William Elliott Simms was an American politician, who represented Kentucky in the United States House of Representatives. He also served as a commissioner for the Confederate government of Kentucky during the American Civil War.
Background
William Elliott Simms was born on January 2, 1822, near Cynthiana, Harrison County, Kentucky. His parents were William Marmaduke Simms, born in Henry County, Virginia, who emigrated to Kentucky in 1809, fighting in the War of 1812 under the command of William Henry Harrison, and Julia Shropshire Simms, a daughter of James Shropshire, a Kentucky pioneer. He had one brother, Edward, who died in 1840. His father died in 1844, and his mother, in her twenty-first year. The family had moved in 1828 to Bourbon County, with which Simms was thereafter identified.
Education
William received a scanty education in the county schools, and after his father's death began reading law in Lexington in the office of Judge Aaron K. Wooley. In 1845, he entered the law department of Transylvania University, and the next year he completed his course of study with distinction.
William Elliott Simms had scarcely begun the practice of his profession in Paris, the county seat of Bourbon, before the war with Mexico broke out. Raising a company of the 3rd Kentucky Regiment of Infantry and becoming its captain, he served in Mexico under General Winfield Scott, and at the end of the war brought back at his own expense the bodies of his comrades who had fallen.
As was true of many other veterans of this war, he capitalized on politics in his military career. In 1849, he was elected as a Democrat to the Kentucky House of Representatives, where he served one term, and then returned to his law practice in Paris.
In 1857 Simms began editing the Kentucky State Flag, largely to promote the election to Congress of James B. Clay. Two years later he was nominated by the Democrats to succeed Clay, in the famous Ashland district, and after a heated campaign, he succeeded in defeating John Marshall Harlan by sixty votes.
In this campaign, he became embroiled with Garret Davis, who challenged him to a duel, but mutual friends were able to prevent their meeting. In the Thirty-sixth Congress Simms took an active part in the bitter sectional debate, showing unusual ability as an orator, both in the selection of effective words and phrases and in delivery.
On Christmas Day, 1860, William Simms issued a message to the citizens of his district, To the People of the Eighth Congressional District of Kentucky, advising Kentucky to be ready to join the South if coercion should be used against any Southern state.
On February 9, 1861, after the Southern Confederacy had been formed, he delivered a powerful attack against the Republican party, in which he charged it with being the author of all the woes which were besetting the country. Apparently his Southern sympathies were too much for the Ashland district, for he was defeated for reelection by John J. Crittenden.
Being unable longer to remain neutral, Simms joined, in September 1861, the Confederate forces of Humphrey Marshall, 1812-1872, and as a colonel fought through eastern Kentucky and western Virginia. In November he was selected by the Confederate government of Kentucky to be one of the three commissioners to treat with the Confederacy for the admission of the state, and upon its entry into the Confederacy, he was elected to the Confederate Senate, where he served until the end of the war.
At the close of hostilities, William Simms fled to Canada and there remained a year before returning to Kentucky. Laboring under political disabilities, which were not removed until about three years before his death, he henceforth eschewed politics and devoted himself to agriculture.
Achievements
William Simms was known as a Confederate senator from Kentucky, serving throughout the war years, and the Lieutenant Colonel of the 1st Battalion Kentucky Cavalry.
He became one of the wealthiest men in Bourbon County, living on his estate near Paris, which he called Mount Airy
Politics
Simms strongly opposed the election of John Sherman to the speakership, and he solemnly charged the North with a fanaticism which had already expressed itself in the Kansas struggle and in the John Brown raid and which was about to drive the South from the Union. He also opposed polygamy in Utah and spoke against sectional tariff measures which, he argued, protected the capital of the New England states but ignored labor in the South and the West.
Connections
On September 27, 1866, William married Lucy Ann Frances Blythe, a daughter of James Blythe of Madison County, and to them were born three children.
