Beverly Leonidas Clarke

Birth Date

1809-02-11

Death Date

1860-03-17

Gender

Race Description

White

Entity Type

Person

Simpson County, Kentucky, attorney and politician. Chesterfield County, Virginia, native. Son of William Clarke and Pauline Hopkins Clarke. Married to Mariah Louisa Clarke in 1827. Father of Pauline Clarke Mosby, Bettie E. Clarke, Delia Clarke, and George W. Clarke. Married to Zenobia A. Turner Clarke in Davidson County, Tennessee, on April 27, 1851. Father of Thomas H. Clarke. Graduate of Lexington Law School in Fayette County, Kentucky, in 1831. Admitted to the bar in 1833. Resident of Simpson County in 1840. Owned four enslaved persons in Simpson County in 1840. Member of the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Kentucky from Simpson County from 1841 to 1843. Member of the United States House of Representatives from the Second Congressional District of Kentucky as a Democrat from 1847 to 1849. Delegate to the Kentucky Constitutional Convention in Frankfort in 1849. Attorney in Simpson County in 1850. Owned four enslaved persons in Simpson County in 1850. Unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Governor of Kentucky in 1855. U.S. Minister Resident to Guatemala and Honduras from 1858 to 1860.

Sixth Manuscript Census of the United States (1840), Population Schedules, Kentucky, Simpson County, p. 206.
Seventh Manuscript Census of the United States (1850), Population Schedules, Kentucky, Simpson County, p. 10B.
Seventh Manuscript Census of the United States (1850), Slave Schedules, Kentucky, Simpson County, p. 847.
Tennessee State Marriages, 1780-2002, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, TN, Davidson County, 1838 - 1864: Marriages 3, p. 57.
Lewis Collins and Richard H. Collins, Collins' Historical Sketches of Kentucky, vol. 2 (Covington, KY: Collins & Co., 1874), 721.
The Biographical Encyclopædia of Kentucky of the Dead and Living Men of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 (Cincinnati: J. M. Armstrong & Company, 1878), 120.
"Clarke, Beverly Leonidas," The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, vol. 2, eds. Rossiter Johnson and John Howard Brown (Boston: The Biographical Society, 1904), 130.

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