Abraham J. Williams (1781–1839)

Missouri’s third governor, Abraham J. Williams served in that office for less than six months. He is also the only person to have advanced to the office of governor from the position of president pro tempore of the Senate.

Elected to the Missouri Senate in 1822, Williams was the first resident of Boone County elected to that office. He won reelection in 1824. During his second term, the Senate chose him as its president pro tempore. Upon the death of Frederick Bates on August 4, 1825, Williams became governor, since the lieutenant governor, Benjamin H. Reeves, had previously resigned. In a constitutionally mandated special election held on December 8, 1825, the voters elected John Miller as the new governor. Williams stepped down following Miller’s inauguration on January 20, 1826.

Williams’s short term as governor was uneventful. The General Assembly was not in session, and he made no major political pronouncements, nor did he offer any recommendations for governmental action. Williams was not a candidate in the special gubernatorial election of 1825.

During his few years in the Missouri Senate, Williams appears to have been a relatively important member of that body. He served on the committees of accounts and education, both major committees. He also achieved recognition for his skill in presiding over the Senate. Williams, however, lost in his bid for reelection in 1826. He held no later public office.

Williams centered his lifelong career more around business and farming than politics. Born in Hardy County, Virginia (now Grant County, West Virginia), on February 26, 1781, he entered life with a serious physical impairment: he was born with only one leg. Williams did not allow this handicap to interfere with an active and productive life.

Arriving in Missouri sometime between 1816 and 1820, Williams first located in Franklin. In 1820 he and a partner, James Harris, operated a tobacco warehouse in Nashville, in the southern part of Boone County. In the early 1820s Williams moved to Columbia, where he opened a dry goods store, allegedly the first of its kind in the town. He bought land in Boone County and engaged in large-scale farming operations. According to the 1830 census, one person, a woman, was enslaved by him in that year. In recognition for his extensive farm operations, Williams was chosen in 1835 as the president of the first agriculture fair organized in Columbia.

Without any encouragement on his part, Williams’s name was placed before the General Assembly as a candidate for election to the US Senate in 1832. However, 1832 was Thomas Hart Benton’s year, and the popular senator won a third term with an overwhelming margin.

Abraham J. Williams died on December 30, 1839, at the age of fifty-eight. He had not married, and appears to have been a private person. Even so, he lived a strenuous and successful life and contributed to the development of frontier Missouri as a businessman, a public servant, and a farmer. He was buried in the Columbia Cemetery.