William Porcher Miles

William Porcher Miles

William Porcher Miles (born July 4, 1822 in Charleston , South Carolina , †  May 11, 1899 in Burnside , Louisiana ) was an American politician who represented the state of South Carolina in the US House of Representatives and the Confederate Congress .

Career

William Porcher Miles was born on July 4, 1822 in Charleston, the second of five sons in the family. He was homeschooled with his brothers until 1836 and then transferred to the Willington School in Charleston. From 1838 he attended Charleston College , which he left in 1842 with a graduation with honors. He also studied law , was admitted to the bar, and then practiced in Charleston.

In 1855 he was voluntarily as a nurse in Norfolk ( Virginia ), as there is a yellow fever epidemic had broken out. It was lauded in Charleston, leading to his being proposed for election as mayor of the Southern Rights Party without his knowledge . He returned two days before the election, won the election and stayed in this office from November 9, 1855 to 1857. At the same time he was elected as a Democrat in the 35th and 36th  US Congresses , where he was active from March 4, 1857 until his resignation in December 1860. Until the end of his two-year term as mayor, he held both offices at the same time. In Washington he met Muscoe Russell Hunter Garnett and Laurence M. Keitt ; he was one of the advocates of slavery and supported the secession of the southern states.

At the South Carolina Convention of Secession, Miles chaired the Committee on Foreign Relations and signed the Ordinance of Secession . Miles took the constituency Charleston as a deputy in the provisional Konföderiertenkongress in February 1861 in Montgomery ( Alabama ) and participated in the drafting of the new constitution. He chaired the flag design and military affairs committee. Afterwards he was also a member of the first and second Confederate Congresses , to which he belonged from February 1862 to March 1864. He was also briefly Colonel in the staff of General Beauregard in 1861 during the Civil War . In 1863 he married Betty Bierne, the daughter of a wealthy planter.

After the war he initially continued to live in Charleston, but in 1867 he moved from the heavily destroyed city to the Oak Ridge plantation in Nelson County in Virginia, which his father-in-law had acquired . After his wife's death in 1874, he returned to South Carolina in 1880 and was President of the University of South Carolina at Columbia from 1880 to 1882 .

From 1882 he managed the Houmas plantation inherited from his father-in-law , now Burnside , in Ascension Parish in Louisiana. He was one of the largest landowners in the state, most recently he owned seven plantations with a total annual sugar production of 9,000 tons. He served in the Sugar Manufacturers Association, co-founded a sugar research institute and the weekly newspaper The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer , which appeared in New Orleans . Miles continued to be politically active, but no longer wanted to hold an election. He campaigned against a state lottery, a sugar tariff, and other measures taken by the Republican government. William Miles died on May 11, 1899 at his estate Houmas House in Burnside and was in the cemetery of Union ( West Virginia buried).

Biographies

• Coski, John M. The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-674-01722-6 .
• Daniel, Ruth McCaskill. William Porcher Miles: Champion of Southern Interests. MA thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1943.
• Miles, William Porcher. The annual address delivered before the Cliosophic Society, March 29, 1847. Charleston: TW Haynes, 1847.
• ———. How to Educate Our Young Lawyers. Address to the law class of the University of Maryland. Columbia, SC: The Presbyterian Publishing House, 1882.
• ———. Oration delivered before the Fourth of July Association. By Wm. Porcher Miles on the Fourth of July 1849. Charleston: James S. Burges, 1849.
• Smith, Clarence McKittrick, Jr. William Porcher Miles, Progressive Mayor of Charleston, 1855-1857. Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association 12 (1942): 30-39.
• Walther, Eric. H. "Abstractions: William Porcher Miles." In The Fire-Eaters , pp. 270-96. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Web links

• William Porcher Miles in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Inventory of the William Porcher Miles Papers, 1784-1906 in the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill