Williams Carter Wickham

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Williams Carter Wickham bigraphy, stories - Confederate Army general and american politician

Williams Carter Wickham : biography

September 21, 1820 – July 23, 1888

Williams Carter Wickham (September 21, 1820 – July 23, 1888) was a lawyer, judge, politician, and an important Confederate cavalry general who fought in the Virginia campaigns during the American Civil War. After the war, he held various political posts and was the President of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway company.

Death, legacy

Wickham was interred in Hickory Hill Cemetery near Ashland, Virginia. A statue of Williams Carter Wickham was given to the City of Richmond by the general’s comrades and employees of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in 1891 and was placed in Monroe Park.

Postbellum activities

After the surrender of the Confederacy, Wickham was active in improving harmony between the states and reorganizing Virginia’s economy, which had been ruined by the war. He became a Republican and voted in 1872 for General Ulysses S. Grant as a member of the Electoral College of Virginia.

In November 1865, at the conclusion of the War, he was elected president of the Virginia Central Railroad, which had been one of the most heavily damaged during the War. In 1868, when the Virginia Central merged with the Covington and Ohio Railroad to form the new Chesapeake and Ohio, Wickham was retained as the new company’s president. In the new capacity, he was anxious to complete a railroad line to the Ohio River, long a dream of Virginians. However, unlike fellow Confederate officer and railroad leader William Mahone had done, he was unable to secure capital or financing in Virginia, or from Europeans. Turning to New York City, he was successful in attracting an investment group headed by Collis P. Huntington. Fresh from recent completion of the western portion of the U.S. transcontinental railroad as a member of the so-called "Big Four", Huntington joined the effort, became the C&O’s new president. His contacts and reputation helped obtain $15 million of funding from New York financiers for the project, which eventually cost $23 million to complete. The final spike ceremony for the long line from Richmond to the Ohio River was held on January 29, 1873 at Hawk’s Nest railroad bridge in the New River Valley, near the town of Ansted in Fayette County, West Virginia.

Throughout the years after the Civil War, while developing railroads, Wickham also maintained an active political life. He maintained his offices in Richmond and his residence in Hanover County. He was elected chairman of the Hanover County, Virginia Board of Supervisors in 1871 and as a Senator in the upper house of the Virginia General Assembly in 1883. He was an officer of the C&O and held all of these other positions at the time of his death on July 23, 1888 at his office in Richmond.

Early life and career

Wickham was the son of William Fanning Wickham and Anne Butler (née Carter) Wickham. His paternal grandfather was John Wickham, the constitutional lawyer. On his mother’s side, he descended from historic roots, as the Nelson and Carter families were each First Families of Virginia, prominent in the Virginia Colony.

Wickham’s great-grandfather, Gen. Thomas Nelson, Jr., was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and a governor of Virginia during the American Revolutionary War. Other ancestors include Thomas "Scotch Tom" Nelson who was one of the founders of Yorktown in the late 17th century. He was also a descendant of Robert "King" Carter (1663–1732), who served as an acting royal governor of Virginia and was one of its wealthiest landowners in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. His mother was a first cousin of Robert E. Lee, whose mother Anne Hill (née Carter) Lee, was born at Shirley Plantation.

Wickham was born in Richmond, Virginia, but spent much of his youth on his father’s plantation, Hickory Hill, which is located about north of Richmond and east of Ashland in Hanover County. Hickory Hill was long an outlying appendage to Shirley Plantation, much of it having come into possession of the Carter family by a deed dated March 2, 1734.