Background
Nathaniel A. Ware was born according to some accounts in Massachusetts and according to others in South Carolina, where as a young man he taught school and practised law. The date of his birth is also variously given as 1780 and 1789.
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Nathaniel A. Ware was born according to some accounts in Massachusetts and according to others in South Carolina, where as a young man he taught school and practised law. The date of his birth is also variously given as 1780 and 1789.
About 1815 he removed to Natchez, Miss. Ware was a major of militia and made money in land speculation. He was the last secretary of the Territory of Mississippi, being appointed June 7, 1815, and serving until October 1817, when the first governor of the state took office. From April 1815 to May 1816, in the absence of the territorial governor, Ware was acting governor. He was the first to sign an address to the cotton planters, merchants, and bankers of the South in 1838, proposing a scheme for paper money based upon cotton, the cotton to be marketed through an agreement with English cotton manufacturers and the Bank of England. The banks had suspended specie payments, and the masses of notes in circulation were rapidly depreciating. In response to the address, a convention was held in Macon in 1839, but the scheme of cotton notes, like many other similar ones, came to nothing. Ware lived at different times in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Galveston. Ware had doubtless come to know Henry C. Carey in Philadelphia; at any rate the works of this leader of the American optimistic school are often echoed in Ware's work. From residence in the North and from his acquaintance with the natural sciences, Ware was much more alert to opportunities for balanced economic development than were other writers in the South. For him there was no rule except public expediency, and governed by this he moved on to the protectionist position, a course almost unique in a Mississippian of that period. The Malthusian principle of population, he thought, pointed to an undoubted tendency of the birth rate to outrun the means of subsistence, but by no means defined a limit of economic progress. Scientific agriculture, as proved by many instances which he cited, would indefinitely postpone the period of starvation. The South at the time he wrote was more and more confining itself to staple agriculture, but Ware explained the virtues of a balanced economy, industry and commerce being joined to tillage of the soil. He was a philosopher of the school of Voltaire, a fine scholar, with a pungent, acrid wit and cold sarcasm . " He died near Galveston, Tex. , of yellow fever.
Ware is best remembered for his Notes on Political Economy, as Applicable to the United States (1844), signed "A Southern Planter. " The title of the volume suggests the conviction of the nationalist American writers that the dogmas of the classical school of Europe did not suit the economic situation of a new continent with a rapidly increasing population. He grasped, more firmly than some others of his time, the fact that an improved standard of living would in itself lead to a reduced rate of population growth, pride becoming a grateful substitute for poverty in preventing Malthus' forebodings from being realized.
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He is described as "a handsome man his complexion pure and fair as a young girl's, his cheeks freshly colored, his brow white as a lily - a very venerable-looking man, with long, thin, white locks falling on his neck. He was "full of eccentricities. His domestic trials rendered him bitter and outwardly morose, even to his friends.
In Natchez, Miss. he married Sarah (Percy) Ellis, daughter of Capt. Charles Percy, of the British navy, an early settler in Louisiana. His two daughters, born in Mississippi, Catherine Ann Warfield and Eleanor Percy Ware Lee, wrote poems and novels.
