page_title: John Tyler Morgan
section_title: Postbellum career
hierarchical_section_title: John Tyler Morgan / Postbellum career
context_page_description: John Tyler Morgan was a general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, a six-term U.S. senator from the state of Alabama after the war. A slave holder before the Civil War, he was a proponent of Jim Crow laws, states rights and racial segregation through the Reconstruction era. He was an expansionist, arguing for the annexation of Hawaii and for U.S. construction of an inter-oceanic canal in Central America.
context_section_description: After the war, Morgan resumed the practice of law in Selma, Alabama. According to insider information, after the death of James H. Clanton in 1872, Morgan allegedly succeeded him as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, but other than a personal account, there is no physical or historical evidence of this. He was once again presidential elector on the Democratic ticket in 1876 and was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in that year, being re-elected in 1882, 1888, 1894, 1900, and 1906, and serving from March 4, 1877, until his death. For much of his tenure, he served as Senator alongside a fellow former Confederate general, Edmund W. Pettus.
  Morgan advocated for separating blacks and whites in the U.S. by encouraging the migration of black people out of the U.S. south.  Hochschild wrote, "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."
  Morgan also staunchly worked 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 "introduced and championed several bills to legalize the practice of racist vigilante murder [lynching] as a means of preserving white power in the Deep South."
  He was chairman of Committee on Rules (Forty-sixth Congress), the Committee on Foreign Relations (Fifty-third Congress), the Committee on Interoceanic Canals (Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh Congresses), and the Committee on Public Health and National Quarantine (Fifty-ninth Congress).
caption: Morgan, circa 1875
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