William D. Lyles was born on July 3, 1817, in Fairfield District, South Carolina. He received medical training in Baltimore, Maryland, before starting his medical practice in Pickensville, Alabama. According to an early biographer, his “practice rapidly became large and lucrative.” He got married in the 1830s, and he had at least three children: John, born around 1839; Edwin, born around 1842; and William, born around 1844. He moved to Macon, Mississippi, around 1840, and he “took high rank as a physician” there.

 

His wife died in the mid-1840s, and he married Mary Bibb on January 9, 1845. They had at least six children: Martha, born around 1846; Mary, born around 1848; Elizabeth, born around 1849; Victor, born around 1853; Thomas, born around 1856; and Fanny, born around 1859. Lyles also operated a farm, and he enslaved at least six people. By 1860, he owned $4,000 of real estate and $8,000 of personal property.

 

Lyles supported the Union Party in the early 1850s. In November 1850, a local writer described him as a “man of marked talent, and of unquestionable patriotism.” At a Unionist meeting that month, he delivered a speech that “would make a disunionist feel extremely absurd, and a unionist entirely triumphant.” He served as a delegate to the Union Party’s 1851 state convention, and he reportedly “became the pivotal point around which was rallied a large following of friends.” A friend noted that he “became a leader, or The leader, of The Union party here.” He supported American Party candidate Millard Fillmore in the 1856 presidential election, and friends regarded him as a “consistent union Man.”

 

He supported Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge in the presidential election of 1860, and he delivered several political speeches. As he later insisted, “he regarded [Breckinridge] as in favour of the Union & opposed to secession…he thought at the time he was the preferred candidate in the Southern states & stood the best chance of Election.” He was a cooperationist during the secession crisis, but he ultimately sided with the Confederacy. He served as a surgeon and medical director in the Confederate army.

 

He returned to Macon after the war, and voters elected him to the state senate in 1865. He moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in the late 1860s, and he died in Lauderdale County, Mississippi, in November 1873.