I Really Wish Rand Paul Knew More American History...
Robert Farley writes:
Clay Fight!: I will grant that there’s a certain courage in a Kentucky Senator lauding Cassius Marcellus Clay over Henry Clay:
“As long as I sit at Henry Clay’s desk, I will remember his lifelong desire to forge agreement, but I will also keep close to my heart the principled stand of his cousin Cassius who refused to forsake the life of any human simply to find agreement,” Paul said. Paul criticized one of the most famous Kentucky politicians, Henry Clay, who at one point occupied Paul’s chosen desk in the Senate. Instead of emulating the Kentucky senator known as the “great compromiser,” Paul praised his cousin, abolitionist Cassius Clay, who was attacked politically and physically for sticking to his principles. “Today we have no issues that approach moral equivalency with the issue of slavery. Yet we do face a fiscal nightmare and potentially a debt crisis,” said Paul. “Is the answer to compromise? Should we compromise by raising taxes and cutting spending as the Debt Commission proposes? Is that the compromise that will save us from financial ruin?”
Don't get me wrong. Cassius Marcellus Clay was a very good guy in the context of pre-Civil War Kentucky and the pre-Civil War United States. But his Abolitionist principles were of a peculiar color indeed.
Cassius Clay's proposal for Kentucky was that the legislature should pass a law that slaves would be freed on their twenty-first birthday--giving plenty of time for plantation owners to sell them south out of state down the Mississippi.
His was not a form of Abolitionism that would cheer the slave--rather, it seemed tuned to cheer the land speculator anticipating a flood of northern immigrants once the slaves had been cleared out south.
From William H. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay:
