John S. Williams, US Congress

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8004468

Democrat Congressman from Mississippi. He served in the House of Representatives from 1893-1909 and in the US Senate from 1911-1923.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sharp_Williams

John Sharp Williams (July 30, 1854 – September 27, 1932) was a prominent American politician in the Democratic Party from the 1890s through the 1920s, and served as the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives from 1903 to 1908.

Williams was born in Memphis, Tennessee, but raised in Yazoo County, Mississippi, after he was orphaned during the American Civil War. After studying at five different universities (including two in Europe), he received his law degree from the University of Virginia in 1876. After a brief return to Memphis (where he married Elizabeth Dial Webb in 1877), Williams returned to Yazoo County, where from 1878 to 1893 he ran the family plantation and kept a law practice.

Elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1893, Williams soon became a leader of the Democratic minority, renowned for his speaking skill and wit. Like most Southern Democrats of the day, he was a proponent of coining silver and an opponent of high tariffs; unlike them, he refused to use race-baiting to build political popularity. In 1906 when Great Britain launched HMS Dreadnought, Congressman Williams introduced a bill to change the name of USS Michigan to USS Skeered O' Nothin' as a challenge to the prestigious English.

During his time as ranking Democrat in the Republican-controlled House, Williams was given the privilege of choosing the Democrats assigned to committees by the House Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon (by the rules of the House, Cannon was entitled to make all appointments himself), giving him tremendous power within the minority party. In gratitude, Williams was known to omit Democrats whom Cannon found particularly objectionable from committee assignments. Recognizing his status vis-à-vis Cannon, Williams jokingly described his relative political impotence in the Cannon-dominated Committee on Rules, "I am invited to the seances but I am never consulted about the spiritualistic appearances."

By beating one of Mississippi's leading race-baiters, James K. Vardaman, Williams moved to the United States Senate in 1911. He became one of Woodrow Wilson's strongest supporters, from Wilson's nomination for the Presidency in 1912 through the losing battle to ratify American participation in the League of Nations in 1920. During his time as a senator, he also served as a chairman of the Committee to Establish a University of the United States. Senator Williams once claimed on the floor of the Senate (and it was duly entered in the Congressional Record) that no nation in proportion to its size had contributed more to the development of the United States than had the Welsh.

After retiring from the Senate in 1923, Williams returned to his family plantation, where he spent the last decade of his life.

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John Sharp Williams was born on 30 July 1854 in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Christopher Harris Williams Jr., a lawyer, and Anne Louise Sharp Williams. His paternal grandfather, a Whig, represented Tennessee in the US Congress for ten years, and his great-grandfather’s brother, Robert Williams, served as governor of the Mississippi Territory from 1805 to 1809. John Sharp’s mother died in 1859, and after his father, a Confederate officer, was killed in the Battle of Shiloh on 6 April 1862, his grandfather, John McNitt Sharp, came to Memphis and took John Sharp and his younger brother, Christopher Harris, back to his three-thousand-acre plantation, Cedar Grove, in Yazoo County. John McNitt Sharp, a Confederate officer, died four months later, and John Sharp’s step-grandmother assumed responsibility for raising the two boys. Williams received his elementary education in Yazoo City and Memphis, where he joined the Episcopal Church at the age of eleven. After completing his high school work, he graduated from the Kentucky Military Institute in 1870. After briefly enrolling at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, he spent three years at the University of Virginia, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa scholar. He then studied in Germany and France for two years before returning to the University of Virginia Law School, earning a degree in 1876. He married Elizabeth Dial Webb of Livingston, Alabama, in October 1877, and the following year the young couple moved into the plantation home that his grandfather had built in 1834 and took charge of the Sharp family’s plantation. For the next fifteen years he supervised the farming operation at Cedar Grove and practiced law in nearby Yazoo City.

Williams undertook his first political campaign in 1890 but failed to win the Democratic nomination for Congress at the party’s district convention; two years later, he tried again and succeeded, going on to defeat a strong Populist opponent in the general election. Williams subsequently won reelection seven times, serving in the US House of Representatives from 1893 to 1909. The young congressman quickly earned respect with his keen intellect, his debating skills, and his sense of parliamentary courtesy and justice. A staunch advocate of a tariff for revenue only and free, unlimited coinage of silver, he opposed imperialistic policies and government ownership of railroads. He never straddled an issue and delighted reporters with his witty remarks and caustic rejoinders to Republican opponents.

His Democratic colleagues elected him minority leader in 1903, 1905, and 1907, and political observers credited him with transforming the party’s unruly and undisciplined House membership into a strong, cohesive force. Williams wanted the Democratic Party to adopt progressive policies that would attract independent voters and appeal to businessmen and organized labor in the North and Midwest. He publicized these concepts in his 1904 essays “What Democracy Now Stands For” and “Why Should a Man Vote the Democratic Ticket This Year?” He served as temporary chair of the 1904 Democratic National Convention, and his moderate views on financial and trade policies prevailed in the party’s platform. Williams supported Alton Parker for the party’s 1904 presidential nomination but supported William Jennings Bryan four years later, though Williams never admired the Great Commoner and opposed his stand on government ownership of railroads. As an influential party leader, Williams emphasized that differences among Democrats should not be magnified and that he thought Bryan was right about most things.

In 1907 Williams faced off against Gov. James K. Vardaman in the contest for the Democratic nomination to represent Mississippi in the US Senate. The race attracted national attention, with William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper chain supporting Vardaman and the New York Times, the Atlanta Constitution, and other leading newspapers endorsing Williams. Collier’s magazine sent author and war correspondent Frederick Palmer to cover the only debate between the two candidates. Williams disparaged Vardaman’s efforts to exploit racial prejudices and make repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment the primary campaign issue. Believing that it was unwise “for Southern statesmanship to narrow all of its efforts . . . to a futile or dangerous attempt to reinject the race question into the arena of congressional politics,” Williams thought “the South ought to take its part in solving the great questions of the day and . . . not occupy itself baying at the moon or in a thing equally useless and much more dangerous.” Williams defeated Vardaman by just 648 votes and received congratulatory messages from all sections of the country.

An early booster of Woodrow Wilson for the 1912 Democratic presidential nomination, Williams served on Wilson’s executive campaign committee and became one of the president’s most faithful supporters in the areas of both foreign policy and economic reform. When controversy arose over the appointment of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, Williams announced that he would vote to confirm Brandeis because a man’s views on academic questions should not disqualify him if he were honest and a good lawyer. Williams supported the president’s decision to hold Germany to strict accountability for the loss of American lives and property in submarine warfare and accused those who opposed a declaration of war in April 1917 of “grazing on the edge of treason.”

Like most white Mississippians and most white southerners, Williams believed in white political supremacy, but he did not exploit the race issue for personal gain. During his senatorial campaign against Vardaman, Collier’s reported that Williams “shared the feelings of his neighbors on the race question [but] had seen enough of other parts of the world . . . to look at the subject in the proper perspective.”

In 1916 Williams was reelected to the Senate without any opposition, but he did not seek a third term in 1922. In March 1923 he returned to his Mississippi plantation to read books, write letters, and enjoy retirement. He made his last formal address at the 12 October 1927 dedication of a bronze monument to Jefferson Davis at the Vicksburg National Military Park. Williams died on 27 September 1932 in the old plantation home of his childhood and was laid to rest in the family cemetery at Cedar Grove. The New York Times remembered him as “easy-going, chock-full of common sense, sociable and companionable, [and] utterly remote from the doctrinaire and the prig.”

Senator from Yazoo City, MS. Had a family Bibile brought from Ireland