William Campbell Preston (1794–1860), attorney, public official, and educator, was born in Philadelphia, the son of Francis Preston, a congressman from Abingdon. He began his studies at Washington College (later Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, received an A.B. in 1812 from South Carolina College (later the University of South Carolina) in Columbia, read law in Richmond under William Wirt, and completed his legal education at the University of Edinburgh. Licensed to practice in Virginia in 1820, Preston moved back to Columbia by 1824, where he continued to practice law and became involved in politics. He was a member of the lower house of the South Carolina legislature, 1828–33, and in the latter year he was elected to fill a vacant United States Senate seat. Preston entered the Senate as a Democrat and resigned in 1842 as a Whig. An eloquent orator, he was a stalwart defender of slavery, states’ rights, and Nullification, and a bitter opponent of Andrew Jackson. Preston served as president of South Carolina College and taught classics there from 1846 until a stroke caused him to retire in 1851. He was a trustee of the college until 1857. Preston donated his extensive personal library to found the Columbia Lyceum and died in that city (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; O’Neall, Bench and Bar of South Carolina description begins John Belton O’Neall, Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina, 1859, 2 vols. description ends , 2:531–5; Minnie Clare Yarborough, ed., The Reminiscences of William C. Preston [1933]; ScU: Preston Papers; Charleston Tri-Weekly Courier, 24, 26 May, 16 June 1860).

TJ’s favor of the 5th current, covering his letter of that date to Thomas Mann Randolph, has not been found and is not recorded in SJL.