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Yinxu royal grave ruins on honor list

BY CHINA DAILY

Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810-1903) was the son of Kentucky Revolutionary War veteran, politician and slave-owner General Green Clay. While at Yale College, he heard a speech by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and he supported gradual emancipation.

During the 1840s, he was elected and reelected to the House of Representatives and twice won reelection; but his anti-slavery views cost him his House seat and almost his life, as he survived two assassination attempts. The death threats continued when he freed his slaves and began publishing the anti-slavery newspaper The True American.

In the 1850s, he was a founding member of the Republican Party and was active in the campaign to elect Abraham Lincoln in 1860. He served as Lincoln’s minister to Russia, where he witnessed the Tsar’s edict of emancipation, which liberated 23 million people from serfdom.