This is the story of Cassius Marcellus Clay — not that Cassius Clay, the heavyweight fighter and luminous worldwide presence best known as Muhammad Ali.  This story is about the original Cassius Clay: the 19th-century scion of a slaveholding family who became a belligerent emancipationist, globe-trotting statesman, unsparing duelist, early Republican and larger-than-life American eccentric.  It was for that Cassius Clay, who died on July 22, 1903, at the Kentucky plantation house where he had been born 92 years earlier, that Ali’s father and, by extension, Ali himself were named.  A firebrand publisher, Yale-educated lawyer, Kentucky state legislator, major general in the Union Army, survivor of multiple assassination attempts and the United States minister to Russia under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson, General Clay was as well known for his private activities as for his public ones.  His obituary in The New York Times, published on July 23, 1903, is remarkable for a level of catty candor rarely seen in American news obituaries of the era — traditionally staid, reverential documents — and, very likely, of any era.  “He was found desperately ill, and has had every care,” the opening paragraph reads. “His children, long estranged by reason of his eccentricities, were again able to be with him, and were at the bedside when death ensued.”  Things get more delicious from there.  There was General Clay’s prolific dueling, which left him with a tangle of scars on his face and body but left his opponents far worse off: He was said to have slain more men in duels than anyone else in the country.  On one occasion, caught without his pistol, General Clay was shot above the heart by a would-be assassin. He forestalled further ado by slicing off the assailant’s nose and ears with a Bowie knife.  Then there was General Clay’s precipitate divorce from his first wife of 45 years, Mary Jane Warfield, and his equally precipitate second marriage — made, he insisted, on populist political grounds — to a 15-year-old servant girl. He was 84 at the time.  “In 1837 he had married his first wife, Miss Warfield, a member of an aristocratic family of slave holders,” the Times obituary said. “Years afterward, when he had become an ardent disciple of Tolstoï, he came to the conclusion that he ought to wed a ‘daughter of the people.’ ”  And so he did, taking Dora Richardson as his bride in 1894. “Gen. Clay Weds Pretty Dora,” a headline in The Times proclaimed. “His Children Were Unable to Prevent Their Aged Parent’s Marriage.”  Young Dora, who evidently had little say in the matter of her betrothal, did not take kindly to being yoked to a man more than five times her age. She ran away repeatedly from home and from the boarding school to which her husband sent her.  “The fact that he supplied her with the most beautiful French gowns and lavished money upon her, she did not consider compensation for the teasing she got at the hands of her fellow-pupils,” The Times said. “In two months he had to take her back home, still uneducated.”  After four years of Dora’s comings and goings, which were avidly covered in the newspapers, General Clay divorced her.  She remarried “a worthless young mountaineer,” The Times reported, but after he was killed in a railway accident, the general tried vigorously to win back “his peasant wife,” as he fondly called her.  In this endeavor, unlike most others, he did not succeed.  The youngest son of Gen. Green Clay and the former Sally Lewis, Cassius Marcellus Clay was born on Oct. 19, 1810, at White Hall, his family’s mansion near Richmond, Ky.  His father (1757-1828) had been a hero of the Revolutionary War and was a general in the War of 1812; Henry Clay, the United States senator and statesman, was a cousin. Both of Cassius’ parents were from the Southern landed gentry, making the family among the wealthiest landowners in the state.  At Yale, Cassius Clay heard a speech by the famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and was converted to the cause. Returning home after earning a law degree in 1832, he established a practice in Lexington, served three terms in the Kentucky General Assembly and was a captain in the 1st Kentucky Cavalry in the Mexican War.  In 1844, he freed his own slaves and the next year started The True American, an emancipationist newspaper published in Lexington.  His proposals for gradually ending slavery, which he also promulgated in public lectures, did not go over well in Kentucky. He kept a cannon on hand to protect the newspaper office from looming mobs and weathered several more attempts on his life.  General Clay, who in the 1850s helped establish the Republican Party, was a friend and staunch supporter of Abraham Lincoln. After the outbreak of the Civil War, he organized the Cassius M. Clay Battalion, a corps of several hundred volunteers charged with protecting the White House.  In 1861, Lincoln appointed him minister to Russia, a post he held through the following year and again from 1863 to 1869. Dispatched to St. Petersburg, General Clay was instrumental in brokering the deal that in 1867 let the United States purchase Alaska.  The general’s later life was a sorry state of affairs. Barricaded in White Hall with a veritable arsenal beside him, he pined for the faithless Dora and worried obsessively that enemies, real and imagined, were coming to kill him.  “Gen. Clay May Be Insane,” a headline in The Times declared on July 4, 1903, followed, five days later, by the more definitive “Gen. Clay Decreed Insane.”  “Though his sight became so much impaired that he could not shoot any longer,” The Times reported in his obituary, “he kept plenty of firearms at his elbow, and kept trained from a porthole in the wall the same brass cannon he had caused to be built to protect his printing office.”  But the vital legacy of General Clay’s early life has endured down the years. He fathered a string of children — as many as 10 in some estimates — most with his first wife, although at least one with a St. Petersburg mistress. Two daughters, Mary Barr Clay (1839-1924) and Laura Clay (1849-1941), became leaders of the women’s suffrage movement.  In 1853, he donated the land for what became Berea College in Berea, Ky. Established two years later, it was the first interracial and coeducational college in the South, open to blacks and to women from its inception.  General Clay was buried in Richmond Cemetery, in Richmond, Ky., and his funeral was newsworthy for the racially mixed crowd in attendance.  “Never was a more striking scene witnessed on the way to Richmond, where the funeral services were to be held,” a contemporary newspaper account read. “From every humble Negro cottage along the roadside and at every cross roads, the mothers and large children carrying those who were too little to walk, the Negroes were lined up to pay their last respects to the man whom they honored as the Abraham Lincoln of Kentucky.”  In the end, then, its garrulous chronicle of its subject’s peccadilloes notwithstanding, the obituary of Cassius Marcellus Clay is every inch a requiem for a heavyweight.  Read the obituary “Cassius M. Clay Dead”
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