Representative Richard Hickman Menefee

Richard Hickman Menefee (December 4, 1809 – February 21, 1841) was a U.S. Representative from Kentucky and a rising Whig statesman widely regarded as a potential successor to Henry Clay. Celebrated for his eloquence and debating skill, he was popularly dubbed “the young Patrick Henry of the West.” His promising national career was cut short by his death at age thirty-one, just days after his election to the United States Senate.

Menefee was born on December 4, 1809, in Owingsville, Bath County, Kentucky, the third of five sons of Richard and Mary (Longsdale) Menefee. His father, an Irish potter who had immigrated to Kentucky from Virginia in the 1790s, became one of the founders of Owingsville despite having only a limited formal education. The elder Menefee served multiple terms in the Kentucky House of Representatives and one term in the Kentucky Senate. Menefee’s birth occurred while his father was in Frankfort attending a session of the General Assembly. At his baptism, his mother initially named him Henry Clay Menefee in honor of the prominent Kentucky statesman, but upon returning from legislative duties, his father changed the name to Richard Hickman Menefee in tribute to his colleague in the state senate, Richard Hickman. Menefee’s father died in 1815, and in 1819 his mother married Colonel George Lansdown, proprietor of a spa in Bath County.

Menefee’s early education was meager and largely overseen by his mother until he was about twelve years old. He then enrolled at Walker Bourne’s preparatory school in Bath County, where he was a classmate of future congressmen Henry S. Lane and John Jameson. Family financial and domestic difficulties forced him to withdraw from school after two years to help support the household. He worked in a tavern in Owingsville and engaged in farm labor during the summers, continuing his studies whenever possible. By age fifteen he had become a teacher. A dispute with his stepfather led him to leave home in his mid-teens; he relocated to Mount Sterling, Kentucky, where he supported himself by teaching and other work while pursuing further education.

At eighteen, Menefee entered Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, joining the junior class. Although the college’s regulations prohibited awarding degrees to underage candidates, President Horace Holley granted Menefee an exception, and he graduated with his class. He then read law under Judge James Trimble and returned to Mount Sterling, where he was admitted to the bar in 1830 and opened a law practice in 1831. On November 15, 1831, Governor Thomas Metcalfe appointed him Commonwealth’s Attorney for Kentucky’s eleventh judicial district, succeeding his former law tutor, Trimble. While holding that office, Menefee furthered his legal education: in October 1831 he enrolled in the law department of Transylvania University and received a formal law degree on March 3, 1832. Among his classmates was George W. Johnson, later the provisional Confederate governor of Kentucky during the Civil War. On August 14, 1832, Menefee married Sarah Bell Jouett, daughter of noted Kentucky portrait painter Matthew Harris Jouett; the couple had three children—Alexander, who died in infancy, and two surviving children, Richard and Mary.

Menefee’s political career began in state office. In 1832 he was elected as a Whig to represent Montgomery County in the Kentucky House of Representatives, having resigned his post as Commonwealth’s Attorney in 1836 to seek legislative office. During the campaign, Governor James Turner Morehead called for one thousand mounted soldiers for service in the Second Seminole War. A company was raised in Montgomery County and chose Menefee as captain, but because the quota was filled before his company reported, his men were turned away and he returned to his campaign, ultimately winning election. In the Kentucky House he was appointed to the Committee on Ways and Means. The first bill he introduced authorized construction of the first turnpike in Bath County and placed it under the control of the Owingsville and Big Sandy Road Company; this measure was signed into law by Governor James Clark on February 16, 1832. His most notable legislative effort in Frankfort was his powerful speech opposing repeal of an 1833 law that prohibited the importation of slaves into Kentucky, a speech that fellow representative Thomas F. Marshall later described as “the master effort of his mind that winter.”

In April 1837, Menefee announced his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives, challenging incumbent Democrat Richard French. Running as a Whig, he defeated French by a margin of 234 votes and entered the Twenty-fifth Congress (March 4, 1837 – March 3, 1839) as its youngest member. His oratorical gifts quickly attracted attention, and contemporaries, as later recorded in the 1898 school text Youth’s History of Kentucky, referred to him as “the young Patrick Henry of the West.” In Congress he served on the Committee on Expenditures on Public Buildings and the Committee on Patents. He opposed several key measures of President Martin Van Buren’s administration, including a proposal to halt the distribution of the federal budget surplus to the states and a bill authorizing the printing of an additional $10 million in currency—approximately $321 million in 2024 dollars—though both measures ultimately passed over his objections.

Menefee’s most famous speech in the House concerned the Caroline affair, an 1837–1838 diplomatic crisis with Great Britain arising from American support for Canadian rebels led by William Lyon Mackenzie. After Anglo-Canadian forces crossed into U.S. territory, seized the American steamer Caroline, set it ablaze, and sent it over Niagara Falls, public outrage in the United States was intense. In his address, Menefee urged restraint and cautioned against inflaming anti-British sentiment, declaring that he saw no great principle at stake that justified war. He also took part in other notable debates, including a controversy on February 1, 1838, over the election of Mississippi representatives Seargent Smith Prentiss and Thomas J. Word, in which he contested arguments by James M. Mason of Virginia and Hugh S. Legaré of South Carolina that the Mississippians had not been properly elected; Prentiss and Word ultimately retained their seats.

Menefee’s congressional reputation was clouded by his involvement in the 1838 duel between Representatives William J. Graves of Kentucky and Jonathan Cilley of Maine. Menefee and fellow Kentuckian John J. Crittenden served as Graves’s seconds in the affair, which ended with Cilley’s death. The House of Representatives censured Graves, and the participation of Menefee and Crittenden damaged their public standing. In the aftermath, Congress enacted anti-dueling legislation. Menefee delivered his longest congressional speech in opposition to aspects of this measure, speaking in three parts on April 23, 28, and 30, 1838. Disillusioned and perhaps mindful of the toll of political life, he declined to seek re-election after his single term and voluntarily retired from national office, returning to his legal practice in Kentucky.

After leaving Congress, Menefee settled in Lexington and resumed an active law practice, quickly gaining a reputation as one of the leading advocates at the Kentucky bar. On a return visit to Owingsville, he successfully defended a man charged with murder in a dispute over rights to an ore bed, opposing his former legislative colleague Thomas F. Marshall; his biographer John Wilson Townsend later described this as the second greatest case of Menefee’s career. Townsend regarded as his greatest case the 1840 litigation over the will of James Rogers. In that matter, Menefee, together with future governor James F. Robinson and Madison C. Johnson, represented the five children of Rogers’s first marriage, who sought to invalidate their father’s will on grounds that a stroke had left him of unsound mind. The will stated that Rogers had already provided $5,000 to the children of his first marriage and directed that his remaining estate be divided among his second wife and her children. Menefee and his colleagues argued against a formidable opposing team led by Henry Clay and Robert C. Wickliffe in a trial that lasted six days; the decision went against Menefee’s clients.

Menefee’s health began to fail during the Rogers litigation, and he made his last court appearance in September 1840. Despite his declining condition, his political standing within the Whig Party remained high. In 1841, Cassius M. Clay nominated him to fill the United States Senate seat vacated by the resignation of John J. Crittenden. Menefee was elected to the Senate by the Kentucky legislature, but he died five days later, on February 21, 1841, before he could take the oath of office or assume his seat. He was commonly reported to have died of tuberculosis, though Townsend asserted that the true cause was “consumption of the bowels.” Menefee was initially interred in a private cemetery in Fayette County. On October 28, 1893, his remains were reinterred in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky.

In the years following his death, Menefee’s contemporaries and later historians reflected on the promise of his brief career. The Transylvania Law Society invited his friend and sometime rival Thomas F. Marshall to deliver an address on Menefee’s life and character; Marshall devoted seven weeks to preparing the eulogy, which was later published as a pamphlet. Kentucky historian Lewis Collins and others opined that, had he lived, Menefee would likely have succeeded Henry Clay as the principal leader of the Whig Party. His memory is commemorated in the naming of Menifee County, Kentucky—spelled with an additional “e”—which honors him despite the inadvertent misspelling of his surname.