John Anthony Winston (September 4, 1812 – December 21, 1871) was a planter, military officer, and politician who became the 15th Governor of Alabama (1853 to 1857) after serving as president of the state senate (1845–1849). Alabama's first native-born governor, Winston later fought for the Confederate States of America as colonel of the 8th Alabama Infantry early in the American Civil War, and after the conflict was not permitted to assume a seat in the United States Senate. Early and family life He was born in 1812 to the former Mary Cooper and her planter husband William Winston in Tuscumbia, in Madison County, then in the Alabama Territory. His grandfather Anthony Winston had represented Buckingham County, Virginia in the House of Burgesses, one of Virginia's Revolutionary Conventions, and as one of its first (part-time) representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates, before becoming a Virginia judge. Winston received a private education appropriate to his class, including at LaGrange College (now the location of the University of North Alabama) and later in Tennessee at Cumberland College (which later became the University of Nashville). John Anthony Winston married his first cousin, Mary Agness Jones (1819–1835), on August 7, 1832, in Madison County, Alabama. They had only one surviving child, a daughter, Mary Agnes Winston. Career Winston, like his father, operated plantations using enslaved labor. He also became Cotton Commissioner, inspecting the state's main export crop. Legislator and officer Winston continued his family's tradition of political involvement in 1840, winning an election to the state House of Representatives and re-election in 1842. In 1843 he won election to the state Senate and won re-election until his gubernatorial term described below. Fellow senators elected Winston their president from 1845 to 1849. During his legislative career, Winston also represented Alabama at the 1848 Democratic party convention in Baltimore and the attempted secessionist convention in Nashville in 1850. Although considered a strong southern rights advocate, Winston did not support William Lowndes Yancey's ardent state's rights platform in Baltimore, nor the popular sovereignty compromise at the Nashville meeting. Meanwhile, in 1846 Winston organized a militia company to fight in the Mexican–American War, but it was never called into active duty. Governor Alabama voters elected Winston the 15th Governor of the U.S. state of Alabama, and he won re-election after two years, thus serving from 1853 to 1857. Winston became known as the "veto governor" because he vetoed