Governor William Evelyn Cameron, (CSA)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Cameron

William Evelyn Cameron (November 29, 1842 – January 25, 1927) was a soldier, lawyer, journalist, and politician. He served as the 39th Governor of Virginia from 1882–1886, elected as the candidate of the Readjuster Party headed by William T. Mahone.

Early life and career

William Evelyn Cameron was born in Petersburg, Virginia. His parents were Walker Anderson Cameron and Elizabeth Page Walker. He attended local schools, then a military academy in Hillsboro, North Carolina.

Cameron briefly attended Washington College in St. Louis, Missouri. He received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

American Civil War

When the American Civil War started, Cameron abandoned his preparatory studies and joined the Confederate Army, serving throughout the war.

Marriage and family

After the war, Cameron returned to Petersburg, where he married Louisa Clarinda Egerton (1846–1908) on October 1, 1868. They had three children.

Career

Cameron read the law and passed the bar. He started to practice law, but decided to pursue a career in journalism . He was an editor for newspapers in Petersburg, Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia.

Hughes duel

In 1869, Cameron fought a duel with Robert William Hughes, after Cameron criticized Hughes in print for the opportunism: he had changed his political views from pre-war Secessionist to post-war Republican. According to the writer Frank Mott,

"[T]he parties met at Chester Station, on the Petersburg Railroad; but, before they could exchange a shot, the police made their appearance, and caused a flight of the parties. They passed into North Carolina, where they fought on the 12th of June with pistols. Cameron was hit in the breast at the first fire, the ball striking a rib and glancing. Hughes demanded another fire, but the surgeons declared that Cameron could not deliver another shot, and the affair ended 'to the satisfaction of all parties.'"

Political career

Cameron became active in the Readjuster Party. He was elected as mayor of Petersburg, serving from 1876 to 1882.

In 1881, he was the gubernatorial candidate of the Readjuster Party and elected governor with biracial support. During his term from 1882–1886, he attempted to implement his party's programs of debt reduction and racial integration in certain areas. In 1882 it led passage of legislation for a land-grant college for blacks, what is now Virginia State University in Ettrick, near Petersburg.

Cameron led an anti-oyster pirate expedition of two boats and armed state militia in the ongoing Oyster Wars of the Chesapeake Bay. The state had attempted to license and control traffic in the popular seafood, but 5800 Virginia oyster boats often disregarded laws related to trying to preserve the harvest.

After his term as governor ended in 1886, Cameron briefly left Virginia. He returned and resumed a career in politics, but as a conservative Democrat. Cameron represented Petersburg in the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902. At this time, the Democrat-dominated legislature created a disfranchising constitution and essentially ended black voting. The Republican Party ceased to be competitive in the state.

It has had a curious revival since the later twentieth century in the state, following the civil rights movement and passage of federal civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s that enforced voting rights for African Americans. Today the Republican Party in Virginia is supported primarily by conservative whites, who used to support the Democrats.

Cameron served as editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot newspaper from 1906 to 1919.

William Evelyn Cameron died on January 25, 1927 at the home of one of his sons in Louisa County, Virginia. He was buried at Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg.

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https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Cameron_William_Evelyn_1842-1927

William E. Cameron was a veteran of the American Civil War (1861–1865), a journalist, a governor of Virginia (1882–1886), and a member of the Convention of 1901–1902. Cameron served in the Confederate army during the war, then worked as a journalist in Petersburg and Richmond, supporting the Conservative Party. Beginning in 1876, he was elected to three consecutive two-year terms as the mayor of Petersburg. Later in the 1870s he began to side with the Readjusters, a faction that sought to adjust the payment of Virginia's prewar debt. He won the governorship as a nominee of the Readjuster-Republican coalition in 1881. Cameron and the Readjusters issued a series of reforms, including repealing the poll tax, but his aggressive use of political patronage angered voters and his opponents. The revived Democratic Party, capitalizing on white supremacy and the electorate's unease over Cameron's tactics, took over the General Assembly in 1883. Cameron left politics after completing his term, but was elected in 1901 to a state constitutional convention. He played an influential role, advocating provisions that strengthened the governor's authority to discharge subordinate officials; defending legislative election of judges; and supporting reinstating the poll tax and other restrictions that disfranchised African American voters. Cameron returned to journalism in 1906, editing the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot until 1919. He died in Louisa County in 1927.

Early Years

William Evelyn Cameron was born on November 29, 1842, in Petersburg, the son of Walker Anderson Cameron, a cotton broker, and Elizabeth Page Walker Cameron. His mother was related to the Byrd and Harrison families, and his father to John Cameron, a Scottish clergyman who had served as the rector of Blandford Church in Petersburg.

Growing up in Petersburg, Cameron attended local schools and developed interests in history, music, and poetry. After his parents died he lived with two unmarried aunts in Petersburg before enrolling in 1857 in a military academy in Hillsboro, North Carolina. Two years later Cameron went to live with an uncle in Saint Louis, Missouri. Following a brief, undistinguished sojourn as a student at Washington College in that city, he worked as an assistant purser on a Mississippi River steamboat. Nomination in 1860 for a cadetship at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, rekindled Cameron's zeal for academic pursuits, and he received preparatory tutoring in Missouri from John F. Reynolds, a captain in the U.S. Army.

Confederate Service

At the start of the Civil War Cameron broke off his studies. Joining a secessionist militia company stationed on the outskirts of Saint Louis, he was captured but escaped and began an arduous journey back to Virginia. Cameron reported to Confederate authorities in Norfolk and was assigned to a Petersburg militia contingent that became part of the 12th Virginia Infantry Regiment. On June 14, 1861, he was elected a second lieutenant, and on May 18, 1862, he was commissioned a first lieutenant and appointed a regimental adjutant. Wounded at the Second Battle of Manassas (Bull Run) in August 1862, Cameron was transferred to Brigadier General William Mahone's command as brigade inspector and commenced a close association with Mahone, a fellow Petersburg resident, that lasted for more than two decades. Promoted to captain and assistant adjutant-general as of November 2, 1863, Cameron served in the Army of Northern Virginia until the surrender at Appomattox Court House.

In his early twenties when the Confederacy collapsed, Cameron returned to civilian life in Petersburg. On October 1, 1868, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he married Louisa Clarinda Egerton, of Petersburg. They had two sons and one daughter. The economic hardships of the postwar era hastened Cameron's entrance into the professional arena. He read law with a Petersburg attorney, but journalism exerted a more powerful attraction. Between 1865 and 1875 Cameron served in editorial capacities at a succession of newspapers: the Petersburg Daily News, the Norfolk Virginian, the Petersburg Daily Index (in which, with Mahone's backing, he purchased a financial interest), the Richmond Whig (which Mahone controlled), the Richmond Enquirer, and the Petersburg Evening Star. Cameron wrote poems and Civil War articles for sale to various publications. He also worked briefly in 1869 as an administrative secretary to Governor Gilbert Carlton Walker.

Early Political Career

Cameron vigorously supported the Conservative Party in its struggles against the Radical Republicans and in 1870 was the party's unsuccessful candidate for Petersburg's seat in the state senate. His journalistic sallies against Robert W. Hughes, editor of the Republican Richmond State Journal, led to a duel in 1869 in which Cameron was wounded. Although vociferously critical of those he called carpetbaggers and scalawags, he accepted such Republican innovations as African American suffrage and a tax-supported public school system. These pragmatic stands were popular with many Petersburg residents, who beginning in 1876 elected Cameron to three consecutive two-year terms as mayor. That year he was also admitted to the practice of law in the local courts, and he wrote for the editorial pages of the short-lived Petersburg Evening Star and for the Richmond Whig.

Issues involving Virginia's massive public debt took center stage in state politics and split the Conservative Party into bitterly antagonistic factions. Funders demanded full payment of the principal and interest, while Readjusters proposed to reduce the amount of the principal to be repaid and to refinance the debt at lower interest. The split between the factions gave the Republican minority the balance of political power in the state. Cameron initially supported the Funders and argued that Virginia was honor-bound to repay its creditors regardless of the budgetary hardships the commitment imposed. As the depression-ridden 1870s wore on, however, he began to side with the Readjusters. Difficulties with his personal finances may have encouraged Cameron's change of heart, but his ties with Mahone exerted a more decisive influence. During a failed bid for the Conservative nomination for governor in 1877, Mahone announced support for Readjuster principles, and Cameron signaled his new allegiance by acting as a floor leader of Mahone's delegates at the party convention.

Cameron followed Mahone down a path that led in 1879 to the creation of an independent Readjuster Party and two years later to an alliance with national and state Republicans. In June 1881, a few months after Mahone took office as one of Virginia's U.S. senators, Cameron secured the gubernatorial nomination of the new Readjuster-Republican coalition. An outpouring of support from whites in western counties and from blacks in the Tidewater and Southside enabled him to defeat his Funder opponent, John Warwick Daniel, by more than 12,000 votes in November. Supporters of the coalition also won majorities in both houses of the General Assembly.

Governorship

Cameron's inauguration on January 1, 1882, marked the onset of a period of intense governmental activism. Within a few weeks he was affixing his signature to legislation that slashed the debt, dramatically boosted expenditures for the public schools, and financed an array of public improvements, including the founding of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (later Virginia State University) and the construction of Central Lunatic Asylum (later Central State Hospital), both located in or near Petersburg, to serve the needs of black Virginians. The Readjusters also repealed the poll tax, abolished the whipping post, imposed harsher penalties on duelists, gave tax relief to farmers and small businessmen, tripled the revenue assessments on railroads, and established a state inspection program for commercially marketed fertilizers. Placing the prestige of his office behind these initiatives, Cameron also moved to curtail violations of Virginia's laws governing the harvesting of shellfish. He personally led militia units in raids that resulted in the arrest of scores of so-called Chesapeake Bay "oyster pirates."

Egalitarian reforms and executive dynamism were hallmarks of Cameron's administration. So too were political turbulence and partisan intrigue. Inspired by Mahone's unabashed manipulation of federal patronage, Cameron took similar advantage of his own state-level powers of appointment and removal and even attempted in several instances to oust hostile officials before their terms expired. Amid rising protests against bossism and machine politics, the governor unsuccessfully pressured a special session of the General Assembly to gerrymander congressional districts and to restructure the circuit court system so that Funder judges could be discharged from their posts. Frustrated by legislative intransigence, Cameron subsequently sparked an even greater furor by replacing Richmond's Funder-dominated school board with new appointees, several of whom were black.

The administration's foes (who began to call themselves Democrats in 1883) effectively exploited these controversial developments. At the outset of that year's legislative races they pragmatically disavowed their allegiance to the state's creditors and instead began to denounce spoilsmanship, Mahone's party leadership, and the alleged willingness of Cameron and his associates to "Africanize" Virginia in pursuit of political gain. These tactics, accentuated by a bloody racial clash in Danville a few days before the 1883 election, paid handsome dividends at the polls. A dramatic upsurge in white voter turnout enabled the Democrats to win large majorities in both houses of the General Assembly.

Shaken by this setback, Cameron faced ever-proliferating adversities during the last two years of his gubernatorial term. Democratic legislators purged many of his allies from administrative posts, investigated his sometimes imprudent handling of public funds, and routinely overrode his vetoes of flagrantly partisan measures such as the Anderson-McCormick election law of 1884. Equally troublesome for Cameron, his ties with Mahone began to deteriorate. Mahone insisted on absolute control over the battered remnants of the old coalition, which renamed itself the Republican Party of Virginia in 1884. Cameron's term ended on January 1, 1886. Scorned by the Democrats and increasingly powerless within his own party, he had tested the limits of political dissent in post-Reconstruction Virginia.

Late Nineteenth Century

Only forty-three years old, Cameron still had a long and multifaceted career ahead of him. He established a law practice in Petersburg in 1886, but other professional pursuits attracted his energies as well. A two-year stint in Chicago, first as an agent and then as official historian of the World's Columbian Exposition, resulted in Cameron's most extensive literary effort, an 800-page chronicle entitled The World's Fair, Being a Pictorial History of the Columbian Exposition (1893). With the cooling of the antagonisms generated by his gubernatorial term, Virginia's cultural and intellectual establishment welcomed Cameron back into its elite circles. He participated in Lost Cause commemorative activities, published articles in Confederate veterans' journals, and received appointment as commissioner-general of the 1907 Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition.

Cameron also reestablished himself as a figure of some importance in Virginia politics, albeit at the cost of betraying the egalitarian principles that he had earlier espoused. His two-year stay in strike-plagued Chicago may have helped push him more firmly into hard-line conservatism. Six years of intraparty clashes with Mahone ended in 1890 when Cameron announced his decision to leave the Republican Party. He lambasted national Republican policies as detrimental to states' rights and to southern economic needs. In 1896, proclaiming his support for a dissident faction of the Democratic Party that refused to support William Jennings Bryan and the free coinage of silver, Cameron took to the campaign trail once again. His debt-repudiation past a distant memory, he denounced Bryan and free silver in speeches from one end of Virginia to the other, but few voters heeded Cameron's appeals in behalf of the gold Democrats.

Convention of 1901–1902

The progressive impulse at the turn of the century afforded a more favorable venue for Cameron's maverick, independent-minded brand of reactionism. Endorsed by local Democrats, he was elected over token opposition in 1901 as one of the two Petersburg representatives to a state constitutional convention. Although such delegates as one-time foe John Warwick Daniel, then a U.S. senator, enjoyed greater prestige and influence, Cameron played a substantial role. He chaired the Committee on the Executive Department and served on the Committee on the Judiciary. Under his leadership the Committee on the Executive Department successfully advocated constitutional provisions strengthening the governor's authority to discharge subordinate officials and permitting him to return bills to the General Assembly with suggested amendments.

In floor debates Cameron defended the Committee on the Judiciary's insistence that judges should continue to be chosen by the legislature, a stance that provoked the ire of western delegates who favored popular election. Unswayed by appeals from the convention's hopelessly outnumbered Republicans, he supported the reinstitution of the poll tax and the adoption of other registration restrictions intended to reduce the number of African American voters. As the proceedings entered their final stage, Cameron introduced the motion for approval of the Constitution of 1902, but he opposed the majority's decision to proclaim the new fundamental law rather than submit it to the electorate for endorsement or rejection. Even this futile gesture reflected something less than a full defense of democratic principles. As Cameron saw it, ratification could best be accomplished through a referendum in which only literate, taxpaying white men would be allowed to participate. He had traversed a broad expanse of ideological terrain since leading the biracial Readjuster-Republican coalition to victory in 1881.

Cameron hoped that his performance at the convention would set the stage for a sustained political comeback, but he withdrew from a 1904 bid for the Fourth District Democratic congressional nomination because of poor health. His old passion for journalism then resurfaced. Joining the staff of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot in April 1906, Cameron soon took charge of its editorial page and remained at the helm of that newspaper, which became the Virginian-Pilot and the Norfolk Landmark in 1912, until he retired in September 1919.

Later Years

Cameron's wife died in January 1908. He divided his final years between stays with his daughter in Tallahassee, Florida, and with one of his sons in Louisa County. Cameron died in Louisa County on January 25, 1927, and was buried not far from the grave of William Mahone in Petersburg's Blandford Cemetery. The Democratic press lamented the passing of a brave soldier, a talented journalist, and a colorful figure from Virginia's past. Devoting scant attention to the reforms of Cameron's gubernatorial term, obituaries instead emphasized his independence of character and his unwillingness to submit to factional dictates, especially as manifested in his bolt from the Republican Party.

Time Line

November 29, 1842 - William E. Cameron is born in Petersburg, the son of Walker A. Cameron and Elizabeth Page Walker Cameron.

1857 - William E. Cameron enrolls in a military academy in Hillsboro, North Carolina.

1860 - William E. Cameron is nominated for a cadetship at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.

1861 - William E. Cameron joins a secessionist militia company stationed outside of Saint Louis, Missouri. He is captured, but escapes and is assigned to a Petersburg militia contingent that becomes part of the 12th Virginia Infantry Regiment.

June 14, 1861 - William E. Cameron is elected a second lieutenant.

May 18, 1862 - William E. Cameron is commissioned a first lieutenant and appointed a regimental adjutant.

August 1862 - William E. Cameron is wounded at the Second Battle of Manassas (Bull Run). Cameron is transferred to Brigadier General William Mahone's command as brigade inspector.

November 2, 1863 - William E. Cameron is promoted to captain and assistant adjutant-general.

1865-1875 - William E. Cameron serves in editorial capacities at a succession of newspapers: the Petersburg Daily News, the Norfolk Virginian, the Petersburg Daily Index, the Richmond Whig, the Richmond Enquirer, and the Petersburg Evening Star.

October 1, 1868 - William E. Cameron and Louisa Clarinda Egerton, of Petersburg, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, marry. They will have two sons and one daughter.

1869 - William E. Cameron works briefly as an administrative secretary to Governor Gilbert Carlton Walker. In the same year, Cameron is wounded in a duel with Robert William Hughes, editor of the Republican Richmond State Journal.

1870 - William E. Cameron is the Conservative Party's unsuccessful candidate for Petersburg's seat in the state senate.

1876 - William E. Cameron is elected to the first of three consecutive two-year terms as mayor of Petersburg. This same year Cameron is admitted to the practice of law in the local courts.

1877 - William E. Cameron fails in a bid for the Conservative nomination for governor.

June 1881 - William E. Cameron secures the gubernatorial nomination of the new Readjuster-Republican coalition.

November 1881 - William E. Cameron wins the election for governor, defeating his Funder opponent, John Warwick Daniel, by more than 12,000 votes.

January 1, 1882–January 1, 1886 - William E. Cameron serves his term as governor of Virginia.

1886 - William E. Cameron establishes a law practice in Petersburg.

1890 - William E. Cameron announces his decision to leave the Republican Party.

1893 - Following his service as official historian of the World's Columbian Exposition, William E. Cameron publishes The World's Fair, Being a Pictorial History of the Columbian Exposition.

1896 - William E. Cameron proclaims his support for a dissident faction of the Democratic Party that refuses to support William Jennings Bryan and the free coinage of silver.

1901 - William E. Cameron is elected as one of the two Petersburg representatives to a state constitutional convention. Cameron chairs the Committee on the Executive Department and supports the reinstitution of the poll tax and other registration restrictions intended to reduce the number of African American voters.

1904 - William E. Cameron withdraws from a bid for the Fourth District Democratic congressional nomination because of poor health.

April 1906 - William E. Cameron joins the staff of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.

1907 - William E. Cameron receives an appointment as commissioner-general of the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition.

January 1908 - William E. Cameron's wife, Louisa Clarinda Egerton Cameron, dies.

September 1919 - William E. Cameron retires from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and the Norfolk Landmark.

January 25, 1927 - William E. Cameron dies in Louisa County. He is buried in Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg.