Lazarus W. Powell, Member of Pioneer Henderson Family, Inaugurated as Chief Executive in 1851
Gleaner and Journal, Sunday, January 14, 1940
Was Third Democratic Governor of State After One Unsuccessful Try.
(Editor’s Note: This is the first of a series of four biographies of Kentucky governors from Henderson County, written by County Attorney Odie Duncan at the request of Miss Susan Towles, librarian, for publication of a Works Progress Administration guide book. One will be published each Sunday until the series is complete.)
By ODIE DUNCAN
Lazarus W. Powell was born in Henderson County, on October 6, 1812. His father, Captain Lazarus W. Powell, a few years previous to 1812, had settled on a tract of land lying twelve miles south of Henderson, on the Morganfield Road, and continued to live there until he died in April, 1869, at the age of ninety-two years. The mother of this subject was the daughter of Captain James McMahon, of Henderson County, a gentleman who had served in the ranks of the Kentucky Volunteers, in the war of 1812. The subject of this sketch was the third son of his parents.
Mr. Powell availed himself of all of the educational advantages afforded in what was then the village of Henderson. He entered St. Joseph’s College at Bardstown, Kentucky, in September, 1830, and graduated from that institution in 1833. In August, a few days after his graduation, Mr. Powell entered the law office of the celebrated John Rowan, of Bardstown, Kentucky, where he studied law under this great legal light. He remained in the office of Mr. Rowan until the winter of 1834-35, when he removed to Lexington to attend a course of law lectures at Transylvania University. There were many able lawyers at Bardstown at this time, but the members of the profession at the Lexington bar were more famous. Among the resident practicing attorneys then in Lexington were Henry Clay, Robert Wickliffe, and many others.
After having attended the law session at Transylvania, Mr. Powell returned to Henderson in the spring of 1835, where he opened his office and entered upon the practice of his profession. A few months later he formed a partnership with the leading practitioner at the Henderson bar, the Hon. Archibald Dixon. His business connection with Mr. Dixon continued until the year 1839.
On November 8, 1837, Lazarus W. Powell married Miss Harriett Ann Jennings, the orphan daughter of Captain Charles Jennings. There were born to this marriage three sons, the eldest of whom was Colonel J. Henry Powell.
Governor Powell’s addresses were always forcible and sometimes eloquent, but his reputation as a lawyer did not result from his forensic powers. He depended more upon careful preparation. Because of this custom, he was always a formidable antagonist.
His Public Life
In 1836, Mr. Powell became the Democratic candidate and was elected to the office of Representative from Henderson County in the Lower House of the Kentucky Legislature. The Whig Party was the dominant party in Henderson County at the time and it was more for the purpose of keeping up their organization than with hope of success that the Democrats proposed a candidate. Mr. Powell’s Whig competitor was John G. Holloway, Esq., a very estimable and popular citizen of Henderson. While the young statesman made a close canvass of the county, Mr. Holloway, relying upon the strength of his party in the county, made little effort and was thus defeated in the election. The result was a surprise in both parties.
Mr. Powell proved himself an able and careful legislator. At the next general election he again became a candidate for the office but was defeated by his old opponent, Mr. Holloway, by a large majority. It appears that party lines by this time had become more closely drawn and that Mr. Powell’s old competitor had learned from his former experience the necessity of personal exertions regardless of the strength of the Whigs in the county.
In 1844 Mr. Powell was District Elector and canvassed his own and the neighboring districts for James K. Polk. In this canvass he was brought prominently before the people of Western Kentucky, and thus far he laid the foundation of that personal popularity which afterwards enabled him to serve his party in more important positions. Mr. Polk was elected President over Henry Clay, his opponent, but the Democrats were defeated in Kentucky.
In 1848 Mr. Powell was selected as the Democratic nominee for Governor of Kentucky and the Whig candidate was the Hon. John J. Crittenden, who was then a member of the United States Senate from Kentucky, and Senator Crittenden was undoubtedly one of the most deservedly popular men in the state. The Hon. Richard M. Johnson, of Scott County, had announced himself an Independent Democratic candidate and had already entered upon his campaign, but finally withdrew in behalf of Mr. Powell.
The Constitution—that great charter of the people’s liberties—was the text of the addresses of Mr. Powell and his associates. They were strict constructionists of this instrument. The canvass was a substantial triumph although it ended in Mr. Powell’s defeat. However, the seed had been sown from which Mr. Powell was to reap a rich harvest in the next gubernatorial contest and this campaign marked the beginning of the downfall of the Whig party in Kentucky.
In 1851, Mr. Powell was re-nominated by the Democrats and was elected the third Democratic Governor of Kentucky. This was an unusual campaign that found Mr. Powell canvassing with the Whig nominee, the Hon. Archibald Dixon, also a resident of Henderson and lifelong personal friend and the one-time law partner of the Democratic nominee. Notwithstanding their widely different political views, both candidates remained throughout the entire campaign the same intimate personal friends that they had always been. They traveled together, spoke together, put up at the same houses and had their meals at the big candidate. Also a Henderson resident. Brought into contact in the exposition of their dissimilar political views, they exhibited toward each other before the public a cordiality of demeanor that was pleasing to contemplate but rare now as it was then.
Mr. Powell, the eighteenth Governor of the Commonwealth, and the first Governor from Henderson County, was inaugurated on September 5, 1851. For twenty years before this the Whigs had entire control of the Commonwealth, and when Mr. Powell came to Frankfort to become chief executive of the Commonwealth, he had much to encounter both social and political prejudice. In that time partisan feeling ran high, but it is said that no man in the state could have been elected Governor who was more fitted for the difficult position in which Mr. Powell was placed.
For the greater part of his term, the General Assembly of the state was in a large majority Whigs, but Governor Powell got along well with the legislatures. It is a matter of recorded history that in Governor Powell’s administration there was no embezzlement of public funds, nor frauds, and that his administration was one of four years of uninterrupted confidence and quiet and happiness among the people of the Commonwealth.
In Governor Powell’s second message to the General Assembly, presented on January 3, 1854, he called attention to the fact that since the adjournment of the previous legislature, the state and nation had been called upon to mourn the death of Henry Clay, and that within a short space of time, Clay, Calhoun and Webster, three of the most noted statesmen of the Republic, had departed this life.
Governor Powell Appointed on Commission to Utah
In 1858, President Buchanan was induced to dispatch a commission to Utah, with the hope of arresting the rebellion that had broken out in that territory. The commissioners named were Governor Powell, of Kentucky, and Major Ben McCullough, of Texas. On the arrival of these gentlemen at the camp of the military expedition, they immediately issued the proclamation of the President, offering pardon to all Mormons who should submit to the Federal authority. This offer was accepted by the heads of the Mormon Church, and all trouble was arrested.
Mr. Powell Goes to the United States Senate
At the session of the General Assembly which took place in 1859, Governor Powell was elected to the Senate of the United States for the full term of six years. He entered the Senate at a time of great political excitement. A party had arisen in the country and was daily growing stronger, which had, for its main idea, the extinction of slavery as a national institution recognized in the fundamental law of the land. By the governments of several of the northern states, the fugitive slave law had been openly proclaimed a measure which required from them no obedience.
The southern states, disgusted at what they conceived to be want of faith on the part of their northern associates and seeing, from the complexion of the legislation of the country, that they would soon be powerless to protect their constitutional rights against the requirements of a constantly increasing majority in the Congress of the United States, already were contemplating secession. In both houses of the Congress fanaticism ruled one part of the people’s representatives and, with but few exceptions, passion the remainder.
Mr. Powell did not believe that slavery was the cause of the war between the states, but that the great struggle resulted from selfish politicians. In a speech on the bill giving freedom to the families of negro soldiers, delivered in the Senate on the 9th day of January, 1863, Mr. Powell remarked:
“Some call this a war for the negro, but, in my opinion, those who look upon African slavery as the cause of the war are greatly mistaken. This war was not designed by the large slave holders of the South; they did not want the war. It is not war of the negro; it is not a war of tariffs; it is not a war of any particular line of policy, but it is a war of politicians who were faithless to their constitutional obligations, and there the responsibility will be placed by the philosophical historian in all after time. If I were to describe it in a sentence, I should say that it was a war of the politicians, both North and South—a war of ambition, fanatical zealots, and they existed North as well as South. I speak of a class of politicians who are faithless to their oaths of office, and who claim to be governed by a law higher than and above the Constitution.”
Two things gained for Governor Powell national prominence. One was his mission to Utah, already mentioned in this sketch, and the other was a scheme to expel him from the Senate of the United States on the charge that he was aiding a rebellion against the Union. This charge of disloyalty was made in March, 1862, by Senator Garrett Davis, Governor Powell’s colleague from Kentucky. Davis was sent to the Senate after John C. Breckenridge had cast his lot with the South.
The hot-headed Unionist had succeeded in getting through the Kentucky Legislature a resolution whereby it was alleged that John C. Breckenridge and Governor Powell did not represent the will of the people of Kentucky and called upon them to resign from their seats in the Senate. Davis claimed that Governor Powell voted against certain bills advocated by the administration for the prosecution of the Civil War and that he thereby showed disloyalty.
The resolution from the Kentucky Legislature and the claim of Davis were presented to the Senate in bitter speeches made by the two Kentucky Senators. The effort to expel Governor Powell from the Senate failed and Mr. Powell remained in the Senate continuously during the Civil War.
When the war was over he returned to Henderson to resume his law practice. He reentered the practice of his profession with more energy than he had ever displayed except during the first years of his professional career. It is said that this was most likely done because of his desire to introduce to the practice of law his eldest son, Col. J. Henry Powell.
There were those among the Governor’s intimate friends who knew that he was in failing health, and on Wednesday of the last week in June, 1867, he appeared alive for the last time in the streets of the city of Henderson. Governor Powell died at his home in Henderson on July 3, 1867, and was buried in the Fernwood Cemetery of Henderson, Kentucky, where his remains are now interred, and by an Act of the General Assembly, approved by the Governor of Kentucky on the 9th day of March, 1868, a monument was erected at the grave, which marks the resting place of this distinguished Hendersonian.
Among Governor Powell’s survivors at his death were his son, Col. J. Henry Powell, who was for many years Commonwealth’s Attorney of this Judicial District and was Mayor of the city of Henderson a short time before his death. He was a distinguished prosecutor and an eloquent speaker. Colonel Powell at his death was survived by five sons and one daughter, all of whom have departed this life except his daughter, Miss Harriett Powell, who now lives in the city of Henderson, Kentucky.
