William Ballard Preston

William Ballard Preston was born at Smithfield and became a Virginia political leader whose career ranged from the Virginia House of Delegates and the Virginia Senate to the U.S. Congress, where he served alongside fellow Whig Abraham Lincoln, and to the post of Secretary of the Navy under Presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. In 1832, after Nat Turner’s Insurrection, he supported an unsuccessful effort for gradual slave emancipation. As a delegate to the Virginia Convention in April 1861, Preston, a conditional unionist, proposed sending a committee to President Lincoln to learn his policy toward the Confederate States, served on that committee, and met with Lincoln in Washington on April 12 and 13 as the bombardment of Fort Sumter began and constitutional questions over federal authority were debated. After the committee reported that Lincoln’s approach was hostile, and after Fort Sumter fell and Lincoln called for 75,000 troops from the states, Preston reluctantly introduced Virginia’s formal resolution to secede from the Union on April 16; it passed on April 17 by a vote of 88-55. He later served in the Provisional Confederate Congress and then in the Confederate Senate until his death in 1862.

Blacksburg, Virginia · United States