William Smith (South Carolina politician, born 1762)

William Smith (c. 1762 – June 26, 1840), often Judge Smith or Judge Wm. Smith in written records of his era, was an American lawyer, judge, plantation owner, and politician. He served two discontinuous terms in the United States Senate, from 1816 to 1823, and from 1826 to 1831, representing the state of South Carolina. Smith was one of the major figures of South Carolina politics during the first third of the 19th century, and formed an intense rivalry with John C. Calhoun, arguing against Calhoun's nationalist views, and advocating for states' rights. He was also a leading pro-slavery voice in the Senate. He fiercely attacked the then-feeble movement to abolish slavery in the United States, and spent his legislative career on both the state and federal levels advocating for the perpetuation of the slave trade and the expansion of legal slavery across the continent. He was also vituperative opponent of government spending on infrastructure or public development ("internal improvements"), to the point that he counterintuitively voted against the admission of Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri as new U.S. states where slavery would be legal, apparently because he thought the U.S. government was being greedy in its reserve of land for public use, in usurpation of the power of the citizen and the existing states.

Smith was awarded electoral votes for the vice presidency in two separate presidential elections. When Smith's lifelong friend Andrew Jackson became president he tried twice to persuade Smith to take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court but Smith declined on both occasions.

Smith left both the Senate and South Carolina in the 1830s, in part because Calhoun been victorious in their power struggle. Smith bought and developed vast tracts of land in the west. His investments were well-chosen and ultimately wildly profitable in part because he was privileged with inside information. U.S. Indian Commissioner plenipotentiary Jackson had advised him to invest in the vicinity of the Tennessee River before land cession treaties had been signed with the Chickasaw and Cherokee, and Smith himself was a member of the Private Land Claims committee that oversaw real estate claims and disputes that had arisen in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase. Smith developed massive plantation complexes in Alabama and along the Red River of the South in Louisiana, as well as acquiring hundreds of slaves to plant those lands with the profitable cash crops of cotton and sugar. Once settled in Huntsville, Smith served in the Alabama state legislature until his death. When he died in 1840 he was said to be "almost a millionaire in wealth," which would be a fortune of approximately $30 million in 2023. He was long remembered for commissioning grand homes for himself in South Carolina and Alabama, including the now-demolished Calhoun House in central Huntsville, which was named not for his South Carolina rival but for his grandson-in-law and successor in grand-scale enslavement, Meredith Calhoun.