Father of Mary Williams Pugh, and according to jung2006, a planter who briefly removed to Texas from Lafourche and then returned as a major promoter of coolie labor in postbellum Louisiana.¹

Refugee in Texas

Williams and his daughter fled to Texas after the Union movements on the Bayou Lafourche in October 1862, and apparently 60 slaves ran away on the journey. Yet he was assessed taxes on 44 enslaved people in the 1864 Cherokee County Tax Rolls, and considered himself, according to Mary, “fortunate for saving what he has done.”²

A letter to Robert Campbell Martin, Sr. in October 1864 suggests he was in Larissa and familiar with the Salt Works there.³ Williams hired out slaves to J. S. O. Brooks, and he appears to have worked with his son-in-law Richard Pugh at one of the area Salt Works.⁴

At the end of 1864, Williams rented two farms in Cherokee County for 1865.⁵ From there he appears to have grown corn that he supplied to the Confederate States Chemical Laboratory in Tyler.

After the War

In 1869, Williams’s firm became a broker for Chinese laborers among Louisiana planters, and, after serving as a delegate to a Memphis convention on “coolies,” Williams sent his son Frank Williams directly to Hong Kong with Tye Kim Orr to recruit. According to jung2006, Williams’s firm was “likely among the first to transport coolies from Cuba to Louisiana” (118).

Ultimately, Williams and Orr had little success in China, though; it took them a year to recruit approximately 200 laborers, who sailed from China to Louisiana in 1870.⁶ An article in the November 24, 1870, issue of the New Iberia Sugar Bowl reported on these laborers:

Mr. Williams works his plantation with Chinamen, who give him entire satisfaction. There has been some sickness among them, but while at first they had two physicians—one Chinese and the other American—the former returned to San Francisco, and they have entire confidence in the latter. Mr. W. says there are orders in the hands of agents at San Francisco for ten times more Chinamen than can be obtained, although sixteen dollars per month is offered. Many have been brought from Martinique, but they are not as good workmen as fresh Chinese. He had endeavored, however, to make arrangements with the captain of a vessel to bring the Martinique Chinamen here, but failed.⁷

Jung notes that even the one shipment of laborers in 1870 cost Williams $30,000—an amount of capital only available to elite sugar planters (154). That expense also made the New Iberia Sugar Bowl suspect, in September 1871, that Williams would not “make anything on this crop, as his expenses in getting Chinamen were very great.” But the same article also praised his Leighton plantation, managed by D. A. Long, as “one of the best plantations on the Bayou,” due partly to its effective use of “71 Chinamen” and “forty negroes.”⁸ In November, the paper reported that Williams had “recently sent up from New Orleans to his Leighton plantation, a mile about Thibodeaux, about forty more Chinamen, to replace some of those who had left his place. Mr. Williams informs us that those who left him are anxious to return; for when other planters find out that they have broken their contract with him they refuse to have anything to do with them. This, certainly, is praiseworthy action on the part of the planters, and if the same course was generally pursued toward negro laborers, there would be much less trouble everywhere on plantations.”⁹