William Parish Chilton (August 10, 1810 – January 20, 1871) was an American politician and author who served as a Deputy from Alabama to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1862.
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Early life
Called Will Chilton, he was born in Columbia, Kentucky, on August 10, 1810, the ninth child of Rev. Thomas John Chilton (a slave-owning Baptist minister) and Margaret Bledsoe, sister of Jesse Bledsoe. He was a younger brother of Thomas Chilton, Representative from Kentucky and ghost writer of an "autobiography" by David Crockett. When Chilton was 14 months old his large family was among the victims of the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes. As a teenager he left home to live in Tennessee with an older sister, Jane, and her husband Charles Metcalfe. He read law with Return J. Meigs III in Athens, Tennessee, passed the bar in 1828, and began to practice law.