White Hall: Cassius Clay's Battlefield at Home

Just off the interstate stands White Hall, a forty-four-room Italianate mansion that tells one of Kentucky's most contradictory stories. The original Georgian house was built in seventeen ninety-eight by Green Clay, one of the wealthiest slave owners in the state. His son Cassius Marcellus Clay grew up in that house, went north to Yale, heard William Lloyd Garrison speak, and came home an abolitionist. In Kentucky, in the eighteen forties, that was close to a death sentence.

Cassius published an antislavery newspaper called The True American right in Lexington. A pro-slavery mob dismantled his printing press and shipped it out of state. He rebuilt, kept writing, and eventually served as Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to Russia, where he is credited with helping secure Russian support for the Union. In the eighteen sixties the house was expanded into the forty-four rooms you see today, with indoor plumbing added. His descendants donated it to Kentucky in nineteen sixty-eight. The man who lived here changed American history twice over, and barely anyone knows his name.