John Tyler Morgan and the Search for Southern Autonomy

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John Tyler Morgan (1824-1907) was a major figure in regional and national politics during a crucial era in southern history. A leader in Alabama politics for almost fifty years, Morgan was first and foremost a southern nationalist who labored tirelessly to liberate the South from outside domination. In tracing Morgan's career, this book, his first comprehensive biography, also illuminates the processes by which Alabama and other southern states decided for secession and later opposed Reconstruction. Morgan's fear of northern and Republican threats to southern liberties, honor, and racial codes led first to his emergence as William L. Yancey's chief secessionist lieutenant and then to service in the Confederate cavalry. Similar motives prompted his active campaign against Reconstruction. As Alabama's U.S. senator from 1877 until his death, Morgan was one of the "Redeemers" who controlled the post-Reconstruction South. The senator's responses to Gilded Age domestic issues aggressively promoted sectionalism, agriculture, white supremacy, and black disfranchisement. In foreign policy, too, Alabama's colorful "ambassador" sought to benefit his "country", the South. Urging expanded exports of southern raw materials and the addition of southern senators and congressmen from new states to be carved out of the nation's island empire, Morgan became the south's foremost territorial and economic imperialist and the principal proponent of a Nicaragua canal.