Kentucky Clay: Eleven Generations of a Southern Dynasty - Hardcover

Bateman, Katherine R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556527950 ISBN 13: 9781556527951

Verlag: A Cappella Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

This sweeping history traces eleven generations of the Clays of Kentucky, a founding American family and Southern dynasty whose members include Henry Clay, who ran for president against James K. Polk; his cousin Cassius Marcellus Clay, a prominent abolitionist and Lincoln&;s advisor against slavery; and matriarch Kizzie Clay, who buried the family silver and escaped by flatboat to avoid marauding Union soldiers. The history of the early colonial period comes to life, beginning with the arrival of the Clay family in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1613 and the Cecil family in St. Mary&;s, Maryland, in 1634, continuing through their trek across Virginia to the Appalachian Mountains, leading to the families&; eventual intermarriage in 1800 and their move across the mountains to Kentucky and beyond.

 

Drawing from original sources such as Civil War records, land deeds, wills, and letters, and through her own dogged detective work and determination to separate reality from exaggeration to understand the complex legacy she has inherited, Katherine Bateman reveals the adventures, accomplishments, and shortcomings of the men in her family, alongside the deep-rooted stories and nontraditional roles of its strong, sometimes selfish, and proud women.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katherine Bateman is the author of The Young Investor. She is a former professor of art history at both Berea College in Kentucky and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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KENTUCKY CLAY

Eleven Generations of a Southern DynastyBy Katherine Bateman

CHICAGO REVIEW PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Katherine Bateman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55652-795-1

Contents

Introduction........................................viiMap.................................................xivFamily Tree.........................................xvii1. The Ancient Planter..............................12. The Chyrurgien and the Rebel.....................113. Family Reunion...................................234. Mysteries........................................335. Family Secrets...................................496. The Voice........................................637. House Stories....................................738. Daddy's Girl.....................................879. Strong Women.....................................10710. Little Dolly Dumpling...........................11911. The Little Indian...............................13512. Catharine and Robert............................14913. Granddaughters..................................16514. House Lust......................................17715. Kentucky My Way.................................187Acknowledgments.....................................201Notes and Sources...................................203Index...............................................215

Chapter One

The Ancient Planter

Although I cannot prove it, I am convinced that John Thomas Claye-the first of my ancestors to come over from England-had brown eyes. This may sound odd, even inconsequential to families who over time have looked into the eyes of relatives that reflect rainbow hues: blue, green, violet, or that luscious yellow that turns to key lime in certain lights. It is not odd, however, to me. My conviction that John Thomas Claye had brown eyes has substance behind it.

All of us, all of the Clays and Cecils-the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, the brothers, the grandparents, the babies-are brown-eyed. Photographs show our dark chocolate eyes for the seven generations that cameras have existed to capture them. Histories of the early settlers of Virginia and Kentucky go even further back. One author speaks of my eighteenth-century relatives not just in terms of their Revolutionary War service or their careers in law and politics but also discusses in surprisingly lush language the family's dark brunette looks. A husband writes love letters to "my black-eyed baby." Oral tradition describes "black eyes flashing."

Consequently, I think that when John Thomas Claye sailed into the Chesapeake Bay in February 1613 he gazed at his new Virginia homeland through irises of brown. I think his dark eyes darkened further when he stepped off the ship Treasurer onto the wharf built just months before on the James River side of the fledgling Jamestown colony. They darkened in stunned disbelief as he walked through the palisade and took in the handful of crude shelters, the deep mud, and the lethargic shamble of the Jamestown colonists who, like him, had invested as land speculators in "The Tresorer and Companie of Adventurers and Planters of the Citty of London for the Firste Colonie in Virginia."

Imagining John Thomas's brown eyes as he stares in confused shock at the skeletal colonists-the ones who felt lucky to have survived "the starving years" of 1609 to 1611-helps me feel that I am in that rain-drenched Jamestown winter with him. I stand beside him as he surveys the bleak and dreary settlement he has come to: the two rows of timber and mud houses, the disheveled storehouses within the fort's triangular form shaped by precariously leaning palisades. I stand there as he contrasts the noisy vibrancy of London-the home he had left just weeks before-with the sluggish stillness of this exhausted place. I want to comfort this twenty-six-year-old relative of mine as he wonders if the Treasurer has docked too soon, as he tells himself this must not be the Jamestown he was promised, the place he has invested in, the place where he plans to buy land, make a home, start a family.

Yes, I want to comfort him. I want to touch his arm. I want to say to John Thomas, "Look at me. Look at my brown eyes. I am one of yours. Eleven generations of your family know your story. Your story and all those like yours taught us what we can do, who we can be. We know that so many of you faced this awful place alone and that you did not give up, you did not go back to the safety, the familiarity of England. Through your stories we know we are capable of taking risks, capable of starting over; we know we are capable of change. We owe the first step in family fearlessness to you. So many of us are here to affirm that the decision each of you made was a positive one, not just for you but for all of us in your bloodlines."

According to the family story, John Thomas Claye came to Virginia in 1613 for one reason only: to amass land. He made that trip across the Atlantic on the ship Treasurer in the dangerous gray winter seas to replace the land he would have inherited if he had not been born the second son of Sir John Thomas Claye and Mary Carleton Claye, if England's laws of primogeniture had not determined that his older brother, William, would get everything. To match the family landholdings was a tall order. The Clayes were well established in England. John Thomas's father was a Welsh coal baron knighted by Elizabeth I, and his mother was the daughter of Sir William Carlton, the "Chief Cockmatcher and Servant to the Hawks" for Henry VIII.

At first, John Thomas had not considered buying stock in "The Tresorer and Companie of Adventurers and Planters of the Citty of London for the Firste Colonie in Virginia" or sailing to Jamestown. For one thing, he had not reached his majority in 1606 when the "Virginia Company" put out its first call for adventurers to participate "in purse or in person" in the land investment venture. And then ships filled with additional adventurers and supplies for the fledgling colony began to return to London with more than logs and furs. The ships also returned with stories. Hard-to-believe stories. Stories the board members of the Virginia Company tried to hide, with little success, from the public. Potential stockholders clustered in London's business district and conferred over what they had heard from the captains and crew of the ships returning from Virginia. In spring 1608, only thirty-six of the first one hundred fifty adventurers survived the first year in the new colony. Could this be true? In 1610, of the five hundred settlers in the colony in 1608-most healthy new adventurers-only sixty were still alive. And, nearly unspeakably, those sixty may have survived only because they were willing to eat their own dead. Unthinkable.

At first, John Thomas Claye was not tempted to join the sons of English nobility in the Virginia Company venture: at first, the second sons who trickled into the fledgling colony and, later, the "distressed cavaliers" who flooded into Virginia in the 1640s following their land losses in the English Civil War. John Thomas was not interested in Jamestown until 1612. That spring, news of an amazing new strain of tobacco reached London, tobacco planted in Virginia from Spanish seeds acquired in the West Indies by John Rolfe, an early Virginia Company adventurer and future husband of Pocahontas. This tobacco was so wondrous that descriptions of its luscious leaves-their resistance to disease, their richness of flavor-reached London before the first hogshead filled with the precious commodity left...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: A Cappella Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1556527950
• ISBN 13: 9781556527951
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar