Williams Carter Wickham (September 21, 1820 – July 23, 1888) was a Virginia lawyer and politician. A plantation owner who served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly, Wickham also became a delegate to the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861, where he voted against secession, but after fellow delegates and voters approved secession, he joined the Confederate States Army and rose to the rank of cavalry general, then became a Confederate States Congressman near the end of the American Civil War. Later, Wickham became a Republican and helped rebuild Virginia's infrastructure after gaining control of the heavily damaged Virginia Central Railroad, which he repaired and helped merge into the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway company. Cooperating with financier Collis Huntington, Wickham developed coal resources and the Newport News Shipyard. He was also again elected to the Virginia Senate. His son Henry T. Wickham also became a lawyer and would work with his father and eventually twice become the speaker pro tempore of the Virginia Senate.
Early and family life
Wickham was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of William Fanning Wickham and Anne Butler (née Carter) Wickham. His paternal grandfather John Wickham was a prominent Richmond lawyer who had moved from New York state to Richmond following the American Revolutionary War. His great-grandfather had been an Anglican minister in New York state, so he had relatives there. On his mother's side, Wickham descended from the First Families of Virginia, specifically the Nelson and Carter families prominent in the Virginia Colony.
One of Wickham's maternal great-grandfathers, Gen. Thomas Nelson, Jr., had signed the Declaration of Independence as a Virginia delegate and served as governor of Virginia during the American Revolutionary War. Thomas "Scotch Tom" Nelson was one of the founders of Yorktown in the late 17th century. Wickham was also descended from Robert "King" Carter (1663–1732), who served as an acting royal governor of Virginia and was one of its wealthiest landowners (and largest slaveowners) 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 spent much of his youth at the plantation, Hickory Hill, 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.
Wickham received a private education appropriate to his class, then traveled to Charlottesville for further studies. He graduated from the University of Virginia.
He married Lucy Penn Taylor
In 1858, as planters responded to John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Wickham recruited a cavalry company in Hanover County, the "Hanover Dragoons" and accepted a commission as captain of Virginia volunteer militia.
In 1861 Henrico County voters elected Wickham as one of their delegates to the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861. A Unionist, Wickham twice voted against the articles of secession. However, unlike fellow Confederate officer and railroad leader William Mahone, Wickham was initially unable to secure capital or financing in Virginia, or from Europeans.
Turning to New York City, Wickham worked with 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 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.
After Huntington assumed the presidency, Wickham remained with the C&O as vice-president from 1869 to 1878, when the company went into foreclosure following a national panic, with Wickham as receiver.
thumb|[[Statue of Williams Carter Wickham sculpted by Edward V. Valentine and placed in Monroe Park]]
Death and legacy
Wickham died of heart failure on July 23, 1888, at his Richmond office, and was interred in Hickory Hill Cemetery in Hanover County near Ashland. Not long after Wickham's death, employees of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, "all of whom were sincerely devoted to the deceased, whose memory they tenderly cherish and revere," initiated an effort to erect a bronze statue in his memory. As of September 1889, a committee consisting of ex-Senator John Callahan, C.T. Dabney, W.B. Waldron, E.C. Meredith, and W.J. Binford partnered with sculptor Edward V. Valentine to create and erect a statue of Williams Carter Wickham so as to "perpetuate the heroic life and gallant deeds of the late Gen. William C. Wickham." The general's comrades and C&O employees gave a statue of Williams Carter Wickham to the City of Richmond in 1891, which was placed in Monroe Park. Two of the general's descendants, Clayton and Will Wickham, called for the statue's removal in the aftermath of Charlottesville, Virginia's 2017 Unite the Right rally, and participants in 2020's George Floyd protests defaced and toppled the statue from its pedestal.