William Smith (June 26, 1840), often Judge Smith or Judge Wm. Smith in written records of his era, was an American lawyer, judge, plantation owner, and politician. He served two discontinuous terms in the United States Senate, from 1816 to 1823, and from 1826 to 1831, representing the state of South Carolina. Smith was one of the major figures of South Carolina politics during the first third of the 19th century, and formed an intense rivalry with John C. Calhoun, arguing against Calhoun's nationalist views, and advocating for states' rights. He was also a leading pro-slavery voice in the Senate. He fiercely attacked the then-feeble movement to abolish slavery in the United States, and spent his legislative career on both the state and federal levels advocating for the perpetuation of the slave trade and the expansion of legal slavery across the continent. He was also vituperative opponent of government spending on infrastructure or public development ("internal improvements"), to the point that he counterintuitively voted against the admission of Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri as new U.S. states where slavery would be legal, apparently because he thought the U.S. government was being greedy in its reserve of land for public use, in usurpation of the power of the citizen and the existing states.
Smith was awarded electoral votes for the vice presidency in two separate presidential elections. When Smith's lifelong friend Andrew Jackson became president he tried twice to persuade Smith to take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court but Smith declined on both occasions.
Smith left both the Senate and South Carolina in the 1830s, in part because Calhoun had been victorious in their power struggle. Smith bought and developed vast tracts of land in the west. His investments were well-chosen and ultimately wildly profitable in part because he was privileged with inside information. U.S. Indian Commissioner plenipotentiary Jackson had advised him to invest in the vicinity of the Tennessee River before land cession treaties had been signed with the Chickasaw and Cherokee, and Smith himself was a member of the Private Land Claims committee that oversaw real estate claims and disputes that had arisen in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase. Smith developed massive plantation complexes in Alabama and along the Red River of the South in Louisiana, as well as acquiring hundreds of slaves to plant those lands with the profitable cash crops of cotton and sugar. Once settled in Huntsville, Smith served in the Alabama state legislature until his death. When he died in 1840 he was said to be "almost a millionaire in wealth," which would be a fortune of approximately $30 million in 2023. He was long remembered for commissioning grand homes for himself in South Carolina and Alabama, including the now-demolished Calhoun House in central Huntsville, which was named not for his South Carolina rival but for his grandson-in-law and successor in grand-scale enslavement, Meredith Calhoun.
Early life and career Smith was born in either North Carolina or York County, South Carolina. A memoirist called "Septugenarian," writing in 1870, referred to the historic Tryon County, North Carolina, which included parts of present-day South Carolina, and stated "I always thought he was from Lincoln," meaning the vicinity of Lincolnton, in what is now Lincoln County, North Carolina. Lincolnton was connected to Yorkville (present-day York, South Carolina) by what was called the King's Mountain Road. Smith's granddaughter and heir, Mary Taylor Calhoun, volunteered to a researcher that "vague impression that, by a re-adjustment of the boundary lines between North and South Carolina, his birth-place, formerly in the jurisdiction of South Carolina, was thrown into North Carolina. Not much is known about Smith's early life outside of his education. According to his granddaughter, "Judge Smith's father was, at one time, a man of considerable property, but his fortune was greatly impaired by the depreciation of the continental money. He, however, was able to give his sons as good classical educations as the academies of those days afforded. Judge Smith was a good Latin and Greek scholar...His father started him in the world with only one negro, Priam, well known here as a foreman, and now living on the farm, adjacent to the town of Huntsville, which Judge Smith left to Mrs. Calhoun." He first attended a school in the neighborhood of Bullock's Creek, where he befriended classmates and fellow future national politicians Andrew Jackson and William H. Crawford.O'Neall 1859 The school at Bullock's Creek was located in the "District between Broad and Catawba Rivers," and taught by Rev. Mr. Joseph Alexander, who also had a school in the Waxhaws. Over a century later, another Carolinian described Smith as "a strong personal friend of President Jackson." The memoirs of Alabama "belle" Virginia Clay-Clopton, published 1904, described Smith as "the warm friend of Andrew Jackson." Smith reportedly had at least one brother "who was a lawyer also, and, unfortunately, intemperate." This may be Bennett Smith (or there may be other brothers).Meredith 2013 pp. 69–70 Another report attesting to Bennett Smith's alcohol use is in the 1845 journal of Murfreesboro resident Samuel Harvey Laughlin, who wrote that, "Maj. Bennett Smith, a remarkable man, is still living, had removed to town to enjoy his fortune about the time I went to the place to live. He pretended, however, now and then, especially when drunk, to engage in the practice of law."
Smith then attended Mt. Zion College in Winnsboro, South Carolina, which was the first preparatory school in the region. He once stated to a friend stated that his life could be described as "wild, reckless, intemperate, rude and boisterous, yet resolute and determined." To that same friend he also credited all of his success to a promise he once made to his wife, Margaret Duff, to forego alcohol.
Smith's law career began on January 6, 1784 when he was admitted to the bar. In one notable case, his client who had been charged for killing a horse failed to appear before the court. Smith did not see the man for a number of years until he ran into him in the Hall of the House of Representatives. The man, known to Smith by the surname "Elchinor", now went by the name John Alexander and was a Representative for the state of Ohio. Smith ensured that Representative Alexander paid him for his previous services.
He may have been resident in the York District during his South Carolina days, but also dwelled for a time in Pinckneyville in the Union District. The South Carolina local historian "Septugenarian" described Smith as an angry, violent man, widely feared as a controlling power within the community:
Political career It is not entirely clear when Smith first joined the South Carolina legislature but in 1803 he was "the chief sponsor of the bill to reopen the slave trade in the state...[and] fought to keep it open until 1808" when the federal ban on imports went into effect. According to the Bench and Bar of South Carolina, "Judge Smith was a member of the Legislature of South Carolina for many years. In 1805, he was elected a member of the Board of Trustees of the South Carolina College." He was elected to the South Carolina Senate from York District in 1804. In 1806 he was elected president of the South Carolina State Senate. In 1808 he became a judge. As a jurist his temperament was considered "tyranical but fair."
According to a South Carolina newspaper, in about 1815 he built a grand house in Yorkville: "The lot on which it stood comprises a beautiful pack of twelve acres...In the construction of the house, only the best heart lumber was used, and at that period carving and ornamental work being the rage on all houses of pretension, no expense was spared by the builder in this style of ornamentation. We have heard it stated that the cost of the house was , and after it was finished was regarded as the finest residence then in the upper part of the State, and persons were known to travel & distance of sixty miles or more for no other purpose but to see the wonderful piece of architecture." At some point, perhaps in the 1820s, he also built a fine house at Turkey Creek.
Then in 1816, Smith was elected a United States Senator, after defeating James R. Pringle for the seat, 101 to 51. He served his first term as a U.S. Senator was 1817 to 1823, when he was replaced by Robert Y. Hayne. During his time in the Senate he seems to frequently have spoken from the floor about slavery and slave trade. For instance in 1819 he declared, "Our Northern friends are not afraid to furnish the Southern States with Africans." In 1820, during the debates over the Missouri Compromise, Smith "directly linked the reopening [of the transatlantic slave trade to South Carolina] and the Louisiana Purchase...Supporting the expansion of slavery without restriction, Smith entered volumes of archival documents from the Charleston slave trade into the congressional record to demonstrate that his state's African slave trade from 1803 to 1808 actually fed the western frontier rather than South Carolina." Smith was one of the first Southerners to argue, at the time of the Missouri Compromise in 1820, that American slavery was a "positive good", arguing that the enslaved were "so domesticated, or so kindly treated by their masters, and their situations so improved" that few would express discontent with their condition.
Shortly after taking office, Smith began a political feud with John C. Calhoun which would last the duration of his political career in South Carolina. The feud between Calhoun and Smith resided in their different political philosophies, when Smith joined the Senate, Calhoun was still a nationalist who believed in funding infrastructure improvements and a "broad construction" of the Constitution, two concepts which Smith found repugnant. In response to Calhoun's growing popularity, Smith formed a coalition of States' Rights allies which included Thomas Cooper, Stephen Decatur Miller, Josiah J. Evans, and David Rogerson Williams. The South Carolina nationalists led by Calhoun "favored a few national roads because of national military necessity," although they repudiated small-scale local appropriations. But, to the Smith faction, even roads for purported military use would instead be used to bolster the economy of other states. This concept of South Carolina in competition with the nation for economic prosperity was common at the time in the South Carolina elite.
During the 1820s, Smith began buying up land in the west. In 1823 he bought a lot at the northwest corner of Eustis and Greene streets that became the first parcel in what became what was called the Calhoun House property, and every year until 1832 bought more lots in town until he owned the entire block as well as "most of the block that fronts on East Side Square." According to Huntsville architectural historian Linda Bayer, "he began assembling acreage immediately northeast of the town, in what is now East Huntsville Addition, with the purchase of 640 acres for $18,000 cash. Additional purchases in 1828 and 1831 increased this holding to almost 1,000 acres, and this land became his Huntsville plantation which he named Spring Grove." This property was later known as Calhoun Grove. Smith may have summered in Huntsville beginning in 1825. Also in 1825 he bought the Huntsville Inn, a three-story brick tavern, soon to be demolished, and hired architect George Steele to construct a spring house, made of brick, for one of his Huntsville properties.