American politician William Harris Crawford (1772-1834) was a leader of the Old Republican wing of the Jeffersonian-Republican party.

William H. Crawford was born in western Virginia on Feb. 24, 1772. At the end of the American Revolution, William's family moved to South Carolina but by 1786 settled near Augusta, Ga. For several years Crawford worked on the family farm and acquired the rudiments of an education. By 1804, having built a respectable law practice, he married and established a homestead (later expanded into a plantation) near Lexington, Ga.

Politics rather than law, however, was to be the focus of Crawford's considerable ambitions. Large in stature, handsome, magnanimous and affable though somewhat coarse, and with a limitless store of entertaining anecdotes, Crawford quickly became a popular figure. Building his career as the upland leader of a powerful coalition of well-to-do and conservative merchant and planter interests, Crawford secured election to the Georgia Legislature...