William Porcher Miles

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William Porcher Miles (July 4, 1822–May 11, 1899) was a United States Representative from South Carolina born in Charleston. He attended Wellington School in Charleston and graduated from the College of Charleston in 1842 where he studied law. He was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Charleston.

He was mayor of Charleston from 1855 to 1857; elected as a Democrat to the Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Congresses and served from March 4, 1857, until his retirement in December 1860. He was a member of the Confederate Provisional Congress in Montgomery, AL, in February 1861; member of the Confederate Congress from February 1862 to March 1864; colonel on the staff of General Beauregard; and president of the University of South Carolina at Columbia from 1880 to 1882.

He died in Burnside, Louisiana and was interred in Union Cemetery, Union, Monroe County, West Virginia.

While serving in the Confederate Provisional Congress he chaired the "Committee on the Flag and Seal," which adopted the "Stars and Bars" flag as the national flag of the Confederacy. Miles himself favored his own design, which although rejected by the committee, eventually became the Confederate Battle Flag today known simply as "the Confederate flag."

[edit] Bibliography

Coski, John M. The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-674-01722-6.
Daniel, Ruth McCaskill. William Porcher Miles: Champion of Southern Interests. M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1943.
Miles, William Porcher. The annual address delivered before the Cliosophic Society, March 29, 1847. Charleston: T.W. Haynes, 1847.
———. How to Educate Our Young Lawyers. Address to the law class of the University of Maryland. Columbia, S.C.: The Presbyterian Publishing House, 1882.
———. Oration delivered before the Fourth of July Association. By Wm. Porcher Miles on the Fourth of July 1849. Charleston: James S. Burges, 1849.
Smith, Clarence McKittrick, Jr. William Porcher Miles, Progressive Mayor of Charleston, 1855-1857. Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association 12 (1942): 30-39.
Walther, Eric. H. "Abstractions: William Porcher Miles." In The Fire-Eaters, pp. 270-96. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.