A Man Seen But Once: Cassius Marcellus Clay

“Clay’s mission to St. Petersburg, when all the world was our foe, will always remain one of the most spectacular passages in Russian American Friendship.” Joseph Freeman, Life Magazine, August 27, 1945. “This man (Clay) is certainly the most wonderful ass of the age. . . It is prosperity that has developed the fearful underlying vanity that poisons his whole character.” William H. Seward, secretary of state in President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. “He was a man such as the world sees but once and a character known to all. He, more than any other man, stood for the world’s idea of a Kentuckian-bold, fearless, generous, kind, quick to avenge an insult and equally quick to forgive a wrong, an orator and a hand-to-hand fighter.” Henry Watterson’s tribute to Clay upon his death July 22, 1903