Cassius Marcellus Clay, born October 19, 1810, was a public figure, politician, newspaper editor, and ambassador to Russia who, though born into a slave-owning family, spent his life advocating emancipation and opposing the injustice of slavery. His political life shifted through the Whig, Free-Soiler, Republican, Democrat, and again Republican parties; he served as a state representative, was once considered for the 1860 vice-presidential nomination, raised troops to protect the White House during the Civil War, and served as a captain in the Army during the Mexican-American War. In 1845 he founded the anti-slavery newspaper The True American, whose four-page editions provoked heated debate, threats, and, within two and a half months, a committee of sixty that obtained a court order to remove his press; he later sued and recovered damages for violation of his freedom of speech rights. Clay argued chiefly for emancipation through legal, gradual means rather than violent abolition, and after his father's death he freed all of his personally owned slaves. He was also a friend of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln's family, having lived briefly with Robert S. Todd's family while a student at Transylvania University; after Lincoln became president, he appointed Clay minister to Russia at the court of Czar Alexander II, and before regular troops arrived in Washington, Clay organized the Clay Battalion to protect the Capitol and White House. His wife, Mary Jane Warfield, born January 20, 1815, was the daughter of Dr. Elisha Warfield; she married Clay in 1833, and they had ten children during forty-five years of marriage before divorcing in 1878 amid strains caused by his years abroad, finances, and rumors. The family home near Richmond, Kentucky, began as Clermont, a brick Georgian house built in 1798 by Clay's father, General Green Clay, and later expanded with a kitchen wing; while Cassius served in Russia, Mary Jane oversaw a seven-year transformation that incorporated the original seven-room house into a forty-four-room Italianate mansion with Corinthian columns, a grand drawing room, central heating, indoor plumbing, and a rainwater cistern, after which it was renamed White Hall. General Green Clay had been among the most prominent slaveholders west of the Appalachians, and at his death in 1828 he owned 2,200 acres around Clermont and 102 slaves whose labor supported the estate; surviving associated structures include the stone kitchen/loom house and ice house, while traces of roads, paths, and possible building foundations identified through drought evidence and aerial infrared photography suggest further archaeological study may reveal more about the property's former layout.