John T. Morgan

John Tyler Morgan (June 20, 1824 – June 11, 1907) was an American politician who was a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War and later was elected for six terms as the U.S. senator (1877–1907) from the state of Alabama. A prominent slaveholder before the Civil War, he became the second Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama during the Reconstruction era.

Amid the fractious debates at the Alabama constitutional convention, a 36-year-old Morgan defended slavery—including the transatlantic slave trade—as a morally-uplifting and Christian institution. As a proud slaveholder, he publicly declared his reasons for advocating Alabama's secession from the Union in a speech on January 25, 1861: "The Ordinance of Secession rests, in a great measure, upon our assertion of a right to enslave the African race, or, what amounts to the same thing, to hold them in slavery." At the close of this same speech in 1861, Morgan envisioned a future slave-holding territory spanning the Gulf of Mexico and the islands of the Caribbean.

American Civil War

thumb|left|upright=0.8|A studio portrait of Morgan taken circa 1860-1869

After Alabama seceded from the Union and the commencement of the Civil War, the 37-year-old Morgan enlisted as a private in the Cahaba Rifles, which volunteered its services in the Confederate Army and was assigned to the 5th Alabama Infantry. He first saw action in a skirmish preceding the First Battle of Manassas in the summer of 1861.

As the war progressed, Morgan rose to major and then lieutenant colonel. He served under Col. Robert E. Rodes, a future Confederate general. Morgan resigned his commission in 1862 and returned to Alabama, where in August he recruited a new regiment, the 51st Alabama Partisan Rangers, becoming its colonel. He led it at the Battle of Murfreesborough, operating in cooperation with the cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

When Rodes was promoted to major general in May 1863 and given a division in the Army of Northern Virginia, Morgan declined an offer to command Rodes's old brigade, and instead remained in the Western Theater, leading troops at the Battle of Chickamauga. On November 16, 1863, he was appointed as a brigadier general of cavalry and participated in the Knoxville Campaign. His brigade consisted of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 9th, and 51st Alabama Cavalry regiments.

His men were routed and dispersed by Federal cavalry on January 27, 1864. He was reassigned to a new command and fought in the Atlanta campaign. Subsequently, his men harassed William T. Sherman's troops during the March to the Sea. Soon after, he was stripped of his command due to drunkenness and reassigned to administrative duty in Demopolis, Alabama. At the time of the Confederacy's collapse and the end of the war, Morgan attempted with little success to organize Alabama black troops for home defense.

Reconstruction era

thumb|right|upright|Morgan and [[Edmund Winston Pettus (pictured) played key roles in overturning Reconstruction efforts in postbellum Alabama.]]

After the war ended, Morgan resumed his law practice in Selma, Alabama. He became the affluent legal representative for the widely-loathed railroad companies. By 1867, angered by formerly enslaved persons serving as state legislators, Morgan began to play a highly public role against the Republican Reconstruction.

Soon after, Morgan toured throughout the American South giving race-baiting speeches and urging fellow Southerners to refuse all compromise with Reconstruction. Aligning himself with the Bourbon Democrats and employing their electoral strategy, Morgan wrote numerous newspaper editorials urging white Alabama voters to "redeem" their state from Republican control and to unite against African-Americans for "self-preservation."

Amid his political struggle against Reconstruction in 1872, Morgan succeeded James H. Clanton as the second Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. According to Alabama Representative Robert Stell Heflin, Morgan and fellow Klan member Edmund W. Pettus became the ringleaders of white supremacy in the state who, more than anyone else, "resisted and finally broke down and destroyed the reconstruction policy which followed the Civil War."

When President Ulysses S. Grant dispatched his U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman to vigorously prosecute Alabama Klan under the Enforcement Acts, Morgan was arrested and jailed. After the demise of the first Ku Klux Klan, Morgan and Pettus continued to resist Reconstruction efforts and to reassert white supremacy in Alabama. Morgan took an active part in opposing all attempts to redress the political and socioeconomic legacies of slavery in Alabama.

Due to his efforts to suppress African-Americans from exercising their political rights and to vouchsafe white supremacy in Alabama during the Reconstruction era, Morgan became a well-known public figure in national politics and subsequently became a presidential elector-at-large on the Democratic Samuel J. Tilden ticket in 1876. Party insiders favored him to win Alabama's seat to the United States Senate in that year.

Senatorship

Following his election as U.S. Senator for the state of Alabama in 1876, Morgan was reelected five times in 1882, 1888, 1894, 1900, and 1906. He served as chairman of Committee on Rules (46th U.S. Congress), the Committee on Foreign Relations (53rd U.S. Congress), the Committee on Interoceanic Canals (56th and 57th Congresses), and the Committee on Public Health and National Quarantine (59th U.S. Congress).

He became Alabama's leading political spokesperson for nearly half-a-century. For much of his senatorial tenure, he remained aligned with the Bourbon Democrats, and he served in the Senate alongside his close friend Edmund W. Pettus, a former Confederate general and Klan member.

Throughout his senatorship, Morgan staunchly labored for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was intended to prevent the denial of voting rights based on race. He frequently urged the disenfranchisement of black citizens in every U.S. state, and he is accordingly credited by scholars with laying the foundation of the Jim Crow era. In a 1890 speech, Morgan declared that, when black residents entered any area, it became necessary to "deny the right of suffrage entirely to every human being." He likened such mass disenfranchisement to having "to burn down the barn to get rid of the rats."

Morgan opposed the passage of a woman suffrage's amendment, arguing it would draw a “line of political demarcation through a man’s household”. He warned that women's suffrage would “open to the intrusion of politics and politicians that sacred circle of the family where no man should be permitted to intrude". he introduced the landmark 1893 Sayre Act, disenfranchising black Alabamians for nearly a century and ushering in the racially segregated Jim Crow period in the state. In 1909, Governor Braxton Bragg Comer appointed Sayre as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama. Like his uncle, Sayre was a Bourbon Democrat.

Sayre's daughter and Morgan's grand-niece was Zelda Sayre, the neo-Confederate wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote The Great Gatsby. Raised by two white supremacist parents, Over time, Zelda's political views evolved from neo-Confederate beliefs toward an espousal of fascism as a political creed.

In contrast to her mother Zelda Sayre, Morgan's great-grand-niece Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald felt guilt and embarrassment over her family's political legacy of white supremacy. She devoted herself to voter outreach for black citizens in Alabama, although many black citizens living in Montgomery declined her social overtures.

Memorialization

In 1913, a memorial arch was built on the grounds of the Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Selma, Alabama, to honor U.S. Senators Morgan and Pettus, both former Grand Dragons of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
In 1953, amid national tension over the ongoing Brown v. Board of Education litigation, Morgan was elected by vote to membership in the Alabama Hall of Fame.
In 1965, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, white segregationists founded the John T. Morgan Academy in Selma. The segregation academy held its classes in Morgan's old house until a new campus was built in 1967.
Morgan Hall on the campus of the University of Alabama, which houses the English Department, was named for him. On December 18, 2015, Morgan's portrait was removed from the building, and in 2016 the university was pondering the results of a petition to rename the building for Harper Lee. By June 2020, the Alabama Board of Trustees had finally decided to study the names of buildings on campus and consider changing them. On September 17, 2020, they voted to remove his name from the building.

References

Citations

Works cited

External links

Men of Mark in America Biography & Portrait
Edmund Pettus and John Tyler Morgan, late senators from Alabama, Memorial addresses (1909)