CRAWFORD, WILLIAM HARRIS.

Lawyer, politician, judge. Born Amherst County, Va., 24 February 1772 died near Elberton, Ga., 15 September 1834. Son of Joel and Fanny Harris Crawford. Married Susanna Gerardine, 1804. Children: John, Caroline, Eliza Ann, Nathaniel Macon, William Harris Jr., Robert, Susan, William Bibb, and [Joel?I. Education: Moses Waddel’s academy, near Appling, Ga.; read law in Augusta. In 1779 the Crawford family moved from Virginia to Edgefield District, S.C., and in 1783 to a farm in what is now Columbia County, Ga. Young William studied under Moses Waddel, taught for two years at the Richmond Academy in Augusta (1796—98), read law while teaching, and was admitted to the bar in 1799. He then settled at Lexington, gradually acquired a flourishing law practice, built a large but unostentatious home known as Woodlawn about three miles west of Lexington, and made it the focus of a steadily enlarging plantation. By 1811 this plantation had sixteen slaves, by 1813 reached 1,100 acres in size, and by 1834 contained 1,300 acres and forty-five slaves. In 1801 Crawford and Horatio Marbury prepared the first officially printed Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia. In 1803 Crawford was elected a member of the Georgia House of Representatives and kept his seat there till 1807. In the assembly he worked to establish free schools, to improve the system of courts, and to provide funds for bridges and river navigation. Early in his career he became the chief upcountry ally of James Jackson of Savannah in a powerful faction of the Jeffersonian party known successively as the Jackson, the Crawford, and the Troup party. This faction embraced most well-to-do Georgians and was opposed, often with bitter passion, by an equally strong faction led by Elijah and John Clark. The Clarkites were generally less conservative than their rivals in finance policy, and included many small farmers. Between 1802 and 1806 the Clarkites forced Crawford into two duels, hoping to ruin or to kill him. In the first, in 1802, Crawford killed Peter Van Alen; in the second, in 1806, John Clark shot Crawford in the left wrist, crippling it. All their adult lives Clark and Crawford hated each other. In 1807 the legislature elected Crawford to the United States Senate. By now he was an impressive-looking man—ruggedly handsome, physically active, six feet three inches tall, weighing more than two hundred pounds, fair and ruddy in face, with “clear blue, mild, though radiant” eyes. He was also genial, unpretentious, studious, clear-minded, fond of good conversation, and had a “capital” talent for anecdotes and for organizing men politically. In the Senate Crawford advocated renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States, voted against the embargo in 1807 (but afterwards defended it staunchly), was critical of President Madison’s vacillations in 181 0 and 18 I 1, voted for war against England in 1812, and was active in the efforts of 1810—12 to make both East Florida and West Florida parts of the United States. When Vice-President George Clinton died in 1811, the Senate elected Crawford its president pro tem. He declined an offer of the secretaryship of war in 1812, but in 1813 accepted appointment as minister to France, then the most important diplomatic post of the United States in Europe. Crawford’s two years in Paris were frustrating, and were devoted mainly to vain efforts to convince France that it should pay for the American ships and cargoes seized illegally under Napoleon’s decrees. Before leaving France in 1815, Crawford was appointed United States secretary of war. He spent fifteen months in that office, and in October 1816 President Madison made him secretary of the treasury. The Treasury was then the largest of the executive departments, and Crawford directed it for eight and a half years. He made it more efficient, increased the number and frequency of its reports to the House of Representatives, gave assistance to the Bank of the United States in making it the dominant force in banking and currency, persuaded Congress and President Monroe to abandon internal taxes in 1817, and was an able and intensely honest administrator. Yet his tenure as secretary was not serene, for most of it was troubled either by a scarcity of revenue or by political acrimony. His relations with Monroe were cordial but not confidential Till 1822 he was on friendly terms with al the members of the cabinet, but after 1822 he came to despise the secretary of war, John C. Calhoun, whom Crawford considered an unprincipled opportunist. As 1824 approached, Crawford was almost universally believed to be the strongest candidate to succeed Monroe as president, and in February 1824 Crawford received the last nomination made by a congressional caucus of the Republican party. Yet the vote of that caucus (sixty-four for Crawford, four for others: represented only a third of the Republicans in Congress, and the nomination did him little real good. He fell seriously ill in September 1823 while visiting friends in Orange County, Va. Crawford called his illness “inflammatory rheumatism,” but it might also have included a stroke. Unquestionably, the physician who treated him worsened his condition by large doses of the wrong medicines and by bleedings “copious enough to have killed a giant.” For two months Crawford was almost blind, hands and feet paralyzed, tongue thickened and almost inarticulate. But he made a partial recovery, and in November 1823 returned to his duties in Washington. In May 1824 he suffered a serious relapse, which in the end proved to be fatal to his hopes for the presidency. During most of 1824 few topics aroused greater curiosity and more gossip in Washington than the state of Crawford’s health, and most of the political attacks by the other three presidential candidates were concentrated upon him. During his long illness his chief aide and scribe was his astute oldest daughter, Caroline. By the end of 1824 his mind was strong, his memory correct, his spirits cheerful, and his reasoning clear and rapid; but his vision was still impaired, his articulation imperfect, his hands and feet weak, and his fingers stiff. In the presidential election Crawford got forty-one electoral votes, whereas Andrew Jackson got ninety-nine, John Quincy Adams eighty-four, and Henry Clay thirty-seven. The House had to make a choice, and there Adams got the votes of thirteen states, Jackson got seven, and Crawford got four. At once Adams asked Crawford to remain as secretary of the treasury, but Crawford declined in a friendly note. After returning to his plantation home in Georgia, he gradually regained his strength and by 1827 was well again in all respects save one: his speech never recovered its clarity. In 1825 it was his intention to go back to the Senate as soon as his health was restored, but by 1828 he had decided to postpone his return indefinitely. As he said, the “defect in my articulation would prevent my holding the same rank as when I was a member of that body.” In 1827 Governor George Troup appointed Crawford judge of the northern circuit of the superior court, and the legislature re-elected him to that post in 1828 and again in 1831. From 1827 till his death Crawford was chairman of the annual conference of the superior-court judges— which, inasmuch as Georgia then had no supreme court, functioned as an ad hoc court of appeals. Crawford’s political ambitions did not die readily, and he stayed in intermittent touch with old friends such as Martin Van Buren, Hugh Lawson White, Henry Clay, and Nathaniel Macon. In 1828 Crawford supported Andrew Jackson “as a choice of evils.” In 1830 he took a grim satisfaction in destroying Calhoun’s chances to succeed Jackson in the presidency when he wrote to John Forsyth a long letter, intended for Jackson’s eye, describing the censure or courtmartial that Calhoun as secretary of war had advocated at the time of Jackson’s invasion of Florida in 1818. Crawford protested against the tariff acts of 1828 and 1832, but he denounced nullification as “revolutionary” and scoffed that any claim that nullification was a peaceable or constitutional measure amounted to a “self evident absurdity.” In September I 834 he wrote to Andrew Jackson saying that he would welcome appointment to the vacancy on the United States Supreme Court created by the recent death of Justice William Johnson. Two weeks later, after a single day’s illness, Crawford died of a “spasmodic affection of the heart” at the home of a friend near Elberton, Ga. He was survived by his wife and by five sons and three daughters. He was buried in the family cemetery at Woodlawn.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Crawford’s papers were accidentally burned about 1860. The best book is Chase C. Mooney, William H. Crawford. 1772—1834 (1974). which contains a complete bibliography. Less satisfactory is Philip J. Green, The Life of William H. Crawford (1965). John E. D. Shipp, Giant Days: The Life and Times of William H. Crawford (1909) is useful because of the documents it contains.