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Author: Smith, William Russell

Biography:

SMITH, William Russell (1815-96: WBIS)

As a lawyer, a politician, and a writer, Smith was talented and versatile, but capricious. He was born in Russellville KY of parents from Virginia stock, Ezekiel (or Ezekial) and Elizabeth (Hampton) Smith. His father died when he was very young. In 1820 his mother moved to Tuscaloosa AL but she died also before he was ten; a local lawyer, George W. Crabb, became his guardian. Smith attended university in Tuscaloosa but left without taking a degree, training instead for the law in Crabb's office. After being called to the bar he opened an office in Greensboro AL. He married three times and had children by all three wives, though it is not clear exactly how many. In Tuscaloosa in 1843 he married Jane Binion (d 1844); in 1847 Mary Jane Murray of Fayette AL (d 1853); and in 1854 Wilhelmine M. Easby of Washington DC, who survived him. He ran a Whig newspaper in Tuscaloosa and served as mayor in 1839; he was elected as a Whig to the state assembly in 1841-2 but left the party in 1843 and moved to Fayette, where in 1850-1 he was a circuit judge and was elected to Congress ("Mr. Smith of Alabama," in his published speeches) 1850-57. After retiring from Congress he returned to Tuscaloosa. He recruited a regiment in 1861 but instead of fighting was elected to serve as a member of the Confederate House of Representatives for the duration of the Civil War. He was defeated in attempts to win higher office and was obliged to resign after only one year as president of the University of Alabama, 1870-1. In 1879 he gave up his law practice and moved to Washington DC to devote more time to writing. His writings are very various. Besides the verses of his youth he published a long poem, The Uses of Solitude (1860); guides to aspects of the law and reports of decisions; numerous speeches and orations; a novel, As It Is (1860); a memoir of J. G. Fichte (1846); possibly a tragedy, Polyxena (1879); and an autobiography, Reminiscences of a Long Life (1879), of which only Vol. 1 appeared. His Washington obituary mentions that towards the end of his life he joined the Roman Catholic church "of which his wife and children have long been members." He died in Washington and is buried there. (ancestry.com 29 Sept. 2020; DAB; Appleton; Evening Star [Washington DC] 26 Feb 1896)

 

Books written (2):

Mobile [AL]: printed by Pollard and Dade, 1833
Tuscaloosa [AL]: D. Woodruff, 1833