Background
William Porcher was born on July 4, 1822, in Walterboro, Colleton District, South Carolina, United States. He was the son of James Saunders and Sarah Bond Worley Miles.
66 George St, Charleston, SC 29424, United States
Miles graduated first in his class from the College of Charleston in 1842.
66 George St, Charleston, SC 29424, United States
Miles graduated first in his class from the College of Charleston in 1842.
https://www.amazon.com/Delivered-Cliosophic-Charleston-Occasion-Anniversary/dp/1179701054/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=William+Porcher+Miles&qid=1579162186&sr=8-5
1841
https://www.amazon.com/Republican-government-everywhere-birthright-commencement/dp/1429722193/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?keywords=William+Porcher+Miles%3A+Champion+of+Southern+Interests.&qid=1579162172&sr=8-2-fkmr1
1852
congressman educator lawyer planter politician
William Porcher was born on July 4, 1822, in Walterboro, Colleton District, South Carolina, United States. He was the son of James Saunders and Sarah Bond Worley Miles.
William attended Willington Academy, graduated first in his class from the College of Charleston in 1842, studied law, and was admitted to the Charleston bar in 1843.
Miles gave up the law, and from 1843 to 1855, he was an assistant professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston.
During a term as mayor of Charleston from 1855 to 1857, he perfected the city’s system of drains. He was elected and served as a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from 1857 to 1860 and helped to stem the tide of the Know-Nothing movement in South Carolina. Miles resigned from Congress in December 1860 and was elected to the state secession convention.
He was a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the South Carolina secession convention and was elected a member of the Military Affairs and Printing Committees of (he provisional Confederate Congress in Montgomery. Miles favored limits on the president's term in office, advocated the inclusion of nonslaveholding states in the Confederacy, and offered amendments to the Confederate Constitution. He represented Charleston in the Confederate House from 1862 to 1865 and was chairman of the important Military Affairs Committee.
Miles was P.G.T. Beauregard’s major spokesman in Richmond, supported the anti-Bragg faction, proposed a Confederate Supreme Court, favored conscription, and desired a streamlined, reorganized army. Miles also served on the Conference and on many special committees.
He held some military duty and was a colonel on Beauregard’s staff at First Manassas. From 1865 to 1880, he lived as a country gentleman at Oakridge, Nelson County, Virginia (he had married into wealth). From 1880 to 1882, he was president of the University of South Carolina.
In 1882, he became the manager of a sugar plantation in Ascension Parish, Louisiana. One of the largest plantations in the South, it produced 20 million pounds of sugar annually. Miles also founded a sugar experiment station.
He played no role in postwar politics.
Miles' political debut was at a celebration of the Fourth of July in Charleston, where he criticized the Wilmot Proviso for attempting to exclude slavery from territory acquired in the Mexican War. "As a Southern man," he explained, "I was bound, on such an occasion, in honor and conscience, to express myself in the strongest and fullest manner." While Southerners were considering the issue as an "abstract question of a constitutional right," Northerners were neither "contending for an abstract principle," nor "influenced by a mere spirit of fanatical opposition to slavery," but rather "are deliberately, intentionally, and advisedly aiming a deadly blow at the South." According to Miles, such a blow was "intended to repress her energies - to check her development - to diminish and eventually destroy her political weight and influence in this confederacy."
Miles supported President Davis until 1864 when he accused the president of no longer wishing to defend Charleston.
Miles had for some time been concerned about the rights of southern states and their freedom to govern themselves without interference. Although Miles did not own slaves, he considered it a right under the Constitution for others to own them.
Quotations:
"They are not contending for an abstract principle - they are not influenced by a mere spirit of fanatical opposition to slavery... they are deliberately, intentionally, and advisedly aiming a deadly blow at the South. It is intended as a blow. It is intended to repress her energies - to check her development - to diminish and eventually destroy her political weight and influence in this confederacy."
"I am chary of seeing the South pass "resolutions." They accomplish nothing. In truth, have come to be regarded very much like the cry of "wolf." Let us resolve less and do more. I am sick at heart of the endless talk and bluster of the South. If we are in earnest let us act. Above all, I am weary of these eternal attempts to hold out the olive branch, when we ought to be preparing to grasp the sword."
"It is not on a question of dollars and cents that the South would dissolve the Union. The history of long weary years of unjust and unequal legislation has sufficiently proved that point. But when it shall be proved to the South not only that the scepter has forever departed from her; that she can never, concurrently with the North, rule the common country; but that she must forever occupy an inferior and subordinate position; that she can never expand, never occupy her just share of the common territory; that her institutions and civilization are at the mercy of a sectional majority which tolerates them only to the end that her people, as "hewers of wood and drawers of water", may minister to its prosperity - then, I believe, she will imitate the example of our revolutionary sires, and take her destinies into her own hands."
William was not some hothead who blindly led his people to war out of ideological fanaticism or personal ambition, but an intellectual who thought seriously about the problems facing his people and how to preserve their established inherited way of life.
Quotes from others about the person
"Like other fire-eaters, Miles found only frustration in the Confederate Congress. Before secession, he had wanted to eliminate all trade duties in a southern confederacy. Now, De Bow warned him that a sudden shift to free trade would alienate and antagonize the powerful sugar planters of the Gulf South, who had prospered under the tariff policies of the Union. Miles complained that his colleagues on congressional committees made work impossible because their habitual absences prevented a quorum, and as events began to sour in the new nation he held no higher opinion of President Davis than other fire-eaters. Late in the war, when some military officials began to discuss the efficacy of using black troops in the Confederate army, Miles was perplexed... He understood the urgent demands of the army, but eventually... that "it is not merely military, but a great social and political question, and the more I consider it the less is my judgment satisfied that it could really help our cause to put arms into the hands of our slaves." - Eric H. Walther
"And yet even the realities of defeat did not change Miles' abstract ideas. Watching how other southerners dealt with defeat greatly upset the highly principled Miles. "When we see the most ardent Secessionists and 'Fire eaters' now eagerly denying that they ever did more than 'yield their convictions to the voice of their State,'" and call secession a heresy and slavery a curse, Miles concluded, "it is plain that Politics must be more a trade and less a pursuit for an honorable man than it ever was before." For any secessionist to return to public office in a reconstructed Union, Miles believed, entailed a forfeiture of self-respect, consistency, and honor. For himself and other secessionists, he said, politics "for a time cannot be a path which any high-toned and sensitive - not to say honest and conscientious - can possibly tread." - Eric H. Walther
In 1863, William married Betty Bevine, the daughter of a Virginia and Louisiana planter. They had five children.
1835-1874
unknown-1909
1864-1946
1867-1936
1868-1943
1870-1922
Miles befriended the future editor James De Bow in Charleston College.
