John T. Morgan | |
|---|---|
 Morgan in 1877 | |
| United States Senator fromAlabama | |
| In office March 4, 1877 – June 11, 1907 | |
| Preceded by | George Goldthwaite |
| Succeeded by | John H. Bankhead |
| Personal details | |
| Born | John Tyler Morgan (1824-06-20)June 20, 1824 |
| Died | June 11, 1907(1907-06-11) (aged 82) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Signature | .png) |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  Confederate States |
| Branch/service |  Confederate States Army |
| Years of service | 1861–1865 |
| Rank |  Brigadier-General |
| Battles/wars | American Civil War |
John Tyler Morgan (June 20, 1824 – June 11, 1907) was an American politician who was abrigadier general in theConfederate States Army during theAmerican Civil War and later was elected for six terms as theU.S. senator (1877–1907) from the state ofAlabama.[1] A prominent slaveholder before the Civil War,[2] he became the secondGrand Dragon of theKu Klux Klan in Alabama during theReconstruction era.[3][4][5][6] Morgan and fellow Klan memberEdmund W. Pettus became the ringleaders ofwhite supremacy in Alabama and did more than anyone else in the state to overthrow Reconstruction efforts in the wake of the Civil War.[7][8] When PresidentUlysses S. Grant dispatchedU.S. Attorney GeneralAmos Akerman to prosecute the Klan under theEnforcement Acts, Morgan was arrested and jailed.[9]
Due to his notoriety in Alabama for opposing Reconstruction efforts,[10] Morgan was elected as a U.S. Senator in 1876.[11] During his subsequent six terms as Senator, he was an outspoken proponent ofblack disfranchisement,racial segregation, andlynching African-Americans.[12] According to historians, he played a leading role "in forging the ideology of white supremacy that dominated American race relations from the 1890s to the 1960s."[13] Widely considered to be among the most notorious racist ideologues of his time, he is often credited by scholars with laying the foundation of theJim Crow era.[14]
In addition to his lifelong efforts to uphold white supremacy,[15] Morgan became an ardentexpansionist andimperialist during theGilded Age.[16] He envisioned the United States as a globe-spanning empire and believed that island nations such asHawaii and thePhilippines should be forcibly annexed in order for the country to dominate trade in thePacific Ocean. Accordingly, he advocated for the United States toannex the independentRepublic of Hawaii and to construct an inter-oceaniccanal inCentral America.[17] Due to this advocacy, he was often posthumously referred to as "the Father of thePanama Canal"[18] despite being a proponent of the Canal to be located inNicaragua. Morgan was a staunch opponent ofwomen's suffrage.[19]
After his death by heart attack in 1907,[20] Morgan's numerous relatives remained influential in Alabama politics and high society for many decades. His extended family owned theFirst White House of the Confederacy inMontgomery.[21] His nephew and protege,Anthony Dickinson Sayre, was President of theAlabama State Senate and later anAssociate Justice of theSupreme Court of Alabama.[22] Sayre played a pivotal role in passing the landmark 1893 Sayre Act which disenfranchised black Alabamians for seventy years and ushered in the Jim Crow period in the state.[23][24] Morgan's grand-niece wasJazz Age socialiteZelda Sayre, the wife of novelistF. Scott Fitzgerald.[21]
John Tyler Morgan was born in a log cabin one mile fromAthens, Tennessee.[18] His family claimed descent from a Welsh ancestor, James B. Morgan (1607–1704), who settled in theConnecticut Colony. Morgan was initially educated by his mother but, in the fall of 1830, the six-year-old barefoot boy walked a quarter of a mile each day to attend Old Forest Hill Academy.[18]
In 1833, his family moved toCalhoun County, Alabama, where he attended schools and then studied law inTuskegee with justiceWilliam Parish Chilton, his brother-in-law.[25] After admission to the Alabama bar, he established a practice inTalladega.[25] Ten years later, Morgan moved toDallas County and resumed the practice of law inSelma andCahaba.[26] By 1857, he had grown prosperous and owned over half-a-dozen slaves—including an entire family who served as his personal household servants.[27]
The most fatal and scandalous declaration ever made by the late Federal Government against the people of the South... is contained in those acts of Congress which denounce the African Slave Trade as piracy — a declaration at once degrading to every slaveholder, and a living rebuke to the Federal Constitution.
Turning to politics, Morgan aligned himself with the pro-slaveryFire-Eaters led by fellow Alabama politicianWilliam Lowndes Yancey and became an ardent exponent of theSouthern secession movement.[29] He became apresidential elector on theDemocratic ticket in1860, and tentatively supportedSouthern DemocratJohn C. Breckinridge.[30] Months later, he was a delegate from Dallas County to the Alabama constitutional convention of 1861, and he played a key role in passing the ordinance of secession.[1][31][32]
Amid the fractious debates at the Alabama constitutional convention, a 36-year-old Morgan defended slavery—including thetransatlantic slave trade—as a morally-uplifting and Christian institution.[33] As a proud slaveholder,[27][33] he publicly declared his reasons for advocating Alabama's secession from theUnion 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."[28] At the close of this same speech in 1861, Morgan envisioned a future slave-holding territory spanning theGulf of Mexico and the islands of the Caribbean.[34]
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,[1] which volunteered its services in theConfederate Army and was assigned to the 5th Alabama Infantry.[35][32] He first saw action in a skirmish preceding theFirst Battle of Manassas in the summer of 1861.[36]
As the war progressed, Morgan rose tomajor and thenlieutenant colonel.[1] He served underCol.Robert E. Rodes, a future Confederate general. Morgan resigned his commission in 1862 and returned toAlabama, where in August he recruited a newregiment, the 51st AlabamaPartisan Rangers, becoming its colonel.[32] He led it at theBattle of Murfreesborough, operating in cooperation with the cavalry ofNathan Bedford Forrest.[37]
When Rodes was promoted tomajor general and given adivision in theArmy of Northern Virginia, Morgan declined an offer to command Rodes's oldbrigade and instead remained in theWestern Theater, leading troops at theBattle of Chickamauga.[38] On November 16, 1863, he was appointed as abrigadier general of cavalry and participated in theKnoxville Campaign.[1][38] 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 theAtlanta campaign. Subsequently, his men harassedWilliam T. Sherman's troops during theMarch to the Sea.[39] Soon after, he was stripped of his command due to drunkenness and reassigned to administrative duty inDemopolis, Alabama.[40] 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.[40]
After the war ended, Morgan resumed his law practice in Selma, Alabama.[41] He became the affluent legal representative for the widely-loathed railroad companies.[41] By 1867, angered by formerly enslaved persons serving as state legislators, Morgan began to play a highly public role against the Republican Reconstruction.[42]
Soon after, Morgan toured throughout the American South giving race-baiting speeches and urging fellow Southerners to refuse all compromise with Reconstruction.[43] Aligning himself with theBourbon Democrats and employing their electoral strategy,[44] 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."[44][19]
Amid his political struggle against Reconstruction in 1872, Morgan succeededJames H. Clanton as the secondGrand Dragon of theKu Klux Klan in Alabama.[3][4][5][6] According to Alabama RepresentativeRobert Stell Heflin, Morgan and fellow Klan memberEdmund 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."[45]
When PresidentUlysses S. Grant dispatched his U.S. Attorney GeneralAmos T. Akerman to vigorously prosecute Alabama Klan under theEnforcement Acts, Morgan was arrested and jailed.[9] After the demise of the first Ku Klux Klan, Morgan and Pettus continued to resist Reconstruction efforts and to reassert white supremacy in Alabama.[46] Morgan took an active part in opposing all attempts to redress the political and socioeconomic legacies of slavery in Alabama.[47]
Due to his efforts to suppress African-Americans from exercising their political rights and to vouchsafe white supremacy in Alabama during the Reconstruction era,[10] Morgan became a well-known public figure in national politics and subsequently became a presidential elector-at-large on the DemocraticSamuel J. Tilden ticket in 1876.[48] Party insiders favored him to win Alabama's seat to the United States Senate in that year.[48]
[We had] to burn down the barn to get rid of the rats. The rats being the Negro population and the barn being the government of the District of Columbia.
Following his election as U.S. Senator for the state of Alabama in 1876,[48] Morgan was reelected five times in 1882, 1888, 1894, 1900, and 1906. He served as chairman ofCommittee on Rules (46th U.S. Congress), theCommittee on Foreign Relations (53rd U.S. Congress), the Committee on Interoceanic Canals (56th and57th 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.[50] For much of his senatorial tenure, he remained aligned with theBourbon Democrats, and he served in the Senate alongside his close friend Edmund W. Pettus, a former Confederate general and Klan member.[51]
Throughout his senatorship, Morgan staunchly labored for the repeal of theFifteenth Amendment to theU.S. Constitution, which was intended to prevent the denial ofvoting rights based on race.[52] 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 theJim Crow era.[14] 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."[49] He likened such mass disenfranchisement to having "to burn down the barn to get rid of the rats."[49]
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".[19]
Due to his relentless efforts to disenfranchise black citizens across the United States and his vociferous championing of congressional legislation "to legalizethe practice of racist vigilante murder [lynching] as a means of preserving white power in the Deep South,"[52] Morgan is frequently credited by historians with "forging the ideology of white supremacy that dominated American race relations from the 1890s to the 1960s."[13]
Morgan frequently advocated for the migration of black people to leave the United States.[52] HistorianAdam Hochschild notes that, "at various times in his long career Morgan also advocated sending them [negroes] to Hawaii, to Cuba, and to the Philippines—which, perhaps because the islands were so far away, he claimed were a 'native home of the negro.'"[53]
By the 1880s, Morgan began to focus on the Congo for his repatriation visions.[54] After the Belgian monarchLéopold II signaled that hisInternational Association of the Congo would consider immigration and settlement of African Americans, Morgan became one of the foremost advocates of this emerging colonial enterprise inCentral Africa. Morgan's support was vital for United States' early diplomatic recognition of the new colony, which became theCongo Free State in December 1883.[55]
After revelations about major atrocities by the colonial occupiers, Morgan cut his ties with the Congo Free State.[56] He feared the brutality against the inherent African population would deter black U.S. citizens from emigrating and jeopardize his plans to create an exclusively white American nation.[56] Hence, by 1903, Morgan became the most active U.S. congressional spokesperson of the Congo reform movement, a humanitarian pressure group that demanded reforms in the notorious Congo Free State.[56]
The alliance between this pioneering international human rights movement and the radical white supremacist Morgan has often led to scholarly astonishment.[57] However, the sociologist Felix Lösing pointed to the ideological nexus between the racial segregation promoted by Morgan and calls for cultural segregation raised by prominent Congo reformers.[57] Both Morgan and the majority of the Congo reform movement were ultimately concerned with the consolidation of white supremacy on a global scale.[58]
Between 1887 and 1907, Morgan played a leading role on the powerfulForeign Relations Committee. He called for acanal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through Nicaragua, enlarging the merchant marine and the Navy, and acquiring Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Cuba. He expected Latin American and Asian markets would become a new export market for Alabama's cotton, coal, iron, and timber. The canal would make trade with the Pacific much more feasible, and an enlarged military would protect that new trade. By 1905, most of his dreams had become reality, although the canal bifurcated Panama instead of Nicaragua.[17]
Morgan was a strong supporter of theannexation of theRepublic of Hawaii,[47] and, in 1894, Morgan chaired an investigation known as theMorgan Report into the Hawaiian Revolution. The investigation concluded that the U.S. had remained completely neutral in the matter. He authored the introduction to the Morgan Report based on the findings of the investigative committee. He later visited Hawaii in 1897 in support of annexation. He believed that the history of the U.S. clearly indicated it was unnecessary to hold a plebiscite in Hawaii as a condition for annexation. He was appointed by PresidentWilliam McKinley in July 1898 to the commission created by theNewlands Resolution to establish government in theTerritory of Hawaii.[32] A strong advocate for a Central American canal, Morgan was also a staunch supporter of the Cuban revolutionaries in the 1890s.
While still in office, Morgan died of a heart attack inWashington, D.C.[20] He was buried in Selma, Alabama, atLive Oak Cemetery, near the grave of fellow Confederate cavalry officer and Klan member Nathan Bedford Forrest. The remainder of Morgan's term was served byJohn H. Bankhead.
In April 2004, Professor Thomas Adams Upchurch summarized Morgan's career and legacy in theAlabama Review:
His congressional speeches and published writings demonstrate the central role that Morgan played in the drama of racial politics on Capitol Hill and in the national press from 1889 to 1891. More importantly, they reveal his leadership in forging the ideology ofwhite supremacy that dominated American race relations from the 1890s to the 1960s. Indeed, Morgan emerged as the most prominent and notorious racist ideologue of his day, a man who, as much as any other individual, set the tone for the comingJim Crow era.[13]
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As the patriarch of a powerful Southern family, Morgan's extended relatives remained influential in Alabama politics for many decades and owned theFirst White House of the Confederacy inMontgomery.[21] His nephew and protege,Anthony Dickinson Sayre (1858–1931), served first as a member of the Alabama State Senate (1894–95) and then as President of the Alabama State Senate (1896–97).[22]
According to historians, Morgan's nephew Anthony D. Sayre played a key role in undermining theFourteenth andFifteenth Amendments in Alabama and enabling the ideology ofwhite supremacy.[59][60][61] As a state legislator, he introduced the landmark 1893 Sayre Act which disenfranchised black Alabamians for nearly a century and ushered in the racially segregatedJim Crow period in the state.[59][60][61]
Later, in 1909, GovernorBraxton Bragg Comer appointed Sayre as an Associate Justice of theSupreme Court of Alabama.[21][22] Like his uncle, Sayre was a Bourbon Democrat.[22] Sayre married Minerva Machen (1860-1958), the daughter ofWillis B. Machen, a formerConfederate Senator and later aU.S. Senator fromKentucky.[62][22] Sayre's daughter and Morgan's grand-niece wasJazz Age socialiteZelda Sayre, the mentally-ill wife of novelistF. Scott Fitzgerald who wroteThe Great Gatsby.[21] According to biographers, Zelda was extremely proud of her family and her Confederate roots,[63][62] and she boasted that she drew her strength from Montgomery's Confederate past.[63]
Morgan's great-grand-niece wasFrances "Scottie" Fitzgerald. In 1973, Fitzgerald retired from Washington, D.C. to her mother Zelda Sayre's home town of Montgomery, Alabama.[64] After her retirement, she researched her family's history and discovered her family's pivotal role in disenfranchising "the black people of Alabama, and thousands of poor whites, of the right to vote."[64] Upon learning of this fact, Scottie felt both embarrassment and guilt.[64] For the remainder of her life, she devoted herself to voter outreach programs in Alabama.[64] According to Scottie, black citizens living in Montgomery still viewed the Sayre family with askance as late as the 1970s, and they would not reciprocate her social overtures.[65]
The University of Alabama Board of Trustees voted Thursday to rename Morgan Hall, originally named for a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon.
On his death the mantle [of Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon] passed to General John T. Morgan, who later became one of the most distinguished of Senators and statesmen.
General James H. Clanton of Montgomery was the first Grand Dragon of the Realm of Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and continued in this capacity until his death, when General John T. Morgan was elected in his place, and served until 1876. The Ku Klux Klan in 1877 was led by General Edmund W. Pettus as Grand Dragon of the Realm.
An online petition asking University of Alabama President Dr. Stuart Bell to rename Morgan Hall after Harper Lee is gaining momentum.... Morgan Hall, which is home to the university's English department, is named after John Tyler Morgan, a Confederate General then later U.S. Senator with KKK ties.
Morgan Hall, named for John Tyler Morgan, a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon...
Following Clanton's murder in 1871, John Tyler Morgan, an ex-Confederate general and a future six-term U.S. senator from Alabama, held the position of Grand Dragon for several years.
When Morgan represented Alabama in Washington, D.C., following the Civil War, the former Confederate general-turned-grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and six-term U.S. senator introduced and championed several bills to legalize the practice of racist vigilante murder as a means of preserving white power in the Deep South.
After the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments formally established universal male suffrage, Democratic-controlled legislatures in the South came up with new means of denying African Americans the right to vote. Most of the new poll taxes and literacy tests were deemed to pass constitutional muster, but they were clearly designed to counter its spirit. As Alabama state legislator Anthony D. Sayre declared upon introducing such legislation, his bill would 'eliminate the Negro from politics, and in a perfectly legal way.'
Sayre Street, which ran through the most fashionable section of Montgomery, was named in honor of Anthony's uncle, who had built the White House of the Confederacy for Jefferson Davis and who was a founder of the First Presbyterian Church. Anthony's mother, Musidora Morgan, was the sister of Senator John Tyler Morgan, who served in the United States Senate for thirty-one years.
The first leader of the Klan in this state was Gen. James H. Clanton, for whom one of our fine towns is named. And on his death, the leadership passed to Alabama's Gen. John Tyler Morgan.
[John Tyler Morgan was] a former senator who was a Confederate general and a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Democrats feared losing local and state offices to Republicans, however, so they developed creative ways to reduce the influence of blacks... The 1893 Sayre Act allowed the Alabama governor to appoint election officials and made the voting process difficult for poor and illiterate blacks and whites through small changes to the election system.
| U.S. Senate | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | U.S. Senator (Class 2) from Alabama 1877–1907 Served alongside:George E. Spencer,George S. Houston,Luke Pryor,James L. Pugh,Edmund Pettus | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Chair of theSenate Rules Committee 1879–1881 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by John Sherman | Chair of theSenate Foreign Relations Committee 1893–1895 | Succeeded by |
| New office | Chair of theSenate Interoceanic Canals Committee 1899–1903 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Chair of theSenate Public Health Committee 1903–1907 | Succeeded by |
| Class 2 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Class 3 | ||
| Rules (1870–1947) | | |
|---|---|---|
| Rules and Administration (1947–present) | ||
| International | |
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| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
