[3][4][5][6] Morgan and fellow Klan member Edmund W. Pettus became the ringleaders of white supremacy in Alabama and did more than anyone else in the state to overthrow Reconstruction efforts in the wake of the Civil War.

[7][8] When President Ulysses S. Grant dispatched U.S. Attorney General Amos Akerman to prosecute the Klan under the Enforcement Acts, Morgan was arrested and jailed.

"[13] Widely considered to be among the most notorious racist ideologues of his time, he is often credited by scholars with laying the foundation of the Jim Crow era.

[16] He envisioned the United States as a globe-spanning empire and believed that island nations such as Hawaii and the Philippines should be forcibly annexed in order for the country to dominate trade in the Pacific Ocean.

Morgan was initially educated by his mother but, in the fall of 1830, the six-year-old barefoot boy walked a quarter of a mile each day to attend Old Forest Hill Academy.

[18] In 1833, his family moved to Calhoun County, Alabama, where he attended schools and then studied law in Tuskegee with justice William Parish Chilton, his brother-in-law.

Turning to politics, Morgan aligned himself with the pro-slavery Fire-Eaters led by fellow Alabama politician William Lowndes Yancey and became an ardent exponent of the Southern secession movement.

[40] At the time of the Confederacy's collapse and the end of the war, Morgan attempted with little success to organize Alabama black troops for home defense.

[41] By 1867, angered by formerly enslaved persons serving as state legislators, Morgan began to play a highly public role against the Republican Reconstruction.

[43] Aligning himself with the Bourbon Democrats and employing their electoral strategy,[44] Morgan wrote numerous newspaper editorials urging white Alabama voters to "redeem" their state from Republican control and to unite against African-Americans for "self-preservation.

"[44][19] Amid his political struggle against Reconstruction in 1872, Morgan succeeded James H. Clanton as the second Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.

[3][4][5][6] According to Alabama Representative Robert Stell Heflin, Morgan and fellow Klan member Edmund W. Pettus became the ringleaders of white supremacy in the state who, more than anyone else, "resisted and finally broke down and destroyed the reconstruction policy which followed the Civil War.

"[45] When President Ulysses S. Grant dispatched his U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman to vigorously prosecute Alabama Klan under the Enforcement Acts, Morgan was arrested and jailed.

[9] After the demise of the first Ku Klux Klan, Morgan and Pettus continued to resist Reconstruction efforts and to reassert white supremacy in Alabama.

[50] For much of his senatorial tenure, he remained aligned with the Bourbon Democrats, and he served in the Senate alongside his close friend Edmund W. Pettus, a former Confederate general and Klan member.

[51] Throughout his senatorship, Morgan staunchly labored for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was intended to prevent the denial of voting rights based on race.

[19] Due to his relentless efforts to disenfranchise black citizens across the United States and his vociferous championing of congressional legislation "to legalize the practice of racist vigilante murder [lynching] as a means of preserving white power in the Deep South,"[52] Morgan is frequently credited by historians with "forging the ideology of white supremacy that dominated American race relations from the 1890s to the 1960s.

[54] After the Belgian monarch Léopold II signaled that his International Association of the Congo would consider immigration and settlement of African Americans, Morgan became one of the foremost advocates of this emerging colonial enterprise in Central Africa.

[56] He feared the brutality against the inherent African population would deter black U.S. citizens from emigrating and jeopardize his plans to create an exclusively white American nation.

He called for a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through Nicaragua, enlarging the merchant marine and the Navy, and acquiring Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Cuba.

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.

[13]As the patriarch of a powerful Southern family, Morgan's extended relatives remained influential in Alabama politics for many decades and owned the First White House of the Confederacy in Montgomery.

[22] According to historians, Morgan's nephew Anthony D. Sayre played a key role in undermining the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in Alabama and enabling the ideology of white supremacy.

[64] According to Scottie, black citizens living in Montgomery still viewed the Sayre family with askance as late as the 1970s, and they would not reciprocate her social overtures.