William Simpson Oldham, Sr.

Who was William Simpson Oldham, Sr.?

William Simpson Oldham, Sr. was a politician in the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War.

Simpson was born in Franklin County, Tennessee. He served in the Arkansas House of Representatives in 1838 and was later a Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1842. He represented Texas in the Provisional Confederate Congress from 1861 to 1862 and was a senator in the First Confederate Congress and the Second Confederate Congress from 1862 to 1865.

In the 1994 Harry Turtledove alternative history novel Guns of the South, A "Congressman Oldham" from Texas is mentioned as sponsoring a bill to re-enslave freedmen in a victorious Confederacy. Since the setting was the time of the Second Confederate Congress, it is likely that Turtledove was referring to Senator Oldham.