John Tyler Morgan - Postbellum Career

Postbellum Career

After the war, Morgan resumed the practicing of law in Selma, Alabama. 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 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."

He introduced and fought for numerous legislative bills in support of legal lynching. Morgan also staunchly worked for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that was intended to prevent the denial of voting rights based on race. 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). In 1894, Morgan chaired an investigation, known as the Morgan Report into the Hawaiian Revolution which concluded that the U.S. had remained completely neutral in the matter. He authored the introduction to the Morgan Report based on the findings of the investigative committee.

He was a strong supporter of the annexation of Hawaii and visited Hawaii in 1897 in support of annexation. He believed that the history of the U.S. clearly indicated it was unnecessary to hold a plebiscite in Hawaii as a condition for annexation. He was appointed by President William McKinley in July 1898 to the commission created by the Newlands Resolution to establish government in the Territory of Hawaii. A strong advocate for a Central American canal, Morgan was also a staunch supporter of the Cuban revolutionaries in the 1890s.

The most recent study of Morgan by Joseph A. Fry suggests an alternate reason for Morgan's desires for American expansionism in the 1890s. Morgan may have figured that the expanded territories in Latin American would center their economic development in the Southern states, not the Northern ones, and this would undo the economic dominion of the North due to its victory of 1865. As it turned out the expansion in the wake of the Spanish American War did not lead to creating a southern United States economic domination.