John William Menzies was born on April 12, 1819, in Bryan Station, Kentucky, to William Adam Menzies and Martha Elizabeth Garber. His father was a judge and farmer who owned at least twelve slaves. The family moved to Boone County, Kentucky, around 1831, and John attended common school there before enrolling at the University of Virginia in 1839. He spent the following year studying law and moral philosophy. He settled in Covington, Kentucky, in 1840 and began practicing law there in 1841.

On May 24, 1848, Menzies married Elizabeth Jane Butler, whose father was a veteran of the War of 1812. She died in July 1850 after a brief illness, and Menzies married Samuella L. Peniston on December 29, 1853. He and Samuella had at least eight children: Sally (born November 2, 1856), Lillian (born 1857), Fennell (born October 27, 1858), Anne (born 1861), Katharine (born May 23, 1864), Elizabeth (born July 29, 1867), Nelly (born October 30, 1869), and John William (born November 27, 1874).

Menzies joined the Whig Party, and in 1849 he won election to the state legislature. That February, he took part in a legislative debate over the future of slavery in Kentucky. When proslavery politicians sought to amend an 1833 law to eliminate its restriction on the importation of slaves, Menzies eloquently objected. If lawmakers amended the law, he observed, they would lose the “power to emancipate at some future day.” As “slave-property” increased in value, he argued, the state’s “pro-slavery men” would amass political power and “fasten slavery upon Kentucky, immovably, by the fundamental law.” Despite his efforts, a new state constitution overturned the restriction later that year, and Menzies lost his bid for reelection in August 1851.

When the Whig Party collapsed in the 1850s, Menzies joined the nativist Know Nothing Party. Kenyon County voters elected him to the state legislature in 1855, and he became chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He joined the Constitutional Union Party in 1860 and supported Tennessee moderate John Bell in that year’s presidential election. Menzies was a proslavery Unionist who insisted that secession would “result in injury to the institution of slavery” because it would inspire slave flight and resistance. As the Deep South seceded, Menzies joined a conservative coalition that helped keep Kentucky in the Union, and he won election to Congress as a Unionist in June 1861.

Although Menzies initially supported President Abraham Lincoln, he broke with the Republican administration over emancipation. In March 1862, Lincoln met with Border State congressmen—including Menzies—to urge them to adopt gradual emancipation. They emphatically rejected the president’s proposal. That May, Menzies and other conservative congressmen denounced sectional extremism and discussed strategies for “effectually defeating the schemes of the abolitionists and secessionists.” Then, in July, he helped publish a public letter rejecting emancipation. Although Menzies had “voted all the men and money” that Lincoln required to wage the war, he refused to accept such a “radical change of our social system.” He argued that the Constitution sanctioned and protected slavery, and that “no one is authorized to question the right [to own slaves], or to limit its enjoyment.”

Radical Republicans grew frustrated with Border State moderation and insisted that emancipation was a military necessity. Menzies, however, passionately defended his state. Kentucky’s Unionists, he observed, were “loyal to the core” and were “fighting, desperately fighting, to preserve this Government.” They hoped to preserve the “Union as it was,” intending to “stay under the Constitution, no matter who may desert it.” He viewed the “plea of necessity [as] the tyrant’s plea,” warning that—if emancipation proceeded—then the “rebels have already succeeded. Then there is no Government left.”

Although most Kentucky Unionists shared Menzies’ conservative convictions, Unconditional Unionists held the balance of power in his congressional district. In the election of 1863, Menzies lost to anti-slavery reformer Green Clay Smith, who vowed to pursue the “most vigorous prosecution of the war.” Even after his defeat, however, Menzies remained a vocal critic of Lincoln’s administration. His political rivals viewed him as a traitorous Copperhead, but Menzies declared himself a “Union Democrat”—a conservative Unionist defending the Constitution against Republicans and Confederates alike.

Menzies remained active in local politics after the war, and he denounced Reconstruction as “utterly revolutionary, rapacious, and malevolent.” The Constitution, he declared, “secure[d] the blessings of liberty to the white people,” and Radical Republicans were “overthrowing justice, insuring domestic discord, [and] providing for the common destruction.” He resumed his legal practice, and in 1873, he became a chancery court judge. He held the position until 1893. Menzies died four years later, on October 3, 1897, of arteriosclerosis in Danville, Kentucky. Newspapers eulogized him as “one of the most widely known jurists and democrats in Kentucky” and “one of the best-known of the [state’s] old school of lawyers.” He was buried in Linden Grove Cemetery in Covington.

Documents:

Charles B. Calvert and John W. Menzies, Border State Congressmen to Abraham Lincoln, July 14, 1862

John W. Menzies's Resolutions on Reconstruction, January 26, 1867