Plantation owners held him personally responsible for the loss of their slaves. When Cassius Clay resigned his diplomatic post, in his late fifties, and returned to Kentucky, he found himself in an atmosphere of extreme hostility. It also, indirectly, led to a postwar episode which somehow expresses the essential character of this stormy Kentuckian and in the following article this final portion of Clay’s career is depicted by a Kentucky biographer who has made an extensive study of Cassius Clay’s life. A little later Lincoln appointed him minister to Russia.Īs a diplomat Clay probably was miscast, but his experience in Russia at least contributed an unusual chapter to the history of American diplomacy. He also commissioned him a major general of volunteers, although to Clay’s regret he never actually commanded troops in combat.
To show his gratitude, Lincoln presented him with a massive Colt revolver-a weapon that Clay later put to good use. He stumped the Middle West for Lincoln in the campaign, and in the dark April of 1861, when Lincoln sat in the White House amid rumors that Confederate forces would march on the defenseless capital to dispossess him, Clay organized a battalion of young roughs to guard the White House and the Washington Navy Yard. The fact that it never became necessary to do all of this made no difference the setup simply expressed the way Clay met life’s challenge.īy 1860, after surviving various personal encounters (in which, he established an enduring reputation as a bowie-knife fighter of vast capacity), Clay was so well known as an antislavery leader that he got 101 votes for the Republican vice presidential nomination in the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for the Presidency. The staff was instructed that if a mob ever stormed the place and, against the probabilities, managed to reach the second floor, all hands were to flee via an escape-hatch in the roof: Clay himself would stay behind to drop a match in the powder and blow the place to fragments. He lined the street door with sheet iron, installed two brass cannon loaded with musket balls and old nails at the top of the stairway, kept a stand of rifles and muskets handy, and put two barrels of black powder, in a corner of his editorial office. Clay retorted: “That would depend on which way he was running.”įounding an antislavery paper, the True American, in Lexington, Kentucky, he prepared for trouble. He had inherited many slaves and he set all of them free, and once when he was making an emancipationist speech a heckler asked whether he would help a runaway Negro. That hardly figured in his ninety-three years he never ran away from a fight, and he got into many fights in a time and place when most fights went to a finish.įor twenty years before the Civil War, “Cash” Clay was that rarity, an outspoken antislavery leader in a slaveholding state. Son of a pioneer Indian fighter and frontier soldier, General Green Clay, and cousin of the great Henry Clay, he was born in 1810 and he lived until 1903, surprising everyone (including himself) by dying peacefully in his bed. If you want to be a successful engineer, go elsewhere, your time there will only be confusing.C assius Marcellus Clay was one of the most colorful, pugnacious, and irrepressible sons of that most colorful, pugnacious, and irrepressible state, the Kentucky of old-time blue-grass tradition. You’re another engineer, operator, maintenance tech, etc. In regards to trust, if you are hired, choose your words carefully to those that dwell in the office, not all but some will boast and laugh and say “Everyone is replaceable” That statement set with me the whole time I was there. Maintenance team/Engineer technicians are your best bet to succeed into grasping an idea of what you need to know. The engineering managers have no drive to assist you. My current job, I’ve learned more in 1 week than I did in a year there. Like I look at my resume and ask myself, I barely accomplished anything. After all the grueling time, I realized they have failed me as managers. If you ask for training the common excuse you will here is “I can’t tell because you need to figure it out on your own.” I did figure out things on my own but I only asked when I felt the need for guidance from my manager.
Your job is to be an area expert over what they conclude to be your best fit. Then it got to the point where I was unsure why there was even an engineer position. As a fresh engineer out of school, I was already a self starter and ready to go and pretty humble at any task. In my mind going in, I wanted a manager that wanted me to succeed. When working here, I felt like there was no true way of learning.
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