John Tyler Morgan - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

Senator Morgan died in Washington, D.C. while still in office. He was buried in Live Oak Cemetery in Selma, Alabama. The remainder of his term was served by John H. Bankhead.

An article by history professor Thomas Adams Upchurch in the April 2004 Alabama Review says:

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."

In 1908, the Congressman from Alabama, Mr. Heflin, in describing both recently deceased Senators Edmund Pettus and John Tyler Morgan said the following, “the ballot, that which represented privileges and powers for which the quick-witted Celt and the thoughtful Saxon had struggled a thousand years to achieve, was given in the twinkling of an eye to the unfit hordes of an inferior race. . . .No two men in Alabama, or in the South, did more to stay the hideous tide of negro domination than the two dearly beloved Senators whose death the House mourns to-day. In the dark and trying days of reconstruction these two men were foremost among the defenders of Anglo-Saxon civilization.” See: "John Tyler Morgan and Edmund Winston Pettus- Memorial Addresses-Sixtieth Congress, First Session, Senate of the United States, April 18, 1908. House of Representatives, April 25, 1908," ed. United States Congress (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909). 188-189.