John Brown Gordon
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| “ | If you are disposed to live in peace with the white people, they extend to you the hand of friendship, but if you attempt to inaugurate a war of races you will be exterminated. The Saxon race was never created by Almightly God to be ruled by the African. | „ |
| ~ Gordon in a speech in South Carolina, 1868 |
John Brown Gordon was a Confederate general, slaveholder, and politician who is best known for being one of Robert E. Lee's most trusted generals. He was known for being a strong white supremacist, having greatly opposed the Reconsturction and continued to strongly support slavery. He is also thought to be the founder of the Ku Klux Klan chapter in Georgia. However, this is unconfirmed due to the organization being very secretive.
Biography edit
John Brown Gordon was of Scots descent and was born on the farm of his parents Zachariah Gordon and his wife in Upson County, Georgia; he was the fourth of twelve children. Many Gordon family members had fought in the Revolutionary War. His family moved to Walker County, Georgia by 1840, where his father was recorded in the US census that year as owning a plantation with 18 slaves. Gordon was a student at the University of Georgia, where he was a member of the Mystical 7 Society. He left before graduating to "read the law" in Atlanta, where he passed the bar examination.
Gordon and his father, Zachariah, invested in a series of coal mines in Tennessee and Georgia. He also practiced law. In 1854 Gordon married Rebecca "Fanny" Haralson, daughter of Hugh Anderson Haralson and his wife. They had a long marriage and six children.
In 1860, Gordon owned one slave, a 14-year-old girl. His father owned four slaves in that same census year.
Although lacking any military education or experience, Gordon was elected captain of a company of mountaineers during the American Civil War and displayed remarkable capabilities. He quickly climbed from captain to brigadier general (1862) to major general (1864) to lieutenant general (1865). He was at many major Civil War battles—Seven Pines, Malvern Hills, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg—and he commanded one wing of General Robert E. Lee’s army just prior to Appomattox.
A hero to Georgians at the age of just 33, Gordon returned to his home state and began to practice law once again. He vigorously opposed federal Reconstruction policies, but, when he ran for governorship as a Democrat in 1868, he was defeated by his Republican opponent. Unquestionably a symbol of the age of white supremacy to his Georgian constituents, Gordon was rumoured to be a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan.
Gordon was elected to the U.S. Senate (1873–79). Though he was reelected, he resigned in 1880 to take an important position with a railroad company, thereby leading the shift of the New South to commercialism and industrialism. He returned to politics in 1886 for one term as governor and, at the conclusion of that term in 1890, was sent back to the U.S. Senate, where he served until 1897.
When the United Confederate Veterans organization was formed in 1890, Gordon was made commander in chief, a position he occupied until his death. He published memoirs of his military exploits in Reminiscences of the Civil War (1903).