Background
James Williams was born on July 1, 1796, in Grainger County, Tennessee, United States. He was the son of Ethelred and Mary Copeland Williams and a grandson of James and Elizabeth Williams. Little is known of his early life.
https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Slavery-Old-World-Presidential/dp/1371036543/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1581403452&sr=1-1
1861
ambassador Diplomat journalist
James Williams was born on July 1, 1796, in Grainger County, Tennessee, United States. He was the son of Ethelred and Mary Copeland Williams and a grandson of James and Elizabeth Williams. Little is known of his early life.
Details of Williams's early career are obscure, but he apparently had a military experience that brought him the title of captain.
In 1841 he founded the Knoxville Post, which he edited for some years, developing a facile pen.
In 1843 James gained election to the Tennessee House of Representatives. For after his short career as a legislator he and his brother William organized a Navigation Society of which he was president, and he soon became an active promoter of railroads. While engaged in these enterprises he founded the Deaf and Dumb Asylum of Knoxville. He eventually moved to Nashville, where he continued along with his business interests his interest in public affairs.
In recognition of his merit as well as of his political importance to the party, President Buchanan appointed him to minister to Turkey in 1858. In this capacity, he urged upon the state department that consular jurisdiction, which, by agreement with Turkey, was already exercised over criminal cases involving Americans, be extended to include all civil cases as well, and that the right of appeal to the American minister from the consular courts be established in cases involving over fifty dollars or imprisonment.
William James also traveled through Syria, Egypt, and Palestine on behalf of the American missionaries in these countries and was eventually able to obtain local concessions looking toward their protection. When Lincoln was elected in 1860 Williams resigned and hastened home in the hope of aiding in some way the settlement of the sectional quarrel so as to prevent war.
When the war began, nevertheless, James returned to Europe, where he acted as Confederate propagandist and minister at large. In London he gave much aid to Henry Hotze, Confederate propagandist chief and editor of the Confederate organ, The Index; indeed, Williams presented the history of the sectional struggle and explained the slavery question better than any other Southern representative abroad. His articles in the Times, the Standard, and the Index had no unimportant part in swinging middle and upper-class England to the side of the South. Some of his essays concerning slavery were gathered into a volume published in Nashville in 1861 under the title "Letters on Slavery from the Old World;" after considerable enlargement, the book was republished in London as "The South Vindicated." Under the clever management of Henry Hotze, it was translated into German and circulated among the German people.
In 1863 Williams published "The Rise and Fall of the Model Republic." While laboring in the effort to educate European public opinion, he was in close touch with the Confederate diplomats; and finally, when French intervention in Mexico developed into French conquest with the prospect of Maximilian as puppet emperor, it was Williams who visited Maximilian at Miramar and persuaded him that it would be to his advantage to ally himself with the Confederacy or at least to give it recognition. Williams not only kept John Slidell and James M. Mason posted, but carried on a secret and perhaps more detailed correspondence with President Jefferson Davis concerning the situation. Had not Napoleon III silenced the royal dupe, Maximilian would probably have recognized the independence of the Confederacy.
After the war, Williams remained in Germany with his wife. Like Slidell, he died in Europe (at Gratz, Austria) and was buried there.
Williams had been a Whig, but the anti-slavery trend of his party in the North and its final absorption into the Republican party caused him in the late fifties to ally himself with the Democrats.
William was evidently a man of great energy and initiative.
James was married to Lucy Jane Graham of Tennessee. They had two daughters and a son.