, bade farewell to the Whig Party because of the industry-centered American System of its distinguished leader. As the elder Robert Wickliffe, Kentucky's most prominent slave-owning planter, remarked, "for myself, I am opposed to Mr. Clay, because I consider him a dangerous politician to the whole of the American States, and especially to the Southern and planting States."3 The American System was distasteful to free-trade planters who had no interest in abetting the industrial develop• ment of their own section, nor of enriching the North. In sup• porting a program of southern manufactures, therefore, Cassius Clay found himself hotly opposed by the dominant class of his section. The fundamental significance of Cassius Clay's career was in his interpretation of Henry Clay's idea to suit the southern 318 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 28 situation. As the American System envisioned a balanced national economy, so Cassius sought to increase Kentucky's prosperity by broadening its economic base. He wanted to apply his kinsman Henry's program of public aid to commerce and industry in his state. A border state, Kentucky enjoyed the distinguishing physical features of both the planting South and of the manufacturing North. Rich farmland with a planta• tion economy existed beside an undeveloped, mountainous, mineral-rich area which was potentially analogous to industrial New England. Clay encouraged his fellow Kentuckians to capitalize upon their favorable situation and to erect a manu• facturing economy in the southern mountains-"American Switzerland." To meet the needs of the industrial workers whom he hoped to entice into the state, Cassius urged farmers to emulate their counterparts north of the Ohio and grow food-grains and meat rather than the slave-produced staple crops. Such a course would increase the state's income, he promised, and would enrich the free white mechanics who engaged in manufactures. In addition, he contended that farmers would also prosper by the growth of a home market for foodstuffs which was lacking under the plantation system. Cassius Clay's plan paralleled the American System on the state level, and he adapted it to the needs of the agricultural South. It was, therefore, a Kentucky System which he proposed as his claim to political office. Despite the glowing future which he painted, Clay did not find an immediate acceptance of his plan. The great enemy to industrial development, he said, was the planting class-the proponents of an agrarian economy and the defenders of slave labor. To Cassius Clay, slavery was incompatible with manu• factures, and it was for that reason that he advocated a program of gradual emancipation. "We are provincial, an agricultural people," he lamented, "without division of labor and without capital, and must remain so while slavery lasts." Slave labor, Clay charged, prevented the growth of manufactures. "Slavery is destructive of mechanical excellence," he said. "The free states build ships and steam cars for the nations of the world; the slave states import the handles for their axes ... "4 Clay wanted to build a political career by an appeal to potential capitalists, so he emerged as a critic of slavery. But he was not, as was commonly supposed, a friend of the enslaved African. Indeed, he held the Negro in deep contempt which he made no effort to hide. "I have studied the Negro character." 1954] Cassius M. Clay 319 he said after years of agitation. "They lack self-reliance-we can make nothing out of them. God has made them for the sun and the bananal'" With that attitude he advocated eman• cipation, not because of the plight of the enslaved, but as a part of his efforts to win support from Kentucky's free white artisans. His purpose was to rid the state of the Negro because the whites suffered under the unfair competition of slave labor. Because the planters defended slavery, Clay urged non-slaveholders to defeat them in order to remove the distasteful labor system and to prepare the way for a southern industrial establishment. From the beginning of his career Cassius Clay maintained that position. In the 1830's, when he served in the Kentucky legislature, he pointed out that the planters opposed the Ameri• can System. "There is a class of politicians who have solemnly declared themselves at war with the system of American manu• factures, sustained by Kentucky," he said. "There are men who have avowed themselves inimical to a system of internal im• provements"; and the same people advocated a reduction of the tariff. They proposed, he declared, to import "at a sacrifice, from foreign and alien merchants, kingly subjects, rather than sustain the freemen of our common country."6 Because planters -members of his own class-opposed the Whig Program, Clay took up the fight against them. In 1840, in the Fayette County legislative election, he came to a parting of the ways. He campaigned upon a platform of restricting slavery in the state, and he took that position because he had committed himself to an industrial program. "Slaves would not manufacture if they could; and could not if they would!" he told Fayette voters. "Give us free labor, and we will manufacture much more than now."" To confirm his thesis that the presence of slavery hampered industrial development and prosperity, Clay made use of a novel argument. From the recent national census he extracted statistics with which he contrasted Kentucky with non--slave• holding industrial areas. Though younger and less well-en• dowed, he said, Ohio had grown in population much faster than had Kentucky; the Buckeye State would send thirty repre• sentatives to Congress that year, while the delegation from his own state had been cut to twelve members. In 1839, Cincinnati had built one thousand homes, he went on, while Louisville wrote "To Rent" upon many of her dwellings. "Negro slavery degrades the mechanic, ruins the manufacturer, land] lays waste and depopulates the country," he charged, appealing for 320 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 28 support against the institution. "Every slave imported," he said, "drives out a free and independent Kentuckian," and thus weakened the prosperity of the whites. "If a free white popu• lation be itself an element of strength, or the increase of popu• lation indicates prosperity," he said, then slavery was an evil which should be exorcised.8 But in the Old South, statistics were not enough to convince planters. Clay drove slaveholders into fearful frenzy and they employed all their weapons of social control against him. But he did not lose his courage; boldly he continued the fight. "I declare, then, in the face of all men," he pugnaciously asserted, "that I believe slavery to be an evil-an evil morally, economi• cally, physically, intellectually, socially, religiously, politically ... " Furthermore, he went on, the vast majority of Kentucky whites had no vested interest in slave labor. "As it is admitted that nine-tenths of the free white population of Kentucky and non-slave-holders, or workingmen," he said, "will they ever be so infatuated and blind as to lower the price of labor ... that southern nabobs may sleep in security, while their own little innocents must cry for bread?"9 Cassius Clay made a deter• mined effort to win the support of workers against the slave• owners-thus splitting the solid front of the whites-and upon that platform he won the 1840 election. Because of his prefer• ence for the Whig program he was now recognized as an anti• slavery politician. While a member of the legislature from Fayette, Clay served the interests of the manufacturing artisans, but he demonstrated that his primary interest was with potential capitalists. In one speech he read a list of machinery shipped out of New England, and then he demanded, "I ask the friends of slave labor how long shall we wait till we shall be able to supply Europe and the world with such things of manufacture?" How long would it be, he wanted to know, "before Holland will send to Kentucky for grist-mills?" Earnestly Clay implored his colleagues to support an industrial development by voting public assistance to the manufacturer. But he continued to declare that slavery was the stumbling-block. The untrained African was inefficient and therefore unsuited to manufactures, he repeated, and the "easy life of the slave-holder" destroyed the initiative of the whites. No one should wonder, then, that the North was "radiant with railroads, the channels of her untold commerce," Clay said, "whilst the South hobbles on at an immeasurable distance behind.'?" He dreamed of a prosperous, industrious 1954] Cassius M. Clay 321 Kentucky in which manufactures and subsistence agriculture flourished, and in which white labor would replace slavery. Four decades before Henry W. Grady would preach the doc• trines of a southern factory economy, Cassius M. Clay had seen the vision of the New South. But his dream was far from fulfillment. His criticism of ..,:... -.::::-.-y_ in the legislature aroused furious resentment against him, and slave-owners banded together to plan his defeat. In the election of 1841, after a close race, they were successful. The campaign was marked by a duel between Cassius and his chief opponent, Robert Wickliffe, Jr., which ended bloodlessly. But Clay was defeated for re-election, and-although he always claimed he had been fraudulently robbed of the victory-he retired from local politics. He did not, however, relinquish his ambitions for a political career." To realize his vision of the New South, and to resume his lost career, Clay proposed a new political organization to effect peaceful, constitutional reform. As long as the state law recog• nized a property right in slaves, Clay would not deny it. But laws might be changed through the ballot. The state consti• tution admitted of its own amendment; therefore Clay con• tended that discussion to amend it must be acceptable. He advocated a program of education to inform non-slaveholding whites of the evil which slavery worked to them. It was similar, he told them, to the labor of convicts in that the slave received no wage. Wage-earners were unable to compete with the Negro. "The day is come, or coming," he warned, "when every white must work for the wages of the slave-his victuals and clothes-emigrate, or die!" But, he went on, the votes of non-slaveholders might change that situation. Six hundred thousands Kentuckians had no economic stake in slavery; only thirty-one thousand, four hundred ninety-five were slave• owners. "Not one in four or five," he calculated, "but one in twenty-five only, is a slave-holder." Basing his estimates upon those figures, Clay made an appeal to the majority to vote their own economic self-interest. "How long, my countrymen," he asitt:"d, "seeing you have the power of the ballot-box, shall these things be? ... will you not at last awake, arise, and be men? Then shall I be delivered from this outlawry, this impending ruin, this insufferable exile, this living death!"12 Clay expected his course to increase Kentucky's prosperity, but he had also a personal interest in the outcome. He intended to return to 322 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 28 officein a much more singificant capacity than legislator if his ambitious schemes were successful. Cassius Clay bet his political future upon the audacious gamble that the six hundred thousand would agree with him and would vote against slavery. Convinced that his course would lead to the prosperity of the majority of whites in the state, he would not relinquish his position. But he fai)p.J .1-. consider the stubborn resistance of the slave-ownir..-0 planters. While they made little effort to refute his arguments, they refused him an outlet for the discussion of his views, and they charged that he was an abolitionist allied with Yankees. Had it not been for his belligerent personality and his strong right arm, he might have been silenced. He did not, however, surrender his ambitious course. The first phase of his new political career was as political theorist. His plan for slave emancipation was an important chapter in southern intellectual history. He evolved a scheme for ending slavery which anticipated political defeat for slave• owners, and which called for local action against the institution. In the thirteen slave states, he said, slavery should be left to domestic discussion. Free from the distracting clamor of meddlesome "foreigners"-Clay told the abolitionists to stay away from slave states-the border states would "by peaceable means" abolish slavery. "Kentucky," Clay said, hopefully, "will be among the first to take the lead." The program would begin by electing enough emancipationists to win control of the legislature. An emancipationist assembly would then call a convention to amend the state constitution with an "easy and light" emancipation clause effective years in the future. At that, many slaveholders would emigrate, taking their slaves with them; others would sell their slaves out of the state as the emancipation date approached. In that way, Kentucky would be free of the African and also of slave-owner control. With slave labor diminishing, white laborers would receive increased wages. Too, there would be an industrial growth. As slaves were sold out of the state, capital would become available, "ready to be invested in manufactures," which would entice white laborers and also "men of capital" into Kentucky. "'Ii.ms would the towns begin to grow once more," Clay promised, "and home markets be secured for the productions of the soil . . ." It was an audacious scheme, and it entitled Cassius I Clay to a place among ante-bellum southern political theorists.13 ) Having outlined the program by which he intended to 1954] Cassius M. Clay 323 introduce the Kentucky System, Clay's next step was to publi• cize it. In the beginning he utilized local iournals, but their editors soon excluded his writings. Thereupon he made use of metropolitan newspapers which circulated in the South. That plan proved ineffective, so Clay determined to publish a paper of his own in Kentucky. Free white workers, he charged, were "barred by despotic intolerance from receiving any LIGHT by which they can know their rights, and free themselves from the competition of slave labor, which brings ignorance and beggary to their doors." To bring light, and to provide a rallying point for political action against slavery, in 1845 Clay announced the publication of The True American at Lexington, in the heart of the Bluegrass slave district." Through the columns of the paper Clay continued his effort to separate non-slaveholding whites from the slave-owners, but his successes brought disaster. He reiterated his economic attacks upon slavery aimed at arousin~ the manufacturing artisans and the professional classes. 'Lawyers, merchants, mechanics, laborers, who are your consumers, Robert Wick• liffe's 200 slaves?" he asked, referring to the most influential slaveholder in the state. "How many clients do you find, how many goods do you sell, how many hats, coats, saddles, and trunks do you make for these 200 slaves?" Clay wanted to know if Wickliffe would purchase as much for his Negroes as two hundred white laborers would buy for themselves. Such arguments produced an immediate response. After two months of publication, Clay boasted that an emancipation party "of slow but sure growth" was in existence, that candidates were in the field, and that the subscription list was growing. In Louisville, a commercial center, Clay's friends planned to publish another emancipation newspaper, and a candidate for the legislature offered himself as a representative of the Emancipation Party.15 Observing the hopeful signs, Clay issued a call for an emancipationist convention, but before it could meet his enemies attacked him. Officially organizing themselves into a mass-meeting, on August 18, 1845, the citizens of Lexington declared Clay's press a public nuisance because of his political efforts. "That this infatuated man believed that the non-slaveholders of Kentucky would feel and act as a party against the tenure of slavery," said lanky Thomas F. Marshall, Lexington attorney who was orator at the mass• meeting, "and that through them he expected to change the constitution of Kentucky, and finally overthrow the institution, 324 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 28 is evident from one of his letters to the Tribune.'?" Although Marshall made use of an irresponsible statement in The True American to arouse resentment against Clay, it was for his political schemes that the orator castigated him. To Kentucky slave-owners, it was enough that Clay sought to construct a political organization contrary to their interests, however con• stitutional his methods. Because he attempted to change Kentucky's basic law and overthrow slavery, Lexington citizens suppressed The True American. Though Clay resumed its publication in Cincinnati, it never again exerted its earlier influence. Clay's effort to achieve constitutional emancipation -and thus a manufacturing economy-had ended in failure in the Bluegrass." Following his defeat in the Inland Tidewater, Cassius Clay began to work among the mountaineers where industry was more popular. "I turned my eyes toward the mountains east• ward, where few slaves were held," he recalled many years later. He pointed out that there would always be a border area between slave and free sections, "and no state, except Louisiana, is without its mountains and its mountain men." And in neither border nor mountains, he went on, "can slavery find long a resting place."18 There, among miners and manu• facturers, Clay continued his work, but it was an unrewarding task. The hill-folk were scattered, and few subscribed to newspapers, so he had to speak to them in person. The large, dark-haired man, clad in a blue suit with brass buttons gleam• ing in the lamplight, became a frequent visitor to country stores and crossroads. In 1851, Clay ran for governor on the emancipation ticket and spoke in eighty of the state's one hundred counties. At each engagement, so the legend declared, he would place a Bible and a bowie-knife on the table before him, asking that any who would not respect the one should beware the other. But the belligerence was unnecessary, for there was no trouble on the campaign. Nor did Clay receive the support of Kentuckians. He polled less than three per cent of the total vote, and promptly concluded that any significant anti-slavery effort would have to come from outside the state. Clay joined the new Republican Party, and more and more he fulminated against slavery, forgetting why he had opposed the institution in the first place.19 On one occasion in the 1850's, however, he returned to a dis• cussion of the basis for his war against slavery. In 1856 he was an orator for the Republican Party, and he saved his most pol- 1954] Cassius M. Clay 325 ished rhetoric for an audience in New York City. He addressed the Young Men's Republican Central Committee in the Taber• nacle and made a determined bid for the support of that influ• ential group. Indeed, his own ambitions overshadowed his ef• forts for Candidate John C. Fremont and the party. As a back• ground for his claim to a future nomination, Clay reviewed his entire career and he described the reasons for his antislavery action. Once more he spoke out in favor of southern manu• factures. "We have taken Man, and subjected him to our will," he told the New Yorkers; "you have ... seized upon the ele• ments-upon steam, upon water-power-upon chemistry, upon electricity ... and made them your omniponent slaves." The same result would occur in the South, he said, but for the emphasis upon slave-worked agriculture, for there were ample resources for an industrial economy in the South. In western Virginia and in eastern Kentucky, he said, "coal, and iron, and marble, and other minerals of unequalled value," were readily available, but remained untouched. Power was also present to turn the wheels of industry. "There is the Blue Ridge pene• trating the clouds and pouring down perennial streams of water• power," Clay asserted, but added that it was wasted in a sec• tion "without manufactures sufficient to clothe her half-naked slaves." If southerners would utilize that power, the whole of southern economy would improve. "Without manufactures and mining there is no commerce," Clay lamented, "and with the finest harbors in the world, there is not a ship upon her stocks, nor a sail unfurledl"?" Yet in the face of his contentions, southerners would not re• linquish their preference for cotton. Whenever he argued for manufactures in the South, he said, his hearers would "cut short the argument by lustily crying out at the top of their voices: CO! cotton is King!' On the contrary I proclaim that• grass is King!" To prove his proclamation, Clay compared the value of the cotton crop with that of hay as given in the census returns, and found that hay was much more valuable. Clay denied the argument that cotton brought a monetary return because it entered foreign trade. "If you were to blot out the whole foreign trade in cotton, the country ... would be much the gainer," he asserted, "in domestic industry, in home manu• facture, home labor, and a home market for ourselves."21 Cassius was still preaching the doctrines of his kinsman Henry Clay. A whole year before Hinton R. Helper, an obscure North Carolina yeoman farmer, aroused resentment among his south- 326 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 28 em compatriots by offering statistics to suggest that slavery harmed the poor-white, Cassius M. Clay continued his efforts to show that it prevented southern manufactures. Both men sought to split the solid front of the whites, and southern gen• tility castigated both. But Helper spoker for the yeomanry and Clay for the proletariat and for its entrepreneurial companions. Clay left Helper little room for originality with his clever use of census figures; Clay had done that for years. Clay continued to declare that the evil in slavery was the resistance to industrialism among its defenders. "In vain do men go to Nashville, and to Knoxville, and to Memphis, and Charleston, in their annual farce of southern commercial con• ventions to build up southern commerce," he said. "And they resolve and resolve, and forthwith there's not another ton of shipping built, or added to the manufactures of the South, and yet these men are not fools! They never invite such men as I to their conventions, because I would tell them that slavery was the cause of their poverty, and that it is free labor which they need .... "22 From the beginning of his public career twenty years before, Cassius Clay had said that slavery ham• pered industrial development in Kentucky. But slave-owners would not listen, and used force to suppress his discordant voice. They proclaimed him an ally of northern abolitionists and he failed to win a following in his state. It was evidence of his failure that in 1856he told New Yorkers,not Kentuckians,about the needs and resources for southern manufactures. Pursuing his efforts to achieve political success by appealing to potential industrialists, he had become an enemy of the slave system. Though it was as an emancipationist and a fighter that Ken• tucky remembered him, Cassius M. Clay was a pioneer advo• cate for an industrial economy in the Old South.

FOOTNOTES 1 This paper was read before The Filson Club at its meeting on December 7, 1953. •Clay to Louis Marshall, November 20, 1895, in Berea College Library, Berea, Ky. 3 Speech of Robert Wickliffe, Delivered before a Mass Meeting of the Democracy of Kentucky ... on September 2, 1843 (Lexington, 1843), 15. • The True American (Lexington, Ky.), February 25, 1846; see also the issue for February 11, 1846. Clay, The Writings of Cassius M. Clay, edited by Horace Greeley (New York, 1848), 204. Hereafter cited as Clay, Writings. •Clay to Editor of the New York World, February 19, 1861, photostat in possession of the author. •Cassius M. Clay "Speech on the bill conferring Banking Privileges ... " in Clay, Writings, 54-5. See also Lexington Intelligencer, January 12, 1838, for an account of the speech. •Cassius M. Clay, A Review of the Late Canvass ... (Lexington 1840), 4-6. =iu«, 14-15, 16; Clay, Writings, 71-2. 1954] Cassius M. Clay 327

•Clay, A Review of the Late Canvass. , . (Lexington, 1840), 14; Clay, Writings, 69. 1° Clay, Writings, 73-4. 11 Clay, The Life of Cassius M. Clay ... (Cincinnati, 1886), I, 80-1; W. B. Redd to Robert J. Breckinridge, May 5, 1841, Papers, Library of Congress; Clay, Writings, 135, and 279 n. There is a legend connected with the Clay-Wickliffe duel. It seems that Cassius had sharpened his shooting eye in prep• aration for such an eventuality; so skilled had he become, so it was reported, that he could sever a string with a bullet from his pistol three times out of five shots at ten paces. Yet on May 13, 1841, the contestants exchanged three shots without effect. Some days later a friend joked Cassius about his marksmanship. "Why is it," he wanted to know, "that you could cut a string at ten paces three times out of five, and yet miss Wickliffe's big body three successive shots at the same distance?'' "Oh," drawled Clay, "the damned string had no pistol in its hand." See Z. F. Smith, "Duelling, and some noted duels by Kentuckians," in Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society, VIII (1910), 77-87. Quoted passage is from pp. 79-80. 1Jl Clay, Writings, 317-8; Clay to Editor of the New York Tribune, April, 1844, in Clay, Writings, 141. L'l Clay, Writings, 143-4; The True American, March 4, 11, 1846. The entry for March 4 is also in Clay, Writings, 398. ,_.Clay, Writings, 86-90. "The True American, June 10, July 15, 1845, in Clay, Writings, 224-5, and 274; "Cassius M. Clay's Appeal,"' in Ibid., 302. 16 W. L. Barre (ed.), Speeches and Writings of Thomas F. Marshall ( Cincinnati, 1858), 206. 11 See Observer and Reporter (Lexington, Ky.), August 20, 1845. 18 Clay's review of John G. Fee's Autobiography, August 24, 1896, in his scrap• book #2, in thelrivate collection of Prof. J. T. Dorris, Eastern Kentucky State College, Richmon , Ky. and graciously loaned to the author. 19 John G. Fee to Gerrit Smith, 1851, in Calendar of the Gerritt Smith Papers in the Syracuse University Library, General Correspondence, Volume Two, 1846-1854 (Albany, 1942), #602; Kentucky Statesman (Lexington, Ky.), May 28, and July 9, 1851. 20 Cassius M. Clay's Speech to the Young Men's Republican Central Committee, October 24, 1856, n. p., n. d., pp. 5-6. 21 Ibid., I?· 10. 22 Andrew W. Crandall, The Early History of the Republican Party, 1854-1856 (Boston, 1930), 70-1. See also Ruhl J. Bartlett, John C. Fremont and the Republican Party. The Ohio State University Studies ... , No. 13 (Columbus, 1930), 48.