Background
Willard Richardson was born on June 24, 1802 in Massachusetts of English and Irish stock. An adventurous youth, he traveled at sixteen to South Carolina where he settled at Sumter.
Willard Richardson was born on June 24, 1802 in Massachusetts of English and Irish stock. An adventurous youth, he traveled at sixteen to South Carolina where he settled at Sumter.
He entered South Carolina College, Columbia, as a junior in 1827 and received the degree of B. A. the next year. As an undergraduate and ever afterwards he was an unswerving disciple of John C. Calhoun and other spokesmen of the State Rights school. After teaching for several years in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he emigrated to Texas in 1837.
At Houston, capital of the Republic, he opened a school for young men. One of his most enduring friendships was formed there with Mirabeau B. Lamar, then serving as the second president of Texas. The political interests of the two were thereafter largely identical, particularly in their opposition to Gen. Sam Houston, who was far too Jacksonian to win the approval of a disciple of Calhoun.
In the summer of 1842 Richardson was invited to conduct the Houston Telegraph during an absence of the editor. The clarity, vigor, and charm of his writing attracted wide attention and led to an offer in 1843 of the editorship of the Galveston News, a journal started by practical printers only the year before. His first efforts were directed toward the annexation of Texas to the United States.
He believed that he was combatting a scheme on the part of Sam Houston to keep Texas an independent nation under an implied British protectorate; since Great Britain was opposed to negro slavery, this scheme must be defeated. In fact, as Richardson later wrote, "it was mainly for the purpose of using our efforts to prevent the success of this abolition policy of England, " in so far as Texas was concerned, that he accepted the editorship of the News. He was elated, therefore, when annexation was accomplished in 1845.
Becoming owner as well as editor in that year, Richardson built up his newspaper so that during the fifties it became the most widely circulated and influential as well as the wealthiest journal in Texas. Despite his intense concern over questions that at bottom were political, he early subordinated political issues to commercial, agricultural, and civic development.
He remorselessly campaigned against Sam Houston when that personage became identified with the American or Know-Nothing party.
He was influential in bringing about Houston's first and only defeat in Texas, that for the governorship in 1857. The enmity continued until death, Houston's farewell address in the United States Senate being in large part a denunciation of Willard Richardson. The bitterness was intensified by events leading up to the firing upon Fort Sumter, with Richardson urging secession as the only protection left to the South and with Houston stoutly standing by the Union. Only against the greatest odds was Richardson able to maintain continuous publication during the Civil War. A Federal blockade forced his removal to Houston, where he shortly afterwards suffered the destruction of his printing plant by fire. Under these handicaps the News lost first place in enterprise and circulation to its old rival, the Houston Telegraph.
It was not until the return of the News to Galveston in 1866 that Richardson, assisted by two new and younger partners, Alfred Horatio Belo and John J. Hand, was able to regain the old primacy of his journal in Texas.
Tall, spare of build, with a mop of hair that early turned gray, "Old Whitey" was the physical embodiment for many of his contemporaries of the gentleman of the old school. His grave, gentle, courteous manner belied the steel in his temperament, however, as his achievements in a new country proved. "Prudent, persevering, cool and indomitable, " it was written by an associate at the time of his death, "he was never caught by surprise or unnerved by adversity. "
In 1849 Richardson married Louisa Blanche Murrell of Sumter, South Carolina, by whom he had one child, a daughter.