to the Sea. Soon after, he was stripped of his command due to drunkeness, and he was reassigned to administrative duty in Demopolis, Alabama. At the time of the Confederacy's collapse and the end of the war, Morgan was trying to organize Alabama black troops for home defense. Reconstruction era After the war ended, Morgan tried briefly to be a farmer, but he failed in the endeavor. He resumed his law practice in Selma, Alabama, and he soon became the affluent legal representative for widely-loathed railroad companies. By 1867, purportedly enraged by the sight of formerly enslaved persons serving as policemen and state legislators, Morgan began to play a highly public role against the Republican Reconstruction. He toured throughout the American South giving race-baiting speeches and urging fellow Southerners to refuse all compromise with Reconstruction. Aligning himself with the Bourbon Democrats and employing their electoral strategy, 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." Amid his political struggle against Reconstruction in 1872, Morgan purportedly succeeded James H. Clanton as the second Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. 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. According to Alabama Representative and segregationist Robert Stell Heflin, Morgan and his friend Edmund W. Pettus did more to preserve white supremacy during the Reconstruction era than any other two men in the state of Alabama or the American South. Heflin explained that "in the dark and trying days of Reconstruction, these two men were foremost among the defenders of Anglo-Saxon civilization. They realized that submission to the reign of the carpetbagger meant the overthrow, the destruction, of all that was sacred to the white man in the South, and knowing this they dared to do things from which the timid would shrink and the coward would flee." Echoing these sentiments, Alabama Representative Richmond P. Hobson attested that Morgan "took an active part in the work of bringing order out of chaos" during the Reconstruction era and asserted that these efforts resulted in his eventual nomination as U.S. Senator. Likewise, Alabama Representative George W. Taylor asserted that Morgan and Pettus were the ringleaders of white supremacy in Alabama who, more than anyone else in the state, "resisted and