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Senate Years of Service: 1877-1907 Party: Democrat
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MORGAN, John Tyler, a Senator from Alabama; born in Athens, McMinn County, Tenn., June 20, 1824;
moved with his parents to Alabama in 1833 and settled in Calhoun County; attended frontier schools;
studied law; admitted to the bar in 1845 and commenced practice in Talladega, Ala.; moved to Dallas
County, Ala., in 1855 and resumed the practice of law in Selma and Cahaba; presidential elector on
the Democratic ticket in 1860; delegate from Dallas County to the State convention of 1861 which
passed the ordinance of secession; during the Civil War enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861 and
rose to brigadier general; after the war resumed the practice of law in Selma, Ala.; presidential elector
on the Democratic ticket in 1876; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1876;
reelected in 1882, 1888, 1894, 1900, and 1906, and served from March 4, 1877, until his death;
chairman, Committee on Rules (Forty-sixth Congress), Committee on Foreign Relations (Fifty-third
Congress), Committee on Interoceanic Canals (Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh Congresses), Committee
on Public Health and National Quarantine (Fifty-ninth Congress); died in Washington, D.C., June 11,
1907; interment in Live Oak Cemetery, Selma, Dallas County, Ala.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; Fry, Joseph A. John Tyler Morgan and the
Search for Southern Identity. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992; Upchurch,
Thomas Adams. Senator John Tyler Morgan and the Genesis of Jim Crow Ideology, 1889-1891. Alabama Review 57 (April 2004): 110-131.
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