A Man Seen But Once

About the Book

“Clay’s mission to St. Petersburg, when all the world was our foe, will always remain one of the most spectacular passages in Russian American Friendship.”

Joseph Freeman, Life Magazine, August 27, 1945.

“This man (Clay) is certainly the most wonderful ass of the age. . . It is prosperity that has developed the fearful underlying vanity that poisons his whole character.”

William H. Seward, secretary of state in President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet.

“He was a man such as the world sees but once and a character known to all.  He, more than any other man, stood for the world’s idea of a Kentuckian—bold, fearless, generous, kind, quick to avenge an insult and equally quick to forgive a wrong, an orator and a hand-to-hand fighter.”

Henry Watterson’s tribute to Clay upon his death July 22, 1903

About the Author

A journalist turned historian, Betty Boles Ellison was a newspaper reporter, travel writer, editor and media consultant to a national prize-winning newspaper before returning to the University of Kentucky in 1986 to complete a BA in American History and a MA in Kentucky history.

            While in graduate school at UK, she was a staff member and contributor to The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Mrs. Ellison edited The History of the Daniel Boone National Forest for the US Forest Service.

            Her first book, Kentucky’s Domain of Power, Greed and Corruption, consumed six years of research and detailed a century of athletic abuses at UK. One reviewer called it a “Hand grenade” of a book. In 2003, Mrs. Ellison wrote Illegal Odyssey, 200 Years of Kentucky Moonshine, which was based on her oral history project, “Moonshiners and Revenuers.”

            A Man Seen But Once, a biography of Cassius Marcellus Clay, could actually be classified as a thirty-five year project since the author first began researching the emancipationist when working with former First Lady, Beula C. Nunn, on the restoration of Clay’s home, White Hall in 1970.

            Unsolved Murders in the Bluegrass in the first in a series of book about famous homicides in Kentucky. Future plans include a book about stock car racing and a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln. Mrs. Ellison worked as a researcher for a six-hour PBS documentary on Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln. She also did research and appeared in a CBS Sports Special on the 1966 UK-Texas Western NCAA National Championship basketball game.