Return Jonathan Meigs was the son of John and Parthenia Clendinen Meigs. He was born on April 14, 1801 near Winchester in Clark county, Kentucky. He was the grandson of Return Jonathan Meigs, 1740-1823, the nephew of Return Jonathan Meigs, 1764-1824, and was related by marriage to John George Jackson. After his father died in 1807 he lived part of the time with his uncle, James Lemme, in Bourbon County.
Meigs attended schools of the community, where he acquired the fundamentals of a classical education. He also studied law and was admitted to the bar in Frankfort in 1822.
For some ten years or more Meigs practised law in Athens, Tennessee. On account of popular prejudice against lawyers he was defeated in 1834 for a seat in Tennessee's constitutional convention. Soon he moved to Nashville, the capital of the state, where for a quarter of a century he was a distinguished and highly respected member of the bar. In 1838 and 1839 he was attorney-general of the state and reporter of its supreme-court decisions. In 1841 he was appointed United States attorney for the Middle Tennessee district. In 1848-50 he published a two-volume Digest of all the Decisions of the Former Superior Courts of Law and Equity, and of the Present Supreme Court of Errors and Appeals in the State of Tennessee. In 1858 he and William F. Cooper published their compilation of the Code of Tennessee, the only one legally adopted by the legislature until 1931. As a Whig he served one term in the state Senate from 1847 to 1848. In this body he sponsored a free banking bill, based upon New York's banking laws, that was defeated at this time but subsequently enacted.
He was one of the few prominent inhabitants of Middle Tennessee who remained loyal to the Union after the Civil War began. In 1861, severely censured by his neighbors for his Unionism and in danger of mob violence, he resigned the office of librarian and went to New York. When Andrew Johnson became military governor of Tennessee, he gave him legal advice regarding the government of the state. He is said to have declined election to the United States Senate in 1865 and an offer of appointment to the United States Supreme Court. In 1863 he was appointed clerk of the supreme court of the District of Columbia. He continued in the active discharge of the duties of this office until almost the day of his death at the age of ninety.
Meigs took a prominent part in the encouragement of the educational, cultural, and humanitarian development of his adopted state. He was the first president of the Tennessee society for the diffusion of knowledge, a corresponding secretary of the Tennessee historical society, a member of the Nashville board of education, a trustee of the University of Nashville and of the state school for the education of the blind, and an incorporator of the Tennessee society for the colonization of free negroes. He was a patron of public lectures, the theatre, and music.
Meigs was an advocate of public education and state and local aid to internal improvements. As early as 1831 he had supported proposals for the building of railroads to connect Tennessee with the Atlantic seaboard.
Meigs was said to have declined a position on the state's supreme court because the salary, $1, 800, was too small, but in 1856 he accepted appointment as state librarian at a salary of $500.
On November 1, 1825, Meigs married Sally Keys Love. He was survived by his five sons.
27 March 1845 - 27 March 1882
25 April 1830 - 2 April 1913
20 November 1834 - 15 April 1905
25 February 1827 - 15 November 1912
7 June 1840 - 14 November 1907
