William L. Sharkey

William Lewis Sharkey was born on July 12, 1798, in Sumner County, Tennessee. When he was six, he moved with his family in 1804 to Warren County, Mississippi. He was likely privately educated and read the law as an apprentice with an established firm. In 1822, he was admitted to the bar in Natchez, Mississippi.

In 1825, Sharkey moved to Vicksburg, a river port city. He was later elected for a single term in the Mississippi House of Representatives, where he served from 1828 to 1829.

He served briefly in 1832 as a circuit court judge before being elected to the High Court of Errors and Appeals of Mississippi (today the Supreme Court of Mississippi), where he sat as a justice for 18 years until his resignation in 1851.

Sharkey was appointed Secretary of War by then-President Millard Fillmore; however, he declined the position. He did accept an appointment as statesman, and from 1851 to 1854, he served as United States consul in Havana, Cuba.[1]

A member of the Whig Party, Sharkey was vehemently opposed to the secession of Mississippi in 1861. Throughout the Civil War, he remained a staunch Southern Unionist and, according to one source, was "tolerated by his Confederate neighbors only because of his towering reputation as a jurist."

Governor Charles Clark appointed him in 1865 as a commissioner (along with William Yerger) to confer on behalf of the state with President Andrew Johnson. On June 13, 1865, Johnson appointed Sharkey the state's provisional governor.[2] Sharkey left office with the election of Benjamin G. Humphreys in October.

He was elected Senator in 1865 but was denied his seat by Congress.

Sharkey died in Washington, D.C., in 1873. He is interred in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi.