page_title: Samuel May Williams
section_title: Mercantile business
hierarchical_section_title: Samuel May Williams / Career / Galveston / Mercantile business
caption_attribution_description: English: The Texas Times (Galveston, Texas) publishes wharfage rates, Feb 18, 1843
context_page_description: Samuel May Williams was an American businessman, politician, and close associate of Stephen F. Austin, who was an Anglo-American colonizer of Mexican Texas. As a teenager, Williams started working in the family's mercantile business in Baltimore. He spent time in South America and New Orleans, fleeing the latter because of debts. He landed in Mexican Texas in 1822, having learned French and Spanish. Stephen F. Austin hired Williams for his colony in 1824. Williams first worked as a clerk, and later assumed the title of secretary to the ayuntamiento, a local government established for the colony by the Mexican state of Coahuila and Texas. He worked for Austin for about a decade.
  In 1834, Williams quit as secretary of the Austin Colony to work as a merchant, then formalized a partnership with Thomas F. McKinney. The next year he also made deals with the provincial government in Monclova for a bank charter and for large tracts of land in Texas. At that time he was a representative in the Coahuila and Texas legislature. However, by 1836, Williams and his partner, Thomas F. McKinney, supported the Texas Revolution against Mexico.
context_section_description: McKinney and Williams were investors and co-founders of the Galveston City Company with Michel B. Menard. Menard hatched the development scheme in 1833, coordinating to acquire a Mexican title to bayside land at the east end of Galveston Island from Juan Seguin. The next year Galveston City Company purchased from Seguin a league and a labor, or about 4,605 acres. The McKinney and Williams investment was initially a fifty-percent share. In December 1836, the Republic of Texas announced it would validate this title in exchange for $50,000 in cash or merchandise. While there is no evidence of any payment to the Texas government, this action transferred land on the east end of the island to the Galveston City Company. Both Williams and McKinney joined the company's board of directors, and voted with the board to make lots available for sale on April 20, 1838. 
  McKinney and Williams relocated its headquarters from Quintana to Galveston in 1838. The firm already operated a diverse set of businesses on the island: they owned a race track, operated a tavern and stables, and offered houses for let, and they owned the Tremont hotel, for which Henry Howell Williams was the managing partner.  The Tremont continued operating in Galveston through 1865.  Their principal developments were their three-story warehouse and the wharf at Twenty-fourth Street. In 1839, McKinney and Williams received goods from Liverpool, England, and loaded the same ship with Texas cotton, establishing direct trade between England and the Republic of Texas. McKinney and Williams divested their commission business in 1842, selling it to Henry Howell Williams, who ran it as a division of his commission house in Baltimore.
  In 1839, Williams represented Galveston County in the lower house of the Congress of the Republic of Texas. McKinney and Williams used their commission house to support the Williams campaign. They offered to buy Texas Treasury notes (redbacks) for 50 cents on the dollar just as rival commission houses offered only 37.5 cents on the dollar. Substantively, he campaigned based on a conservative monetary policy in response to the Republic's devaluing currency. 
  Williams once used his position in the House to assert the interests of the Galveston City Company, challenging the election of John M. Allen, the town's first mayor. He led the passage of a bill to change Galveston's charter, which imposed a requirement of land ownership in order to vote in municipal elections. Effectively this reduced the number of eligible voters by half, and this paved the way for the "conservatives" to elect John W. Walton over the "liberal" John M. Allen in 1840. Allen transported the town's archives and stored them in his home, which was guarded by two artillery pieces. McKinney recruited a group of men to recapture the archives, and Allen surrendered them without incident.
  Williams chaired the finance committee for the lower house, and served as a member of the naval affairs committee. Williams allied with Sam Houston's faction against President Mirabeau Lamar's spending proposals and his Indian policy. He issued a finance report and proposal on January 12, 1840, which included two Hamiltonian recommendations: the recall of older debt instruments and stopping further issuance of unsecured debt. In addition, he proposed that Texas only accept payments in cash from importers and suggested a broad fifteen percent tariff on imported goods. This proposal was a political success, as all of its recommendations were adopted. However, inflation continued into 1841, as Texas redbacks traded at 37.5 cents on the dollar before he went to Austin and later depreciated to 12.5 cents. He sponsored a successful bill which established a state charter for the city of Galveston and another to build a local lighthouse. Williams promoted a bill to emancipate Cary McKinney, a slave of his business partner. Cary was just one of two enslaved persons emancipated in recognition of service to the Republic of Texas. Though Cary's family was not emancipated, he was able to reunite his family by 
caption: Rates at the Galveston Wharf, 1843 (via Portal to Texas History)
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