William Montgomery Meigs was an American lawyer and historian.
Background
William Montgomery Meigs was one of the eight children of Dr. John Forsyth Meigs and Ann Wilcocks (Ingersoll) Meigs. Arthur Vincent Meigs was his brother; their progenitors included Chief Justice Benjamin Chew of Pennsylvania, Professor Josiah Meigs of Yale and the University of Georgia, and Charles Jared Ingersoll, historian, playwright, and member of Congress. After the death of their mother, the children were cared for in part by their paternal grandmother, while their grandfather, Charles Delucena Meigs, taught them the family history and the "duty incumbent upon them to promote its honorableness. "
Education
William attended John W. Faires's Classical Institute (1862 - 68) and the University of Pennsylvania (A. B. , 1872; A. M. and M. D. , 1875), read law in the office of George W. Biddle.
Career
In 1879 William was admitted to the Philadelphia bar. Unhappily, after this preparation for several sorts of useful citizenship, he remained handicapped by persistent ill health; but by adjusting his activities to his limitations he achieved a life of singular unity. Selecting two fields of historical interest, he explored them in parallel lines thenceforward: legal problems of the relationship between constitutions and courts; biographical problems of certain men whose lives spanned the septennial of 1780-1850. American legal origins and practice, concerning the powers of federal and state courts, were the objects of careful study, which he summarized in numerous articles contributed to the Southern Law Review, American Law Review, American Law Register, and Constitutional Review. When federal courts were called upon to determine questions arising from state laws, Meigs concluded, they should, generally, follow the laws of the states and the decisions of state courts thereon. But the power of supreme courts to declare laws unconstitutional and to refuse to enforce them was sound and eminently beneficial, if not abused. Contrary arguments, that this power was in itself "a great usurpation, " aroused his amazement. He edited Brinton Coxe's Essay on Judicial Power and Unconstitutional Legislation (1893); and produced his own topical summary of the debates waged in the Constitutional Convention and the action finally taken in The Growth of the Constitution in the Federal Convention of 1787. In biography, the semi-invalid found "an occupation that could be taken up or dropped at will. " In the course of his travels in search of health he searched for distant source materials. Sick or well, he kept to the rigorous standards of his first book in this field, Life of Josiah Meigs (1887). "I have made every effort, " he wrote in the preface, "to be accurate and to avoid writing a sentence which would not be easily capable of proof while not hesitating at the same time to speak in plain language". He then turned to a study of "Pennsylvania Politics Early in this Century, " published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, December 1893. Next, another ancestral biography, The Life of Charles Jared Ingersoll (1897), developed the thesis that the men who agitated against slavery, with disregard for the Union, were not necessarily right. Thereafter for some time Meigs concentrated his efforts upon The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (1904), producing an able and scholarly biography of a character in whom he had long been interested. Years of industrious examination of sources next were devoted to The Life of John Caldwell Calhoun, a work accepted by J. S. Bassett as "the long-desired complete and impartial life of the Great Nullifier". Despite his frail health he lived to a ripe age, dying four months after the completion of his seventy-seventh year.
Personality
Although W. E. Dodd thought that it had certain defects as history, he commended it as biography unsurpassed for thoroughness of research.