William Porcher Miles - United States House of Representatives

United States House of Representatives

In 1856 Miles ran for the seat being vacated by Congressman William Aiken, Jr.. The national issues of slavery in Kansas and the rise of the Republican Party dominated the election. Miles argued that the election of the Republican candidate for president, John C. Fremont, would require a joint southern response that could include boycotting the new Congress and calling a southern convention to determine further action. In a three way election Miles was victorious by a vote of 1,852 to 1,844 for his two opponents.

When he took office in 1857 he found that the Kansas issues dominated Congressional debate, threatened the unity of the Democratic Party and increased the growth of the Republicans. His first speech on the House floor came in 1858 and argued the southern position on Kansas. Despite his acknowledgement that the Kansas climate was not conducive to slavery, he stated:

But, sir, the issue has been made, the battle joined; and though it be on an abstract principle which does not at present promise to result in any practical advantage to us, I am willing to stand by the guns and fight it out. ... The South may not dissolve the Union on the rejection of Kansas, but such rejection would, assuredly, sever still another of the cords - rapidly becoming fewer - which the course of events has been snapping one by one.

Miles was re-elected in 1858. In January 1859 he spoke in support of fellow fire-eater William Lowndes Yancey in advocating the repeal of federal laws banning the African slave trade. Miles felt that the regulation of the trade should be a state function and that the national ban was an insult to southern honor. This stance was considered too radical even by his friends, such as Trescott, who felt, since it could never be supported by the majority of the nation, that Miles' stance was simply a guise to force disunion .

John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry sent a shock wave across the South. When the Thirty-sixth Congress met in December 1859 the first order of business was the selection of a speaker. Already in turmoil over the Brown raid, southerners were further aggravated by the nomination of Ohio Republican John Sherman for the post. Sherman was one of 68 Republicans who had endorsed Hinton Helper’s book, The Impending Crisis and How to Meet It, which southerners believed would ignite class warfare between slaveholders and non-slaveholders in the South. Republicans proposed buying 100,000 copies of the book and distributing it throughout the country.

In South Carolina the state legislature was unable to determine an appropriate response, but finally, reacting to a proposal by pro-secession Governor William Henry Gist decided to propose a southern convention. As a first step Christopher G. Memminger was dispatched to Virginia in order to solicit their support. Miles advised Memminger to “urge our Carolina view in such a manner as to imbue Virginia with it ... we may soon hope to see the fruit of your addresses in the sturdy and healthy offspring of whose birth we would be so greatly proud — a Southern confederacy.