Background
BOYCE, William Waters was born on October 24, 1818 in Charleston, South Carolina, United States, United States. Son of Robert and Lydia (Waters) Boyce.
BOYCE, William Waters was born on October 24, 1818 in Charleston, South Carolina, United States, United States. Son of Robert and Lydia (Waters) Boyce.
Private school, law school.
He attended South Carolina College and the University of Virginia, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1839. During the 1840s, he practiced law and was a planter in Winnsboro, South Carolina. He was an Episcopalian, and he married a daughter of Dr. George Butler Pearson.
Boyce was elected as a states’ rights Democrat to the state House of Representatives in 1850 and to the U.S. House, where he served from 1853 until his resignation in 1860. He was considered a cooperationist and a moderate, but he spoke strongly in favor of secession in 1860. As a delegate to the Montgomery provisional convention, he supported Howell Cobb for president of the Confederacy.
Boyce argued in favor of a constitution identical to that of the United States, except for his resolution that would permit a state to secede from the Confederacy. In the provisional Congress, he served on the Postal Affairs and Inauguration Committees and on the committee which organized the Executive Department. He also served in both permanent Confederate Congresses where he turned against the Davis administration.
An active congressman, Boyce served on the Naval Affairs, Currency, and Ways and Means Committees, opposed conscription, and offered a deflationary currency plan in the second Congress. In 1863, he joined the peace movement, for which he was condemned in South Carolina as a submissionist. Boyce believed that the Davis government had created a military despotism.
Accordingly, he supported George McClellan for president in 1864 and advocated peace without reconstruction. For that, his political career was doomed in South Carolina. After the war he moved to Washington, D.C., and practiced law there.
Boyce never again entered public life.
"Peculiar institution" of slavery was not only expedient but also ordained by God and upheld in Holy Scripture.
Stands for preserving slavery, states' rights, and political liberty for whites. Every individual state is sovereign, even to the point of secession.