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John Tyler Morgan

John Tyler Morgan (20 June 1824-11 June 1907) was a US Senator from Alabama from 4 March 1877 to 11 June 1907 (succeeding George Goldthwaite and preceding John H. Bankhead) and a former Confederate States Army Brigadier-General. 

Biography[]

John Tyler Morgan was born in Athens, Tennessee in 1824, and his family moved to Calhoun County, Alabama in 1833. Morgan became a lawyer in Selma and Cahaba before serving as a Democratic presidential elector in 1860 and serving as a delegate to the secession convention in 1861. He led a Confederate partisan rangers regiment in the western theater of the American Civil War, and, after the war, he resumed his law practice and became Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan after James H. Clanton's death in 1872. He again served as a Democratic elector in 1876 and was then elected to the US Senate that same year, and he served until his death in 1907. On 7 January 1890, he introduced a congressional bill to fund black emigration to Africa to solve the class and racial problems of big southern landowners, with an agricultural depression leading to some "dirt farmers" raging against black farmers and other white farmers joining with blacks against white landowners in an interracial populist movement. He also called for the annexation of Hawaii in 1897 and was a strong supporter of the Spanish-American War, supporting the Cuban revolution against Spain. He died in office in Washington DC in 1907.

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