William Porcher Miles (July 4, 1822 – May 11, 1899) was an American politician who was among the ardent states' rights advocates, supporters of slavery, and Southern secessionists who came to be known as the "Fire-Eaters." He is notable for having designed the most popular variant of the Confederate flag, originally rejected as the national flag in 1861 but adopted as a battle flag by the Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee before it was reincorporated.
Born in South Carolina, he showed little early interest in politics, and his early career included the study of law and a tenure as a mathematics professor at the Charleston College from 1843 to 1855. In the late 1840s, as sectional issues roiled South Carolina politics, Miles began to speak up on sectional issues. He opposed both the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850. From then on, Miles would look at any northern efforts to restrict slavery as justification for secession.
Miles was elected as mayor of Charleston in 1855 and served in the United States House of Representatives from 1857 until South Carolina seceded, in December 1860. He was a member of the state secession convention and a representative from South Carolina at the Confederate Convention in Montgomery, Alabama, which established the provisional government and constitution for the Confederate States. He represented his state in the Confederate House of Representatives during the American Civil War.
Early life
Miles was born in Walterboro, South Carolina, to James Saunders Miles and Sarah Bond Worley Miles. His ancestors were French Huguenots and his grandfather, Major Felix Warley, fought in the American Revolution. His primary education came at Southworth School and he later attended Willington Academy where John C. Calhoun had matriculated a generation earlier. Miles enrolled at Charleston College in 1838 where he met future secession advocates James De Bow and William Henry Trescot. Miles graduated in 1842 and in 1843 he briefly studied law with a local attorney before returning to his alma mater as a mathematics professor.
Throughout the 1840s Miles showed little interest in active politics. He did not participate in the Bluffton Movement in 1844, although he did recognize that the 1846 Wilmot Proviso threatened his concepts of "southern rights, the equality of the states under the Constitution, and the honor of a slaveholding people." In 1849 Miles was invited to speak at a Fourth of July celebration in Charleston.
In this speech, Miles attacked the principles behind the Wilmot Proviso. While he believed that slavery was a "Divine institution," he was willing to accept differences of opinion as long as antislavery advocates returned the favor by admitting that slavery was "recognized and countenanced" by the Constitution. To Miles, Northerners, in their efforts to legislate restrictions on slavery, were not simply raising an issue of constitutional interpretation. Miles argued: