William Porcher Miles

William Porcher Miles (July 4, 1822 – May 11, 1899) was a United States Representative from South Carolina. He was among those ardent States' Rights advocates and Southern secessionists that came to be known as the "Fire-Eaters."

Miles was born in Charleston. He attended Wellington School in Charleston and graduated from the College of Charleston in 1842 where he studied law. He was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Charleston. He was mayor of Charleston from 1855 to 1857.

Miles was elected as a Democrat to the Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth United States Congresses and served from March 4, 1857, until his retirement in December 1860. He was a member of the Confederate Provisional Congress in Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861, and was subsequently a member of the First Confederate Congress from February 1862 to March 1864. He also served as a colonel on the staff of General P. G. T. Beauregard.

While serving in the Confederate Provisional Congress, he chaired the "Committee on the Flag and Seal," which adopted the "Stars and Bars" flag as the national flag of the Confederacy. Miles himself favored his own design, which although rejected by the committee, eventually became the Confederate Battle Flag today known simply as "the Confederate flag."

Following the Civil War, Miles was the president of the University of South Carolina at Columbia from 1880 to 1882.

He died in Burnside, Louisiana, and was interred in Union Cemetery, Union, Monroe County, West Virginia.

Bibliography

*Coski, John M. "The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem." Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-674-01722-6.
*Daniel, Ruth McCaskill. "William Porcher Miles: Champion of Southern Interests." M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1943.
*Miles, William Porcher. "The annual address delivered before the Cliosophic Society, March 29, 1847." Charleston: T.W. Haynes, 1847.
*———. "How to Educate Our Young Lawyers. Address to the law class of the University of Maryland." Columbia, S.C.: The Presbyterian Publishing House, 1882.
*———. "Oration delivered before the Fourth of July Association. By Wm. Porcher Miles on the Fourth of July 1849." Charleston: James S. Burges, 1849.
*Smith, Clarence McKittrick, Jr. "William Porcher Miles, Progressive Mayor of Charleston, 1855-1857." Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association 12 (1942): 30-39.
*Walther, Eric. H. "Abstractions: William Porcher Miles." In "The Fire-Eaters", pp. 270-96. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

External links

* [http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/m/Miles,William_Porcher.html Inventory of the William Porcher Miles Papers, 1784-1906] , in the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill
* [http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=M000707 Congressional biography]
* [http://www.quotationsbook.com/authors/4989/William_Porcher_Miles Quotations]
* [http://www.csasilverdollar.com/starsbars.html Stars and Bars]