Samuel May Williams
Samuel May Williams was an American businessman, politician, and close associate of Stephen F. Austin, who was an Anglo-American colonizer of Mexican Texas. As a teenager, Williams started working in the family's mercantile business in Baltimore. He spent time in South America and New Orleans, fleeing the latter because of debts. He landed in Mexican Texas in 1822, having learned French and Spanish. Stephen F. Austin hired Williams for his colony in 1824. Williams first worked as a clerk, and later assumed the title of secretary to the ayuntamiento, a local government established for the colony by the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas. He worked for Austin for about a decade.
In 1834, Williams quit as secretary of the Austin Colony to work as a merchant, then formalized a partnership with Thomas F. McKinney. The next year he also made deals with the provincial government in Monclova for a bank charter and for large tracts of land in Texas. At that time he was a representative in the Coahuila and Texas legislature. However, by 1836, Williams and his partner, Thomas F. McKinney, supported the Texas Revolution against Mexico. Williams borrowed money against his family's lines of credit, which the partners applied to ships and ammunition on behalf of the rebel government.
After Texas gained independence, Williams focused most of his business activities in Galveston, and represented Galveston County for one term in the Republic of Texas legislature. Through his partnership with McKinney he was invested in the Galveston City Company, and established diverse business interests there. The partnership ended when their business was acquired by Henry Howell Williams in 1842.
After 1842, Williams worked toward establishing a bank in Texas. He briefly returned to public service when he accepted a diplomatic mission to negotiate a treaty with Mexico, which had still not recognized the sovereignty of the Republic of Texas. In the first year of Texas statehood, he ran twice for the U.S. House of Representatives, losing both times. In 1848 Williams succeeded in introducing the first bank in Texas: the Commercial & Agricultural Bank. This was the only institution to legally issue paper money, though his charter and the bank's practices faced legal challenges throughout its existence, including anti-banking legislation and scrutiny from various Texas Attorneys General. Favorable decisions rendered by the district courts saved Williams and his bank for about four years. C & A Bank remained solvent during the Panic of 1857, but anti-banking politics were on the rise. Many of Williams' friends and allies distanced themselves from the bank and encouraged him to give up the project, but he resisted their advice. He died in 1858 after a short illness.
Early life
Samuel May Williams was born October 4, 1795, in Providence, Rhode Island, to Howell and Dorothy Williams. His ancestors arrived in New England in the 1630s, and his family tree included a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a president of Yale University. Williams had four brothers and three sisters. His immediate family consisted of sailors and merchants; Howell Williams was a ship captain, and Samuel's uncle, Nathaniel Felton Williams, was a commission merchant in Baltimore. After some schooling in his native city, Samuel apprenticed to Nathaniel. A younger brother, also named Nathaniel Felton Williams, succeeded him as their uncle Nathaniel's apprentice.The Williams family conducted a robust trade with Argentina, shipping food in exchange for cash or hides. Williams left Baltimore to oversee freight bound for Buenos Aires, where he stayed to conduct further business in South America. There Williams learned the Spanish and French languages, and his business dealings gave him experience in navigating Spanish business and political customs. In 1818, Williams boarded at a hotel in Washington, D. C., and the next year, Williams was living and working in New Orleans. Historians disagree about the timing of Williams's return to the United States from South America. While Joe B. Frantz and Ruth G. Nichols estimate his arrival to New Orleans as the year 1815, Margaret Swett Henson disputes this as a possibility, though she is less certain about timeline.
Career
Gone to Texas
The Panic of 1819 in the United States forced many Americans into insolvency. By 1822, the opening of Mexican Texas to Anglo-colonization offered these distressed families an opportunity to escape debts by moving outside the jurisdiction of American law. Sometimes these debtors abandoned their property and wrote the letters "GTT" on their doors, an acronym for Gone to Texas. Though Williams sold tobacco to the Karankawa people on Galveston Island in 1821, he joined the ranks of the immigrant debtors in May 1822. He and a female companion left New Orleans and the United States to escape debts and poor economic prospects. They registered under the names of Mr. and Mrs. E. Eccleston, and passed over the gangplanks of the sloop Good Intent. The sailing ship met a storm in the Gulf of Mexico, and finally made landfall at the mouth of the Colorado River on June 18.At this time Texas was a part of Mexico. Moses Austin had negotiated a contract to colonize part of Texas, but his death in 1821 put the deal in limbo. As Williams first arrived in Texas, Stephen F. Austin, the son of Moses Austin, traveled to Mexico City in order to reinstate the contract and facilitate implementation of the Austin Colony. During Austin's visit, word reached Mexico City of a Mr. Eccleston, who was literate in English, Spanish, and French. By late 1823, Austin had returned to Texas and met Eccleston, who had established a local reputation by clerking and teaching school. Austin hired him in November. This is around the time that Williams reverted to his birth name. For a time both Williams and Austin had lived and worked in the same area of New Orleans, but there is no direct evidence that they had known each other prior to their meeting in 1823.
Stephen F. Austin Colony
Williams was with Austin when the new empresario selected a location for his colonial headquarters, San Felipe de Austin. Austin first hired Williams as a translator and clerk, whose language skills, both in English and Spanish, were necessary to fulfill his responsibilities. Another critical skill was his handwriting. In an era when all documents were written by hand, the ability to write legibly was critical to properly reading them later. Williams' knowledge of Mexican culture and Spanish business practices were also assets. In the fall of 1824, Austin appointed Williams as a recording secretary for the Austin Colony. Though Mexico had not yet established an ayuntamiento in the colony, Austin had told Jose Antonio Saucedo about his intention to establish the recording secretary position with all of the responsibilities of a secretary for an ayuntamiento. Also in 1824, Williams received his own headright, which included two leagues and three labores. Austin had promised Williams an annual salary of $1,000, but the colony was not generating much revenue.Williams continued to accept additional responsibilities at the Austin Colony. He managed the Public Land Office, and he served as its postmaster from 1826. He served as secretary of the ayuntamiento from 1828 to 1832, a post requiring him to record official documents in Spanish and send them to the state government. Austin later claimed that Williams had been underpaid for his service and later compensated him with of land in Texas. With his existing land grant of, Williams had accumulated more than of land in Texas.
After the Austin Colony
Early in 1834 Williams co-founded the partnership of McKinney and Williams, setting up a warehouse at Brazoria, then relocated to Quintana at the mouth of the Brazos River. The firm operated small steamboats on the Brazos and used its warehouse to manage transfer of freight to and from the larger ships operating on the Gulf of Mexico.An internal political battle in Mexico caused the state of Coahuila and Texas to split into two capitals. Those loyal to Santa Anna controlled the original capital, Saltillo, while the rival federalistas established their capital at Monclova. During meetings at the state capital, Williams bought 100 leagues of land in northeast Texas from the Monclova government at an eighty percent discount. During the trip he also secured a bank charter, while selling $85,000 worth of its stock. However, back in Anglo-Texas, the Consultation nullified the land deal when it declared all large land grants voided in November 1835.
In 1835, Williams was elected as a delegate to the Coahuila and Texas Legislature, representing the district of Brazos. That legislature offered for sale 3.5 million acres of land in the Mexican state, an action which many Texians perceived as corrupt. His participation in the Monclova government aroused the resentment of such persons, many of whom were already suspicious of Williams because of his former position of power in granting land in the Austin Colony. From the perspective of Williams, a member of the federalist Monclova government, the massive land sale was a justified state action in defense of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, which was challenged by Santa Anna and the Saltillo government. The Monclova government was raising money to prepare for a possible civil war in Coahuila.
Texas independence
With santanista General Martín Perfecto de Cos marching from Saltillo, the Monclova legislature ended its session in late-May 1835 with most of its members fleeing the region. Many of the federalists were captured, including Williams who was taken after crossing the Rio Grande River at Presidio, Texas. He was incarcerated at San Antonio, but escaped on horseback in a plot engineered by his friend, José Antonio Navarro. Williams arrived in San Felipe de Austin as an enemy of Santa Anna and Cos. At the same time, his actions in Monclova made him unpopular with Anglos in Texas.Williams went on a tour of the eastern United States in order to raise capital for his bank. Williams was selling stock in New York when he read about a possible war in Texas. He pivoted toward Texas independence while relying on financial assistance from his brother, Henry Howell Williams. He borrowed against his brother's credit to obtain the 125-ton schooner Invincible in support of a Texian naval force. In May 1836, Williams returned with ammunition and supplies loaded on his schooner, along with as many as 700 volunteers on three other boats. Mostly as a result of procurements Williams made in the United States in 1835, the McKinney and Williams partnership had contracted $99,000 in short-term debt on behalf of the Republic of Texas. The new government was not able to repay the debt. These loans to the Texas cause had been leveraged by letters of credit from Henry Howell Williams. Thus the Republic of Texas mounted substantial debt from the account of the McKinney and Williams partnership, which in turn had at least of portion of its financial backing from Henry Howell Williams. After independence, Williams served the Republic of Texas as its loan commissioner while serving simultaneously as a procurement officer for the Texas Navy, serving both the Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar administrations.