Family Background

William Beach Lawrence Jr. was the son of William Beach Lawrence, the distinguished Rhode Island jurist, international-law scholar, diplomat, and politician who served as Lieutenant Governor and Acting Governor of Rhode Island. Through his mother, Esther Rogers Gracie, he was connected to the prominent Gracie family of New York, placing him within the social and commercial elite of the antebellum Northeast.

Unlike his father, whose public career and writings are well documented, the younger William Beach Lawrence lived largely outside public office and appears only sporadically in the historical record.

Siblings (for Context)

His brothers and sisters included:

Isaac Lawrence (1828–1919), lawyer and Democratic candidate for Governor of Rhode Island.

Esther Gracie Lawrence (b. c. 1830), who married Dr. W. L. Wheeler.

Albert Gallatin Lawrence (1836–1887), Union brigadier-general and U.S. Minister to Costa Rica.

Cornelia Beach Lawrence, who married Baron von Klenck of Hanover.

James Gracie King Lawrence (b. 1845), who married Catherine Augusta Le Roy.

Political Views and the 1860 Letter

William Beach Lawrence Jr. emerges most clearly in the fall of 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, through a letter reprinted and criticized by the St. Albans Weekly Messenger (Vermont) on 11 October 1860. The newspaper identified the writer as “not an office-holder,” “a Breckinridge man,” and a resident of Rhode Island, and named him explicitly as William Beach Lawrence. The son appears to hold the same political beliefs as his father; or possibly the father wrote the letter and it was attributed to the son because of the similarity of their beliefs.

The letter:

“He isn’t an office holder—is a Breckenridge man—lives in Rhode Island—his name is —William Beach Lawrence.

He has written a letter to some gentleman who owns a Cotton Mill, and to whom he utters the solemn warning that if Lincoln is elected, “a dissolution of this Confederacy is inevitable.” But he goes further than this,—and thus sets forth his own sentiments:

“Far be it from me to aggravate the complaints on the part of the South. But if a president is elected with the avowed object of creating a servile war, exposing, through missionaries of abolitionism and incendiary publications, (for the distribution of which the Post Offices are to be made subservient,) the property of the planters to conflagration and ruin, and their wives and daughters to horrors infinitely worse than death; no human man, however ardently attached to the Union, could object to their anticipating the fatal blow, not only by refusing obedience to the Federal authorities, but by even invoking, as did our ancestors of the Revolution, foreign aid.”

Now Mr. William Beach Lawrence, we conjure you not to dissolve this Union. People this way think a great deal of it, and certainly won’t allow it to be done if they can prevent such a dire calamity, and, Mr. Lawrence,—they think they can,”

The letter, addressed to the owner of a cotton mill, warned that the election of Abraham Lincoln would make “a dissolution of this Confederacy… inevitable.” It asserted that a Republican victory was undertaken “with the avowed object of creating a servile war,” accused abolitionists of inciting violence through publications distributed via the Post Office, and claimed that Southern planters faced not only economic ruin but threats to their families. The letter argued that under such circumstances no one, however devoted to the Union, could object to Southerners refusing obedience to federal authority and even invoking foreign aid, as had the American Revolutionaries.

The Messenger responded with an editorial rebuke, urging Lawrence not to promote the dissolution of the Union and insisting that Northern public opinion would not permit so catastrophic an outcome.

Attribution and Identification

The identification supplied by the St. Albans Weekly Messenger allows the letter to be attributed with high confidence to William Beach Lawrence Jr., rather than to his father. The explicit description of the writer as “not an office-holder” effectively excludes William Beach Lawrence Sr., whose service as Lieutenant Governor and Acting Governor of Rhode Island was widely known and would almost certainly have been emphasized had he been the author. The characterization of the writer as an active partisan supporter of John C. Breckinridge further supports attribution to the younger Lawrence, a private citizen of political age, rather than to the elder Lawrence, whose public persona was that of a cautious jurist and international legal scholar.

Historical Context and Significance

The letter places William Beach Lawrence Jr. among Northern Democrats and conservative Unionists who, in 1860, echoed Southern fears of abolition, “servile insurrection,” and constitutional overreach. Such views were not uncommon in Northern commercial and professional circles with economic or cultural ties to the South, and they illustrate the depth of sectional anxiety even outside the slaveholding states.

Although William Beach Lawrence Jr. never held public office and left no known descendants, his brief appearance in the political discourse of 1860 provides a revealing contrast with the more measured and institutionally oriented career of his father. It also underscores how members of prominent Northern families could articulate sharply divergent responses to the crisis of the Union on the eve of civil war.