finally broke down and destroyed the reconstruction policy which followed the Civil War." Due to his efforts to suppress African-Americans from exercising their political rights and to vouchsafe white supremacy in Alabama during the Reconstruction era, Morgan became a presidential elector on the Democratic ticket in 1876, and he was favored to win Alabama's seat to the United States Senate in that year. Senatorship Following his landslide election in 1876, Morgan was elected six times as U.S. Senator for the state of Alabama in 1882, 1888, 1894, 1900, and 1906, and serving from March 4, 1877, until his death. For much of his tenure, he remained aligned with the Bourbon Democrats, and he served in the Senate alongside his Alabama colleague Edmund W. Pettus, a fellow former Confederate general and Klan member. Alongside Democratic U. S. Representative Bourke Cockran of New York, 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. Morgan also "introduced and championed several bills to legalize the practice of racist vigilante murder [lynching] as a means of preserving white power in the Deep South." He served as chairman of Committee on Rules (46th U.S. Congress), the Committee on Foreign Relations (53rd U.S. Congress), the Committee on Interoceanic Canals (56th and 57th Congresses), and the Committee on Public Health and National Quarantine (59th U.S. Congress). Foreign policy As a U.S. Senator, Morgan advocated for separating blacks and whites by encouraging the migration of black people to leave the South. Historian Adam Hochschild notes that, "at various times in his long career Morgan also advocated sending them [negroes] 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.'" By the 1880s, Morgan began to focus on the Congo for his repatriation visions. After the Belgian monarch Léopold II signalled 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. Morgan's support was vital for United States' early diplomatic recognition of the new colony, which became the Congo Free State in December 1883. After revelations about major atrocities by the colonial occupiers, Morgan cut his ties with the Congo Free State. He feared the brutality against