James Guthrie

and his ancestor James Guthrie was a Scottish clergyman executed in 1661 after the Restoration of King Charles I (although the Scottish parliament in 1690 posthumously reversed the bill of attainder that led to his execution).

Adam Guthrie moved from Virginia across the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky and married Hannah Polk in 1788.

They had three sons and five daughters who survived to adulthood.

James Guthrie (December 5, 1792 – March 13, 1869) was an American lawyer, plantation owner, railroad president and Democratic Party politician in Kentucky.

James Guthrie was born on December 5, 1792, in Bardstown, Nelson County, Kentucky, to General Adam Guthrie (1762–1826) and his wife, the Pennsylvania-born Hannah Polk (1765–1842).

Though his grandparents emigrated from Ireland, Guthrie was of Scottish descent.

Having fought Native peoples until they left the area after the American Revolutionary War, the senior Guthrie developed a large plantation in Nelson County, and twice won election to the Kentucky General Assembly (serving from 1800 to 1805, and again in 1808).

James Guthrie received some of his early education in a log schoolhouse.

During his father's military campaigns, Guthrie studied at McAllister's Military Academy in Bardstown.

In 1812, young James Guthrie took a job on a flatboat transporting goods (and slaves) down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, Louisiana.

After three such trips, he decided to change careers, and began to study law under Judge John Rowan, along with Ben Hardin and Charles A. Wickliffe.

Admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1817, Guthrie began his private legal practice in Bardstown.

In 1820, Governor John Adair appointed Guthrie as Commonwealth's Attorney for Jefferson County, Kentucky, whereupon Guthrie relocated to what was then the town of Louisville.

In 1821, Guthrie married Eliza Churchill Prather.

In 1824, he served on a committee which sought to have Louisville recognized by the state legislature as a city (the state's first).

The effort failed, but Guthrie was elected to the town's board of trustees, and later became its chair.

The following year, Guthrie became a director of the newly formed Louisville and Portland Canal Company.

He helped secure federal funding for a bypass around the Falls of the Ohio.

Jefferson County voters elected Guthrie, who ran as a Democrat, to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1827.

In his first year, he chaired the Internal Improvements Committee.

In this capacity, he promoted construction of a number of roads and canals, as well as a railroad connecting Louisville to Frankfort.

During his service in the House, Guthrie came to chair the Committee on the Courts of Justice.

In 1828, Guthrie mustered enough support to secure city status for Louisville.

He was elected to the new city council, and quickly became chair of its most powerful committee, the finance committee.

However, although Kentucky's long-time Senator Henry Clay supported such internal improvements, his political opponent Andrew Jackson when elected president, cut off these funds shortly after taking office in 1829.

Guthrie then secured private funds and the canal was completed in late 1830.

Within a few years, however, steamboats became too wide for the canal, and their increasingly high smokestacks interfedered with bridges, so it became more an impediment than an aid.

Guthrie also served in the House (a part-time position) until 1831, when he was elected to the Kentucky Senate.

Fellow legislators twice chose him President Pro Tempore.

He served on the Finance and Education Committees.

In 1834, Guthrie helped found the State Bank of Kentucky, and served as one of its directors.

The couple had three daughters—Mary Elizabeth, Ann Augusta, and Sarah Julia—before Eliza Prather Guthrie died in 1836.

Sarah Julia Guthrie married chemist J. Lawrence Smith, after whom the J. Lawrence Smith Medal is named.

Guthrie also was a director of the Louisville and Portland Canal Company, the first president of the University of Louisville, and presided over the Kentucky Constitutional Convention of 1849 (which explicitly ratified slavery in the state until its abolition after the Civil War).

During the Civil War, Guthrie resisted federal pressure to nationalize the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, but allowed the Union to use it to move troops and supplies.

After serving, part-time, in both houses of the Kentucky legislature as well as Louisville's City Council before the American Civil War (and failing to win his party's nomination in the presidential election of 1860), Guthrie became one of Kentucky's United States senators in 1865 (until resigning for health reasons in 1868 shortly before his death).

Guthrie strongly opposed proposals for Kentucky to secede from the United States and attended the Peace Conference of 1861.

Although he sided with the Union during the Civil War, he declined President Abraham Lincoln's offer to become the Secretary of War.

As one of Kentucky's senators after the war, Guthrie supported President Andrew Johnson and opposed Congressional Reconstruction.

He served as the 21st United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, and then became president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.