Senator John Tyler Morgan and the Genesis of Jim Crow Ideology, 1889-1891

WHEN RECONSTRUCTION MET ITS DEMISE, it died unmourned by most white Americans. The issue of the proper place and status of African Americans in southern politics and society lay dormant throughout, the 1880s as Democrats and Republicans split national political power and the collective attention of the American people turned toward Gilded Age economic issues. White southern political leaders cautiously reestablished Democratic control over their slates, obviating the civil rights of their black populations in various ways, including political disfranchisement, economic discrimination, and social ostracism. In 1889, however, the inauguration of GOP president Benjamin Harrison and the convening of the Republican-dominated Fifty-first ("Billion Dollar") Congress returned national political attention to what most observers alternately called the "Negro question," the "southern question," or the "race problem."1

The Republicans hoped to reinstate full suffrage rights for black southerners by passing a strong federal elections law. Democrats wanted to prevent that possibility at all costs and to deal with the race problem in ways of their own choosing. In the vanguard of Democrats who sought to thwart the Republicans' racial agenda and to develop their own solutions to the southern race problem was Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama. 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 of white 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 coming Jim Crow era.2

Morgan, a distant relative of former president John Tyler of Virginia, was born in 1824 in the eastern hills of Tennessee. His family migrated to Alabama during the tumultuous period of Creek Indian removal in the 1830s, finally settling in present-day Calhoun County. In 1845, despite never having attended college, Morgan passed the bar and entered a law practice in Talladega. The following year he married Cornelia Willis, a member of the locally prominent Hardie family. Ten years later the couple established their permanent home in Selma. Morgan vacillated politically between Jacksonian Democracy, Whiggery, and even Know-Nothingism during the 1840s and 1850s before finally casting his lot with the Democratic Party and helping lead the secession movement of 1860-61. He served as chief lieutenant of one of the most ardent fire eaters of the Civil War generation, William Lowndes Yancey, and became his most devout disciple. Morgan did all he could to help establish and perpetuate the Confederate States of America. He played a prominent role in the Alabama secession convention, and during the war he distinguished himself in both the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee, rising to the rank of brigadier general. The ultimate defeat of the Confederacy hurt him deeply, and he never forgave the U.S. government, the northern states, and the Republican Party for the white South's prostration during and after the war. Morgan led the charge to redeem Alabama from GOP control in the mid-1870s, going so far as to attempt unsuccessfully to unseat Republican senator George E. Spencer, a carpetbagger who served from 1868 to 1879.3

The Alabama legislature rewarded Morgan for his leadership in the redemption by sending him to the U.S. Senate in 1876. Upon arrival Morgan received a chilly welcome from Spencer, who attempted to challenge Morgan's credentials in the Committee on Privileges and Elections, but the Senate ignored Spencer's protest. Morgan then served as Alabama's self-proclaimed "ambassador" to the United States for the next thirty years, enjoying election to the Senate six times in all. he routinely worked eighteen-hour days and quickly distinguished himself as one of the most knowledgeable senators in either party, being frequently acclaimed to possess "a wider range of information" on public issues than any other man of his time. He also rose quickly to prominence as one the most able spokesmen for the Democratic Party and, more importantly, one of the most adamant defenders of the South. His biographer has rightly called him a "southern nationalist" and the "last of the doctrinaires of the Old South."4

To say that Morgan loved Alabama and the South-particularly the way they were before the war-would be an understatement. Throughout his public career he never ceased to affirm the traditional southern view of states' rights. Primary among these, he believed, was the right of states to establish their own racial mores and laws. As the Congressional Record clearly shows, by 1890 he had become the most outspoken southerner on Capitol Hill and one of the most virulent race ideologues of his generation, a man extraordinary in his ability to articulate what the masses of white southerners were thinking. Although he certainly borrowed ideas from fellow racists in formulating his beliefs, he was also an original thinker not bound by the intellectual parameters of others. As one contemporary observer noted, Morgan was the South's "watchful genius," a leader with a bully pulpit from which he could capitalize on every opportunity to promote and justify white supremacy in his native region.5 Although he has received little recognition as an important historical figure outside his home state, his racist oratory and publications garnered a national and even international audience at the time, giving him a degree of influence over the course of American race relations that was greater than that of most of his peers.6

Morgan had been in the Senate for more than a decade when Harrison's presidential campaign resurrected the issue of black voting rights in the South in 1888. Following Republican victories in both the presidential election and in a majority of congressional contests, GOP leaders began discussing possible measures for the enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment in the South. The result was Massachusetts congressman Henry Cabot Lodge's Federal Elections Bill, which the Democrats berated as a "Force Bill" because it allowed the possibility of the U.S. Army patrolling the South during election seasons. This controversial measure passed the House of Representatives in July 1890 before its introduction in the Senate.7

By this time Morgan had already fired a shot in the debate over federal monitoring of southern elections. Anticipating the Republican efforts to procure such a bill, Morgan articulated the Democratic South's position in a February 1889 article published in Forum, one of the country's leading magazines. he argued for an alternative approach to dealing with black voting rights that eventually gained wide acceptance-the idea of states adopting literacy tests to disqualify illiterate voters.8 In presenting his literacy test idea to the public, Morgan formed an unlikely alliance with a leading egalitarian, Republican Albion Tourgee, who had served as a carpetbagger judge of the North Carolina Superior Court during Reconstruction. In a subsequent Forum article Tourgee predicted that the constitutional limitation of suffrage based on a literacy test would be the only solution to the southern race problem that would "command the approval of a majority of the people of the North."9 Morgan was not sure about the veracity of that statement, but he certainly hoped it was true. he and fellow southern Democrats had always lamented the fact that the former Confederate states were held to a different standard than northern states with regard to establishing voter qualifications. he explained that Massachusetts had enacted a literacy test in 1857 for the sole purpose of controlling the voting strength of its ethnic immigrant population. Why, asked Morgan, should southern states not be allowed to disqualify their undesirable voters as well? How is one a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment but not the other?10

Most Republicans considered the Morgan-Tourgee idea ludicrous. Senator William M. Chandler of New Hampshire, a neo-abolitionist firebrand who had addressed the issue in Forum in 1888, stirred the political waters again in 1890 when he appealed to northern public opinion to condemn such foolish talk and urge congressional approval of the Federal Elections Bill plan instead. The idea of southern states limiting the suffrage of African Americans through literacy tests while simultaneously retaining their full congressional representation would be a worse injustice, mused Chandler, than the antebellum South receiving "representation for three-fifths of its slaves." Blacks were U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment and qualified to vote under the Fifteenth, and any attempt to abridge their civil rights should be met by any means at the government's disposal, including military occupation of the South. Chandler engaged in the saber rattling typical of the period by reminding his audience that the North had defeated the South already and could do so again if necessary.11 Chandler's acidic article elicited a published response from Morgan, who called the New Hampshire senator a self-appointed judge, jury, and "public executioner" of white southerners. He warned Chandler and his fellow Republicans that their plan to control southern elections would be "more bitterly condemned" by the American people than any other partisan bill in the history of Congress. he added that national public opinion had already consigned the idea to perdition before the Republicans even began discussing it.12

Morgan later took his argument even further, making the ultimate racist case for disfranchising black voters. In 1890, in an introduction to a new edition of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the Alabamian rioted that the young Tocqueville had been fascinated with "the general equality of conditions" in America despite the existence of slavery in the South. Morgan explained that the foreign visitor meant equality only "among the people of the white race, who are described as 'We, the people,' in the opening sentence of the Constitution." The founding fathers never included blacks in their definition of "the people," said Morgan. Adding blacks to "the people" was, he asserted, a political maneuver of the Republican Party that had never received the sanction of public opinion, the Reconstruction amendments notwithstanding. If the American public did not put its stamp of approval on such a radical distortion of the founders' Constitution, the amendment could never be enforced. "Public opinion," Morgan declared, "is the vital force in every law in a free government."13

Morgan also argued that the founders and Tocqueville considered axiomatic the notion that public approval of a government's structure and policies was necessary for a nation to survive and prosper. Even the Declaration of Independence arid the founders' Constitution, Morgan opined, required a majority of public support in order to become and remain operable. If, therefore, the majority of the American people now refused to support the Fifteenth Amendment, why should it stand? Why should it be law? And by contrast if the American public decreed that only members of the male sex should vote, as it did at the time, or if it supported an educational test for voters, as Albion Tourgee claimed, then why could it not also dictate that race or skin color be among the qualifications for voting? Such a requirement, contended Morgan, would put government exclusively in the hands of "the people" as the founders defined the term.14

Morgan expanded his argument at about the same time in another widely circulated periodical, the Arena. He pontificated that "this government was ordained 'to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.'" To whom, he askecl, did the founders refer when they wrote "ourselves" in the Constitution? Did they intend that non-white Americans be included? And were black Americans now the "posterity" of the founders? Or had the Republicans changed the original meaning of the Constitution to suit their own purposes? The answers to these questions were perfectly clear to Morgan, and many Americans found his argument at least somewhat compelling if not totally convincing. His doctrine of original intent helped buttress his next argument, that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments provided blacks, on paper, with "higher and more definite security for their liberties than was provided for the white race" in the Constitution originally. The Republican revision to the Constitution contradicted the founders' intent, in Morgan's mind, and thus required immediate remedy. A correction could be readily accomplished, he had long-believed, through implementation of some common-sense measures such as literacy tests.15

Morgan's views on limiting suffrage rights through literacy tests soon gained wide acceptance. In 1890 the Democratic leadership of Mississippi, headed by Senator James Z. George, stepped out on a shaky political limb, unsure whether the Republican administration in Washington would yield to such a manipulation of the electorate, and implemented the literacy test as a voting requirement in its new constitution. The effects were dramatic: approximately 90 percent of the state's black voters were disfranchised, as were fifty percent of white voters.16 This state action started a chain reaction among the southern states to copy the Mississippi model or devise their own methods of circumventing the Fifteenth Amendment, which Morgan's own state did in 1901, due largely to his leadership.17 Although Morgan's role in influencing the Mississippians to go forward with the literacy test was indirect, the senator from Alabama must nonetheless be considered at the forefront of the racist movement of disfranchisement that had such a devastating impact on African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century and thereafter.

Meanwhile, in late 1890 the Republicans introduced their Federal Elections Bill in the Senate. The bill's provisions called for increasing federal monitoring of elections through the use of election supervisors and military patrols in problematic, i.e. Democratic, precincts. No senator expressed more vehement opposition to the controversial measure than Morgan. He used the Senate debate as a public forum to proclaim his ideology on an array of issues, some of which were directly related to race relations and some of which were not. He based his opposition to the bill on several grounds, including the notion that it would be an unconstitutional use of federal power against the states, that the expense of maintaining the elaborate supervision required by the bill would be exorbitant, and that the supervisors would be appointed for life. On the first point he merely reiterated the states'-rights mantra that had become standard rhetoric in any southern grievance against the use of federal power. On the second point he noted that each deputy election supervisor would be paid about fifty dollars per election, a wage considerably higher than that of many post office positions, which were considered plum appointments. Each voting precinct would have three of these well-compensated deputies, costing a total of $150. Placing such resources and hiring discretion in the hands of local chief supervisors, Morgan maintained, would feed the very type of machine politics that the bill purported to remedy. Moreover, some highly populated districts contained as many as forty precincts, for an aggregate cost of $6,000 per district, per election. The expense to taxpayers to implement the supervisory program at national elections every two years would thus be insufferable, in Morgan's opinion.18 On the third point Morgan reasoned that lifetime appointments of supervisors simply created too many opportunities to make dishonest officials out of otherwise honest men when party allegiance inevitably took precedence over impartialjudgment. Consider, argued Morgan, how the five Supreme Court justices voted in the presidential election dispute of 1876: "Can any man deny in the United States Government to-day, after the eight-by-seven vote and after all the other things we have seen done in the Government . . . that every judge when he puts on the ermine still remains a Democrat or still remains a Republican and that whenever he has an opportunity without the violation of his oath he will throw all of his influence in favor of the party to which he belongs?"19

Besides objecting to the framework of the bill itself, Morgan also took issue with the Republican majority's strong-arm effort to pass the controversial measure without allowing adequate time for debate. he contended that legitimate debate would forestall the dreaded filibuster, which everyone knew the Democrats would initiate in the absence of a meaningful dialogue between the opposing sides. Morgan accused Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts, the leading sponsor of the bill as well as the floor manager of the debate, of being unaware of the provisions of his own bill, adding, "That is not saying anything to his discredit, for I suppose the Senator does not understand Sanskrit and that is not to his discredit." Hoar fired a tongue-in-cheek retort at Morgan, saying, "I do not understand the Senator from Alabama, and that is not to my discredit."20 To Morgan, such a complex and controversial document surely required a point-by-point explanation. Keeping track of its details, he said, "is very much like hunting a red fox in the Virginia hills."21 No Republican was willing to be drawn into a debate, however, and after several unsuccessful attempts to entice them Morgan finally fumed, 'You had better consider this bill. You had better debate it with us . . . you had better convince the country that the bill is right and we are wrong." If the Republicans refused, Morgan declared, the American people would soon revolt against the Senate in the same manner they revolted against the House of Representatives in the midterm elections of 1890, when the GOP suffered the worst defeat and turnover in American history.22 "It must be discussed," he grumbled. Otherwise, the nation takes a "step back over the march of a hundred years of progress" to become precisely "what the British Government was when we withdrew from it," a body of "absolutism."23

Hoar and the other seasoned veterans on the Republican side realized that the best strategy for passing their bill was to resist Democratic efforts to lure them into unnecessary defenses of their position, which would only prolong the debate and thus indirectly contribute to a filibuster. Some less experienced Republicans either would not or could not resist, however. Morgan's tirade struck a nerve with several of them, who finally took the bait. Among these was the junior senator from Oregon, Joseph N. Dolph, who accused Morgan and the Democrats of opposing the bill for purely racial reasons, contending that all other arguments against it were a smoke screen to hide their true intentions. Morgan replied to Dolph's charges by reading the Oregon state constitution, which, until 1887, said that "No negro, Chinaman, or mulatto shall have the right of suffrage," and forbade whites to intermarry with blacks, Chinese, or Indians. Citing as an example the renowned black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was married to a white woman, Morgan pointed out that if the Douglasses were to leave Maryland and move to Oregon, they would automatically become criminals. According to state law they could be sent to jail for not less than six months each. Morgan relished his chance to lash out at what he perceived to be the hypocrisy of the Republicans by telling Dolph, "You took care, very good care, never to take any of your own medicine." Considering the existence of such laws, were Oregonians really that much different than Alabamians, he asked? Did they really have the right to sit in judgment of white southerners?24

When the hot-tempered young Oregonian asked Morgan to yield the floor in order that he might offer rebuttal, the experienced Alabamian refused. He no doubt took immense pleasure in retorting, "I want the Senator to have due time for reflection before he speaks."25 Once the filibuster started, it dragged on from the middle of December 1890 to the end of January of the following year. During that month and a half Morgan consumed far more time speaking than anyone else in the Senate, which is not surprising considering his reputation as the most notorious "long distance talker" or "jawsmith" on Capitol Hill. He held the floor on January 26, the last day in the life of the inflammatory Federal Elections Bill, when the Republicans finally abandoned their plan to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. The filibuster had worked; it had allowed the Democrats time to convince several Republicans to defect from their party's leadership and oppose the controversial measure. Although it required a well-choreographed effort among Democratic senators and their Republican allies to defeat the bill, it is clear that Morgan played the starring role in the drama and was thus more responsible for the racists' triumph in this battle than any other individual.26

Besides airing his racial views with regard to voting rights, Morgan also had an opportunity during the Fifty-first Congress to express his racial ideology on the matter of black emigration. As an alternative to the Federal Elections Bill, Senator Matthew Calbraith Butler of South Carolina sponsored a proposal to provide federal aid to southern blacks who wanted to leave the United States. The bill called for a modest appropriation of five million dollars per year to launch the project. The Butler Emigration Bill was a half-baked and half-hearted attempt by southern Democrats to provide an alternative solution to the South's race problem. Some contemporaries contended (and most historians agree) that Butler's true intention behind the bill was only to antagonize the Republicans.27 Indeed, according to one northern newspaper, Butler later admitted that he did not really expect his bill to be taken seriously and had only introduced it as "a piece of sarcasm" to make the Republicans do some soul searching before they launched their Federal Elections Bill.28 Whatever the case, the senator from South Carolina, who offered few recorded speeches from the floor, did not begin the discussion of his bill in the Senate, nor was he ever its main advocate.29 John Tyler Morgan, on the other hand, never missed an opportunity to speak in Congress, and he took Butler's bill quite seriously. Consequently, Morgan called the bill up for consideration and became its most vociferous advocate.

The idea presented in the Butler bill was not new. Various attempts at colonizing America's black population abroad had been attempted, with little success, throughout the nation's history. Many prominent national figures remained convinced, however, that colonization might yet prove to be the solution to the South's race problem. Morgan had advocated removal of black emigrants to the Congo as early as 1884, when, as a leading member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (on which he served from 1878 until his death in 1907), he began compiling an impressive array of materials on the subject. He also learned how divisive the issue of black emigration could be.30 Consequently, realizing that the Butler bill of 1890 would be considered a partisan, sectional, and racist measure, Morgan tried from the start to prove otherwise. The bill did not propagate a radical new idea, he said, but one that had existed in various forms for more than a century. Morgan asserted that many of the nation's most respected leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster, had believed that the solution to the race problem lay in deporting or scattering the black population. Even William Windom, President Harrison's secretary of the treasury and a Republican with impeccable credentials as a racial egalitarian, advocated the emigration of black Americans. Why then, asked Morgan, should the idea not be taken seriously? If the primary source of the race problem was the concentration of blacks in one region, what could possibly be wrong with diffusing the population? Even the redistribution of the black population within the United States would spread their voting strength enough to remove the danger of their controlling any state government, which was the possibility feared by white southerners. But removing blacks from the United States altogether, said Morgan, would be even better.31

Morgan believed that the technological advancements of the industrial revolution in Gilded Age America had made the logistics of mass expatriation possible for the first time. More blacks could now be shipped abroad in one year, he told the Senate, than were shipped in twenty years when the American Colonization Society began operations in 1817. Although the population of blacks had reached almost eight million by 1890, every one could conceivably be helped to return to his or her ancestral homeland through a long-range, federally funded program. Opposition to such a plan seemed irrational to Morgan. If there never had been any Africans in America, he asked, and eight million of them suddenly wanted to immigrate to America, would the federal government allow it? "No! Never!" he exclaimed. Why, then, should they be allowed to stay now?32

Morgan justified his advocacy of emigration in a masterful articulation of southern paternalism, claiming that he cared deeply for the welfare of blacks and only wanted to see the best possible action taken for them. He claimed that his black neighbors were like family and said that most white southerners felt the same way toward blacks in their communities. While it would be difficult to break that bond, he was sure that blacks would ultimately be better off in their own land than in the United States. They were now, for the first time, psychologically and intellectually prepared for the move en masse because they had gained education, political experience, Christian values, and social civility from having enjoyed a generation of freedom in the United States. If there was any suspicion that by going back to Africa they would lose these attributes and regress to savagery, Morgan said, he would never try to encourage them to leave. But he believed the opposite to be true, that Christian black Americans would help lift the whole African continent out of barbarism and backwardness. If Africa could be so converted, it would happen only through the work of blacks themselves, he concluded, because the Africans possessed "a marked aversion to the white race" and refused to be proselytized by them. To illustrate the futility of the white race's efforts at uplifting the people of Africa, Morgan asserted that certain parts of the vast continent were the only places on earth where the white Catholic church-which was otherwise renowned for its dogged determination-had already given up its missionary efforts. Black Christians from America, therefore, must become the new missionaries to Africa. he vowed that they would immediately become a privileged elite in the backward and poverty-stricken land and would have the opportunity to "be as kind and patient and generous towards their own kindred as we [white southerners] have been to them." Morgan read aloud from publications of the British Zoological Society and the journal of Henry Stanley to show how desperately Africa needed this civilizing influence and to prove that the interior of the continent, particularly the Congo region, would make a suitable habitation for the emigrants.33

Morgan reasoned that a mass exodus to Africa would bring the same benefits to blacks that the American Revolution had won for the patriots in the thirteen colonies: it would give them "independence, liberty, and power," but, unlike the colonists of the eighteenth century, the "negroes" would gain all of this "without a sacrifice." If they remained in America, on the other hand, they would only waste their lives attempting to secure the same freedoms that could be had easily in Africa. No matter how intelligent, talented, and determined a black man may be, said Morgan, he "cannot find a place suited to his worth in any part of the United States. The more conspicuous his abilities may be, the less chance he will have for a position where he can make them felt. all of us, in every part of the Union, with one accord refuse to the negro the power and influence for which we have endeavored to qualify him." How many blacks are there in positions of power and influence in the North, asked Morgan? A resounding "None!" was his answer. What northern state had ever sent a black man to either house of Congress? Again, the answer was "None!"34

Considering the nature of the situation, Morgan reasoned, it would be more humane to stop building the hopes of black Americans by drawing them into the vortex of party politics and making them the spoils. He was convinced that removing the wild card of race from the American political equation would be best for everyone: it would restore peace between the North and South, remove a stumbling block from the path of both Democrats and Republicans, uplift the continent of Africa, and give the emigrants opportunities for self-fulfillment that they would otherwise never know. He concluded by asserting that "pride of race will cause the African negro to rejoice in his coming as the redeemer and regenerator of his fatherland. . . . Their light shall be as a city set upon a hill."35

Other southern Democratic senators followed Morgan in advocating the Butler bill, including Zebulon Vance of North Carolina, Wade Hampton of South Carolina, and Butler himself. Only two Democrats expressed opposition to the bill: Alfred Colquitt of Georgia, who considered it logistically impossible, and George Vest, a diminutive Missourian from Kansas City who believed blacks were collectively too unintelligent to play the role of pioneers. During the Democrats' filibuster of the Federal Elections Bill in January 1891, Vest and Morgan deliberately wasted a fair amount of time rehashing arguments over the feasibility of the federally funded mass emigration idea. Vest, who enjoyed a long career in the Senate but is most remembered for eulogizing the dog as man's best friend, argued that blacks were not a pioneering people as were whites. Rather than venture voluntarily into the great unknown, Vest said, blacks would choose a degraded status in the United States because they had a childlike dependency on whites. If that were true, replied Morgan, reading from the latest issue of the Washington Post, why would two thousand blacks from Texas and Mississippi be converging on Savannah as he spoke, awaiting transportation to Africa from the Congo National Emigration Steamship Company? Vest retorted that they would only sit there in Georgia, waiting to be told what to do because they would not have the capacity to figure it out for themselves. Morgan conceded the point by necessity, considering that the doctrine of black inferiority underlay the entire purpose for removing blacks from America. In fact, the notion undergirded Morgan's ideology of racism in all of its manifestations, and he never deviated from it as a proslavery secessionist, a Confederate, a Redeemer, and a thirty-year member of the Senate.36

The emigration debate soon spread to the House of Representatives. In the House debate over the Federal Elections Bill in july 1890, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts declared the talk of black emigration among white southerners "a confession of failure and a cry of despair" in trying to solve the race problem without federal help.37 Other House Republicans found comic relief in presenting a resolution passed by the Afro-American Congress, an organization that had coincidentally assembled in Chicago at the time the Butler bill was under discussion. The resolution asked Congress to appropriate $100 million for the relocation of every "unhappy" white southerner to the North. It added that Senator Morgan, along with Senators Wade Hampton of South Carolina and Randall L. Gibson of Louisiana, should be jointly appointed "the Moses[es] to direct the unhappy people out of the States of their misfortunes." Some African Americans did not find the Butler bill amusing, however. A young Harvard scholar named W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, wrote an opinion of the scheme in which he singled out Morgan by name and "let go at him with no holds barred" in a "long and blazing rebuke."38

Despite the fact that several African American leaders-most notably Bishop Henry M. Turner of the A. M. E. Church, the most renowned Pan-Africanist before Marcus Garvey-supported the bill, the debate came to an abrupt halt as the Republican leaders of the Senate tabled the bill and took up other matters.39 Morgan, however, never abandoned his support for the idea of a federally funded program to remove the South's black population to some distant land. Eight years later, after the United States had taken possession of the Philippines in the Spanish-American War, the Alabamian rekindled the old colonization idea by promoting the newly acquired Asian islands as the ideal home for America's downtrodden blacks.40

Notwithstanding Morgan's detailed list of reasons why emigration was the best course for African Americans, his real motive for supporting black emigration was an irrational fear, shared with most white male southerners, of miscegenation by black males and white females. he once commented that a desirable by-product of black removal would be that "we in the United States will be freed from the necessity of a general amalgamation of the races," which he thought was otherwise inevitable.41 Morgan's public musings on racial mixing spurred a vituperative rebuttal in the Arena from T. Thomas Fortune, one of the leading African American newspaper editors of the day. Fortune, who was of mixed racial ancestry himself and looked more white than black in his physical appearance, complained that Morgan and other white southerners had never shown the slightest concern for the thousands of children born of miscegenation in the slave era. Now that the roles were potentially reversed, however, these same whites bemoaned racial mixing. "The best white blood has for two hundred years gone into the black race; and if it now and in the future returns to plague those who sowed to the wind," said Fortune, white racists should not suddenly "whine like babies over their supposed misfortune, and appeal to the rest of mankind for sympathy."42 Needless to say, such statements fell on deaf ears. The senator from Alabama was determined to keep the races apart in the South, by segregation if not by emigration. The arguments for removing blacks from the United States could be easily adapted to an agenda for separating them from the presence of whites in daily living. Races would instinctively associate with their own kind, asserted Morgan, in a natural order recognized by whites and inferior races alike. The propriety of segregation "is as instinctive with the negro to admit," he said, "as it is with the white race to demand and assert it. . . . Race separation is the only cure for race aversion."43

Morgan judged the black race collectively as objects of pity, unfortunate creatures who seemed destined to remain perpetually at the bottom oi American society if they did not the out altogether. In his opinion, "The negro is a grateful man. he is a good man. he is not a wise man." Due to this interminable condition, predicted Morgan in 1890, black Americans would still hold the same position in society seventy-five years later.44 Although succeeding generations of racists rather than racial inferiority were to blame, Morgan's predictions proved true-seventy-five years would pass before Congress chose to protect the constitutional civil rights and voting rights of black Americans in any effective and meaningful way. In the interim, white southerners would embrace and codify in state law the racial ideology and system of segregation propounded by Morgan and others of his era. Indeed, the next generation would come of age treating white supremacy as social orthodoxy and racial dogma.

After working relentlessly from 1889 to 1891 to find a solution to the southern race problem, Morgan spent the remaining fifteen years of his life and Senate career focusing on America's foreign policy. He became a leading proponent of American expansion abroad during the age of imperialism, arguing for the annexation and statehood of Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, and various other territories, ever looking for a new homeland for black southerners. he also labored incessantly to persuade Congress and Presidents Cleveland, McKinley, and Roosevelt to dig a canal across Central America. Although he fought unsuccessfully for the Nicaraguan rather than the Panamanian route, he nonetheless became the ideological "father" of the Panama Canal, the achievement for which he has been best remembered in history.45

And Morgan was definitely concerned about his place in history. While many of his colleagues routinely went through the motions of speech making with little thought to its significance for posterity, Morgan obsessed over it.46 A contemporary of Morgan's, Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont, once commented that he was "comforted" by the belief that his Senate speeches "all have an unmortal oblivion in the Congressional Record," where they would be "read by nobody" and merely "stored away voluminously . . . until the crack of doom."47 Morgan believed precisely the opposite, asserting that "senators will find themselves mistaken if they think that what we say will not be read. . . . We are making history here, and I want it to be correct, true, and honest."48 Morgan read the Record every day, checking to make sure the transcript was correct. If the Senate's business was not recorded verbatim he let everyone know, complaining that some extremely important "utterance.. .was lost to history. "He complained especially loudly when it was his utterance that was lost.49

Thus, with his eye fixed firmly on his place in history, Senator John Tyler Morgan fashioned his legacy as one of the foremost champions of white supremacy in late nineteenth-century America, taking every opportunity to speak and write publicly on racial issues and helping to articulate the views of a whole generation of white southerners. just as his words survived long after him in the Congressional Record, Morgan's influence helped construct policies of oppression against black southerners and defiance against the federal government that would shape the South's course for much of the twentieth century. As much as anyone, Alabama's "ambassador" to the United States gave life to Tim Crow.

1 For contemporary assessments of the national change of focus away from racial issues in the late 1870s and early 1880s, see George Washington Cable, "The Freedman's Case in Equity," Century Magazine, January 1885, 409-18, reprinted in Forgotten Voices: Dissenting Southerners in an Age of Conformity, ed. Charles E. Wynes (Baton Rouge, 1967), 13-36; and T. Thomas Fortune, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (1884; reprint, New York, 1968), 9. Fora full study of this topic with regard to the Billion Dollar Congress, known as such for being the first Congress to spend more than a billion dollars in a two-year term, see Thomas Adams Upchurch, Legislating Racism: The Billion Dollar Congress and the Birth of Jim Crow (Lexington, Ky., 2004).

2 The Jim Crow era is here defined as beginning in the 1890s, when the joint discriminatory practices of constitutional disfranchisement and de jure racial segregation were implemented against African Americans. For more on the origins of Jim Crow, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed. (New York, 1974), and Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York, 1954).

3 Joseph A. Fry, John Tyler Morgan and the Search for Soulhern Autonomy (Knoxville, 1992), 1-30. Fry's biography is the definitive work on Morgan and is highly recommended for information on aspects of his life and career not addressed in this article. On the effort to remove Senator Spencer from office, see Charles M. Crook, "The Barbour County Background to the Election of 1872 and Alabama's Dual Legislatures," Alabama Review 56 (October 2003): 242-77.

4 Fry, John Tyler Morgan, xi, 2, 37, 48; see also James M. Anders, "The Senatorial Career of John Tyler Morgan," (Ph.D. diss., George Peabody College for Teachers, 1956), 1, 29.

5 "Senator Pugh Writes a Letter," unidentified newspaper clipping, scrapbook one, James L. Pugh Papers, Special Collections and Archives Department, Ralph Brown Draughon Library, Auburn University.

6 A few other southerners of this period have become more infamous than Morgan for their racism, but two differences set Morgan apart from them. First, most racial demagogues, including "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman of South Carolina, acquired their reputations through grassroots action at the local level, rather than by purveying a well-defined set of racist beliefs through printed and spoken word at the national level. second, most of them, including James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, did not come to national prominence until the mid-1890s and early twentieth century. The only racist to rival Morgan as a true ideologue in the formative years between Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era was Carlyle McKinley, editor of the Charleston News and Courier. Several ideologues would rise to replace Morgan in the twentieth century, most notably Thomas Dixon and Tom Watson. For a good overview of racist leaders of this time and their respective beliefs, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971), 198-255, and Edward L. Ayers, ThePromise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York, 1993). To compare Morgan's ideology with that of McKinley, see Carlyle McKinley, An Appeal to Pharaoh: The Negro Problem, and Its Radical Solution (New York, 1889). see also Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman ana the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill, 2000), 113.

7 The best sources of information on the Federal Elections Bill are Richard E. Welch Jr., "The Federal Elections Bill of 1890: Postscripts and Prelude," Journal of American History 52 (December 1965):511-26; Fred Wellborn, "The Influence of the Silver-Republican Senators, 1889-1891," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 14 (March 1928): 462-80; Daniel W. Crofts, "The Blair Bill and the Elections Bill: The Congressional Aftermath to Reconstruction" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1968); Stanley P. Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt: Northern Republicans and the Southern Negro, 1877-1893 (Bloomington, 1962); and John R. Lambert, Arthur Pue German (Baton Rouge, 1953).

8 John Tyler Morgan, "Shall Negro Majorities Rule?" Forum 6 (February 1889): 586-99.

9 Albion Tourgee, "Shall White Minorities Rule?" Forum 7 (April 1889): 149. For further information on Tourgee see Otto Olsen, Carpetbagger's Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgee (Baltimore, 1965), and Theodore L. Gross, Albion W. Tourgee (New York, 1963). The best source on Tourgee's role in the Federal Elections Bill debate is Crofts, "Blair Education Bill," 250-59.

10 Morgan, "Shall Negro Majorities Rule?" 596-97; see also Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston, 1902), twentieth amendment, and Claude H. Nolen, The Negro's Image in the South: The Anatomy of White Supremacy (Lexington, 1967), 85.

11 William E. Chandler, "Our Southern Masters," Forum 5 (July 1888): 508-20; William E. Chandler, "National Control of Elections," Forum 9 (August 1890): 714.

12 John Tyler Morgan, "Federal Control of Elections," Forum 10 (September 1890): 24-25.

13 John Tyler Morgan, introduction to Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqucville, trans. Henry Reeve (New York, 1890), vii. Morgan's former colleague in the Senate, John J. Ingalls of Kansas, also contributed an introduction. The text of the 1890 edition is available on the CiD-ROM supplement to Robert A. Divine et al., America, Past and Present, 5th ed. (New York, 1999).

14 Morgan, introduction to Democracy in America, iii-viii.

15 John T. Morgan, "The Race Question in the United States," Arena 2 (September 1890): 385.

16 George, a driving force behind Mississippi's new constitution, was clearly just as much a racist as Morgan, but his expertise lay more in jurisprudence than in articulation of racist ideology. In 1890 he engaged in several public dialogues with leading Republican senators to test their reaction to the proposal of adopting a literacy test. They were curiously amenable to the idea, although they came to regret, it. See, for example, the exchange in Congressional Record (CR) 21 (March 12, 1890), pt. 3:2154-57. For more information on George and the Mississippi constitution, see Jackson Clarion-Ledger, January 24, November 6, 14, 21, 1889, January 9, 1890; Jackson New Mississippian, February 12, June 25, 1890; J. S. McNeilly, "War and Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1863-1890," Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society: Centenary Series 2 (1918):531-32; J. S. McNeilly, "History of the Measures Submitted to the Committee on the Elective Franchise, Apportionment, and Election in the Constitutional Convention of 1890," Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 6 (1902): 129-40; S. S. Calhoon, "Causes and Events that Led to the Calling of the Constitutional Convention of 1890," Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 6 (1902): 105-10; and James P. Coleman, "The Origin of the Constitution of 1890," Journal of Mississippi History 19 (April 1957):76. For more information on the literacy tests' effects on southern politics and race relations, see V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949), 537; Nolen, Negro's Image in the South, 85; Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 82-83; and Logan, Negro in American Life and Thought, 198.

17 Malcolm Cook McMillan, Constitutional Development in Alabama, 1798-1901: A Study in Politics, theNegro, and Sectionalism (Chapel Hill, 1955), 260, 274-75, 293, 349; Fry, John Tyler Morgan, 133-53.

18 CR 22 (January 16, 1891), pt. 2:1459.

19 CR 22 (December 16, 1890), pt. 2:510.

20 CR 22 (January 16, 1891), pt. 2:1426.

21 CR 22 (December 31, 1890), pt. 1:891.

22 CR 22 (December 11, 1890), pt. 1:320-21; CR 22 (January 16, 1891), pt. 2:1419-31. Republicans entered the 1890 elections with a 24-seat majority in the House of Representatives, but that November voters gave the Democrats 154 seats, producing a Democratic majority of 130 votes. A major factor leading to this outcome was the House's passage of the Federal Elections Bill, which, combined with the unpopular McKinley Tariff and the squandering of the budget surplus on pensions, produced a conservative backlash. See John S. Henderson to Mrs. John S. Henderson, September 7, 1890, John Steele Henderson Papers, #327, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (SHC); John G. Carlisle, "The Recent Election," North American Review 151 (December 1890): 641-49; and William McKinley Jr. et al., "What Congress Has Done," North American Revient 151 (November 1890): 513-32.

23 CR 22 (January 21, 1891), pt. 2:1597-98. The preponderance of evidence indicates that Morgan was not disingenuous in wanting the Republicans to debate him on the merits of the bill in question. Debate often resulted in revised (or watered-down) versions of bills, which the Democrats would have gladly accepted in the early stages of the filibuster when it seemed a foregone conclusion that the measure would pass. See the comments of Republican senator Eugene Hale of Maine about how "instructive" the early Democratic speeches on the bill were to him in CR 22 (December 30, 1890), pt. 1:883-85. See also George F. Hoar's duplicitous thoughts on the necessity of Congress making slow and careful deliberation before passing any controversial legislation in "The Senate," Youth's Companion, November 13, 1890, 620; and Republican speaker Thomas B. Reed's equally duplicitous thoughts in "Obstruction in the National House," North American Review 149 (October 1889): 424.

21 CR 22 (December 17, 1890), pt. 1:573-74. Morgan also defended white supremacy in the South by arguing that Native Americans received worse treatment under Republican policies in the West than blacks received under white rule in the South. CR 21 (July 22, 1890), pt. 8:7546-47; see also Joseph A. Fry, "An Unlikely 'Friend' to Native Americans: John Tyler Morgan and Gilded Age Indian Policy," Hayes Historical Journal 4 (Summer 1992): 5-18.

25 CR 22 (January 22, 1891), pt. 2:1725.

26 Fry, John Tyler Morgan, 40. James M. Anders has commented on Morgan's proclivity for "prolixity" by quoting the senator's own thoughts: "If I had studied the subject thoroughly and had my authorities arranged, I could speak three days, but without preparation I could speak indefinitely" (Anders, "Senatorial Career of John Tyler Morgan," 27). According to some contemporaries, Morgan was not a very charismatic or exciting speaker. One Republican likened his voice to a "perpetual whine and whimper," a charge to which Morgan responded by apologizing for sticking to the facts rather than trying to throw a "circus show" on the floor of the Senate. CR 22 (December 11, 1890), pt. 1:321.

27 The best treatment of the Butler bill and the various emigration movements of this era is Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890-1910 (New Haven, 1969). Contemporary skeptics of the plan and historians alike have contended that the Butler bill was unworkable. Redkey has cited the lack of ships available for such a purpose as a factor that automatically made Butler's plan an impossibility. Yet the Benjamin Harrison administration was engaged in the largest naval buildup in American history to that time, and it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that naval ships could have been employed for transporting black emigrants. Letters of citizens to Senator William E. Chandler of New Hampshire, who chaired the naval appropriations committee, bear this out, including H. L. Duncan to Chandler, April 1, 1891, book 82, Papers of William E. Chandler, Library of Congress. Other skeptics have complained that there was not enough interest among black Americans to warrant a federal emigration program. Yet the most famous black emigrationist of the day, Bishop Henry M. Turner, rejected that notion, as did the American Colonization Society, claiming that perhaps as many as one million black heads of households would have accepted the federal offer to emigrate in 1890. See H. M. Turner to M. C. Butler, April 10, 1890, Matthew Calbraith Butler Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina; "Seventy-third Annual Report" and "Seventy-fourth Annual Report," in The Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vols. 64-91, 1881-1910 (reprint, New York, 1969).

28 "Decline of the Negro in America," Philadelphia Record, February 1, 1891, quoted in Public Opinion, February 7, 1891, 418.

29 James C. Hemphill Scrapbook, 1889-1890, pp. 23, 102, Hemphill Family Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University.

30 John Tyler Morgan, "The Future of the Negro," North American Review 139 (July 1884): 81-84; Fry, John Tyler Morgan, 71, 77-78.

31 CR21 (January 7, 1890), pt. 1:419.

32 Ibid., 420. For further discussion of the potential for mass removal of the black population to Africa in 1890, see Johann Buttikofer, "Notes of a Reisebilder aus Liberia" (Leiden, Ger., 1890), trans. and comp. George R. Stetson, in The Records of the American Colonization Society (Washington, D.C., 1971), microfilm, reel 315; Atlanta Constitution, January 1, 1890; Leavenworth (Kansas) Advocate, February 5, 1890; Literary World, August 30, 1890, 291; "Seventy-third Annual Report"; "Seventy-fourth Annual Report"; Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmol Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832-1912 (New York, 1967), 131-32; and McKinley, Appeal to Pharaoh, 128-42, 152-57, 180.

33 CR 21 (January 7, 1890), pt. 1:420-27. For further arguments on the need for black Christians from the United States to populate Africa, see Edward W. Blyden, The African Problem and Other Discourses, Delivered in America in 1890 (London, 1890), 83-84, 90. For further discussion of Henry Stanley's influence on American emigrationists, see "The Stanley Controversy-A German-American View," New York Bellelnstiches Journal, November 19, 1890, reprinted in Public Opinion, November 29, 1890, 175; D. Kinmount Ray, "Notes and Comments: Stanley's Pygmies," North American Review 151 (August 1890): 253-54; George Washington Williams, "An Open Letter to His Supreme Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo by Colonel, The Honorable Geo. W. Williams, of the United States of America," reprinted in Adelaide C. Hill and Martin Kilson, eds., Apropos of Africa: Afro-American Leaders and the Romance of Africa (Garden City, N.Y., 1971), 113-24.

34 CR 21 (January 7, 1890), pt. 1:420, 428.

35 Ibid., 428-29.

36 CR 22 (December 15, 1890), pt. 1:457; CR 22 (January 21, 1891), pt. 2:1622-23; miscellaneous newspaper clippings, vol. 17, p. 8, Arthur P. Gorman Scrapbooks, #280, SHC; Vest speech, Warrensburg, Missouri, 1870, George G. Vest Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis; Savannah Morning News, September 9, 1890; Fry, John Tyler Morgan, 15.

37 CR 21 (June 26, 1890), pt. 7:6543.

38 CR 21 (June 28, 1890), pt. 7:6686; W. E. B. Du Bois, "A Negro Student at Harvard at the End of the Nineteenth Century," Massachusetts Review 1 (Spring 1960), reprinted in W. K. B. Uu Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York, 1995), 279.

39 Turner once said of the bill's sponsors, "Some may hiss and condemn your course for the present, but unborn generations will commend your courage and honor your memory," adding that they would "go down in history as the pioneer [s] of the grandest measure in the closing days of the nineteenth century," Turner to Butler, April 10, 1890.

40 John Tyler Morgan, "The Race Question," reel 11, p. 5, Papers of John Tylcr Morgan, 1840-1907, Library of Congress; see also Fry, John Tyler Morgan, 323.

41 CR 21 (January 7, 1890), pt. 1:429.

42 T. Thomas Fortune, "The Afro-American," Arena 13 (December 1891): 115-18.

43 Morgan, "Race Question," 3-5; see also CR 21 (July 26, 1890), pt. 8:7734-36.

44 CR 21 (July 26, 1890), pt. 8:7734-36; CR 22 (December 16, 1890), pt. 1:503.

45 For further treatment of Morgan as a molder of America's imperialist, foreign policies in the 189Os and early 190Os, see Lawrence A. clayton, "Canal Morgan," Alabama. Heritage (Summer 1992): 6-19;Joseph A. Fry, "Strange Expansionist Bedfellows: Newlands, Morgan, and Hawaii," Halcyon 11 (1989): 105-24; Joseph A. Fry, "John Tyler Morgan's Southern Expansionism," Diplomatic History 9 (Fall 1985):329-46; John Major, "Who Wrote the HayBunau-Varilla Convention?" Diplomatic History 8 (Spring 1984): 115-23; Joseph O. Baylen and John Hammond Moore, "Senator John Tyler Morgan and Negro Colonization in the Philippines, 1901-1902," Phylon 29 (Spring 1968): 65-75; and O. Lawrence Burnette Jr., "John Tyler Morgan and Expansionist Sentiment in the New South," Alabama Review 18 (July 1965): 163-82.

46 Many sources make this assertion regarding senators' lack of concern for the historical value of their speeches. see, for example, David J. Rothman, Politics and Power: The Uniled States Senate, 1869-1901 (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 2-3, 7-8; and George H. Haynes, The Senate of the United States: Its History and Practice (1938; reprint, New York, 1960), vii.

47 Quoted in William B. Parker, The Life and Public Services oj justin Smith Morrill (1924; reprint, New York, 1971), 329.

48 CR 22 (December 11, 1890), pt. 1:320, 818.

49 CR 22 (January 22, 1891), pt. 2:1731.

Thomas Adams Upchurch is assistant professor of history at East Georgia College.

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