Cassius M. Clay's Knives and the Elusive Bowie Knife Manual

Our roving correspondent Bob Dickerson recently toured White Hall, stately home of the 19th-century emancipationist and bowie-knife fighter Cassius M. Clay. Bob was able to answer some of the questions I've had about White Hall, such as whether any of Clay's bowie knives are on display. Here is his report:

There were four Bowie knives on display. (Unfortunately, photography isn’t permitted and my wife and I were the only ones on the tour.) The case also contained the sword that is in several photographs of Clay. The guide pointed out several pistols and swords that were documented as belonging to Clay. He said that, in his opinion, the Bowies are probably authentic. "Probably."

One was a folder with a five-inch blade. The one on page 319 of your book is real close. [This is a J.A. Henckels spring-back knife.]

Another was a double-edged knife with an eight-inch blade. Similar to the one on page 146. I’d classify the third as a spear-point Bowie with about three inches on the reverse edge of the blade sharpened. The length was about eight inches and it had a silver handle. (It has to be the one on page 96 of your book.) [This is Clay's "Dress-up Bowie."]

The one classic Bowie had a seven-inch blade and was very close to a Randall #1 in general shape. The facets were different and it had a slab stag handle. The knives on pages 118 and 264 are close. It is similar to other commercial Bowie I’ve seen, some of them fairly new. The sheath however was old and seemed right for the time.

In general, they looked like commercial knives rather than handmade. There were manufacturers marks on two but I couldn’t read them through the glass. The dagger had “GEO. WOSTEN????” [that would be George Wostenholm, a major Sheffield knifemaker] in small letters on the blade. The spearpoint had a large I*XL on the blade. [The I*XL ("I excell") stamp was a trademark of Wostenholm.]

Bob asked the tour guide about the persistent rumor that Clay penned a manual on bowie-knife fighting in or around 1869, after his return from Russia. The guide said that no one who's been involved with the restoration or maintenance of White Hall, any historian they've talked to, or any of Clay's descendants has ever seen a copy of the book. A search of the local libraries, Transylvania College, and the University of Kentucky holdings has turned up empty too.

I got the same response--along with a weary chuckle--when I asked the Kentucky State Historical Society about such a manual. People have been asking about it for decades and not a trace of it has been found. The main source of the rumor about the manual would seem to be a lecture about Clay given by William Townsend to the Chicago Civil War Roundtable in 1952, published as a pamphlet called "The Lion of White Hall." Townsend later wrote a book-length biography of Clay with the same title.

During my research into this rumor, I was intrigued to come across a clue in the Publisher’s Weekly of February 13, 1886, p. 258. A publisher named Jansen, McClurg & Co., of Chicago placed the following ad in the section titled "Books Wanted": "The Use of the Bowie Knife. Probably pub. in Ark."

Could this refer to the fabled Clay manual or was the publisher pursuing a chimera? I can find no other mention of "The Use of the Bowie Knife."

Here is another reference to such a manual, from John W. Forney's Anecdotes of Public Men, Volume 1 (1873), though in this case what is referred to sounds like it describes the knife's use in dueling, rather than its general use:

I have heard it stated that a formal duel with knives lately took place in New Orleans; and it is alleged that two of the Southern members of the present House engaged in a fearful conflict with the ordinary bowie knife. Those who know say that there is a manual by which the use of the bowie-knife is regulated in prearranged fights; and it is notorious that many of those who carry this instrument of death use it with as much dexterity as the Indian uses the bow or the scalping-knife.

Profile of Cassius Marcellus Clay

I would rank Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810-1903) foremost among bowie-knife fighters.  Clay was in a number of fights in the course of his long life, involving everything from fists to pistols. He fought three times with the bowie knife, his weapon of choice. Two of Clay's knife fights arose from his stance as an Emancipationist, an anti-slavery position he distinguished from Abolitionism. Abolitionists believed in the immediate freeing of slaves, while Clay felt it must be a gradual and controlled process. This distinction did not placate his opponents much.

The following is an obituary of Clay published shortly after his death:

Reminiscences of General Clay

It was the peculiarity of the late Cassius M. Clay's career that he was a fire-eating antislavery man and a Southerner. He used as haughty and threatening a manner in attacking slavery and slaveholders as the most violent had employed in its defence. In one of his earliest outbursts he made it plain to his opponents that an odd and formidable enemy had appeared among them.

“This is not the first time I have heard the cry of abolition. It has no terrors to my ear. Bowie- knives, and belted pistols. and the imprecations of maddened mobs have not driven me from my country's cause. My blood, and the blood of all whom I hold most dear, is ready when she calls for the sacrifice.”

Clay suited his actions to his words. He constantly wore a bowie-knife in his belt, and when he made a political speech there was always a brace of pistols in the mouth of his carpet bag, which he ostentatiously placed at his feet. He went prepared to let his opponents make their choice of arguments. Though he adopted the Northern view of slavery, he strictly adhered to the Kentucky view of “honor” and good-breeding. He made it a rule of his daily life to argue with the reasonable, to refer his differences with “gentlemen” to the great unknown god of duels, and to stab every cutthroat and kick every coward that crossed his path.

Clay desired an audience larger than any that could come within the hearing of his deep voice, and therefore he established at Lexington, in 1845, an antislavery weekly journal which he called The True American. Its tone was very violent and personal; but it was doubtless pleasing to his antislavery readers in Kentucky. He continued his attacks upon slavery and its champions in Kentucky as if the power were all on his side. His physical and moral courage were marvellous. As in every case where an anti-slavery agitator raised his head in the South, “a number of the respectable citizens” assembled; it was resolved that The True American was “dangerous to the peace of our community, and the safety of our homes and families.”

The usual committee was sent to demand the discontinuance of his paper. Clay likened the “respectable citizens” to “assassins, pirates, and highway-robbers.” To their demands he replied: “I treat them with the burning contempt of a brave heart and a loyal citizen.… Your advice with regard to my personal safety is worthy of the source whence it emanated, and meets with the same contempt from me which the purposes of your mission excite. Go tell your secret conclave of cowardly assassins that C. M. Clay knows his rights and how to defend them.”

Although he had previously made elaborate preparations to protect his office against violence, he had not sufficiently recovered from a serious illness to defend his rights. His press was seized and sent away to Cincinnati. This was a serious check to Clay's growing power. Nevertheless, he continued the publication of his paper in Cincinnati, and even edited it in Lexington, as before. Clay's fearless independence of party shows that he was no mere self-seeker. History will not go wrong in honoring him as the fighting Garrison of the South.

 The last sentence compares Clay reference to William Lloyd Garrison, a prominent abolitionist in Boston and publisher of the anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator.  The Liberator constantly inveighed against what it called the "bowie-knife culture" of the South, though the bowie knife played a role in hands of the anti-slavery movement, just as it did in the hands of those who supported "the peculiar institution."