Alabama Governors: A Political History of the State

John Murphy / Hugh C. Bailey

John Murphy, 1825–1829 HugH c. bAiley John murphy was born in robeson County, north Carolina, circa 1785 to first-generation scottish immigrant neil murphy. As a child, murphy moved with his family to south Carolina, where he completed his preparatory education and taught school to earn money for college. he attended south Carolina College in the same class with a future governor of Alabama , John Gayle, and another important antebellum political figure, James Dellet,both of whom later played important roles in murphy’s political career in Alabama.Following his graduation in 1808, murphy read law, which he never practiced,and for the next ten years he served as clerk of the south Carolina senate.he was also appointed a trustee of south Carolina College, which later became the University of south Carolina,a position he held from 1808 to 1818. murphy was married twice, first to sarah hails in south Carolina, the mother of his son John murphy Jr.After her death, he married sarah Darrington Carter,a Clarke County,Alabama,widow.she bore him several children , including a second son, Duncan murphy, who spent much of his life in California and served in its legislature. in 1818 murphy moved to monroe County in the southern portion of the newly created Alabama Territory. he bought land, began to create his own plantation, and quickly established himself as a man who commanded the respect of his peers. in 1819 he was elected a delegate to the constitutional convention, where he served on the 26 / John murphy 1825–1829 Committee of Fifteen that drafted the constitution. he was elected as one of monroe County’s five members of the house of representatives in 1820, and in 1822 he was chosen the county’s only member of the Alabama senate. As an Alabama politician, murphy quickly aligned himself with israel Pickens’s “popular” party,which opposed the “royal Party,” or Georgia faction .These “royalists,” including GovernorsWilliam bibb and Thomas bibb and U.s. senator John Williams Walker, were viewed as advocates of the territorial legislation that permitted the charging of unrestricted interest rates and as supporters of the privately owned and much disliked Planters and merchants bank of huntsville. As a legislator, murphy endorsed Pickens’s efforts to establish a state bank as a means of providing adequate capital for the currency-starved state, and he and Pickens forged a strong alliance. The dominance of the Pickens forces was so great that murphy was twice elected governor without opposition in 1825 and 1827.The most important development in his first term was the decision to move the capital from Cahawba to Tuscaloosa. The 1819 Alabama Constitution provided for the first session of the legislature to be held in huntsville and “all subsequent sessions at the town of Cahawba” until 1825, when legislators could “designate by law . . . the permanent seat of Government” without the need for concurrence by the governor.Understandably,most of the interest in the 1825 election focused on the selection of a site for the capital. Travel to Cahawba was long and difficult for legislators from north and west Alabama; regular flooding in Cahawba and subsequent fevers gave the advocates of another location strong arguments. The southern site was associated with the arrogant actions of Governor William Wyatt bibb, who had ignored a legislative commission recommendation to place the capital at Tuscaloosa in 1819. sectional interests were paramount when northern and west-central Alabama legislators gained a narrow ascendancy in the legislature in the 1825 election. murphy, like Pickens, was a south Alabamian who opposed the move from Cahawba, but as a realist without a veto, he did not fight the effort, and Tuscaloosa was chosen. Cahawba continued to flourish for several decades, but by the late nineteenth century that community had all but vanished. Tuscaloosa, it turned out, was also the locus of the most important development of murphy’s second term in office. murphy’s involvement in events that led to the opening of the University of Alabama began in 1821 when he was elected by the legislature to the university’s first board of trustees.The board’s chairman was murphy’s friend and colleague Governor israel Pickens . Despite urgent requests from the trustees to move forward with the es- John murphy 1825–1829 / 27 tablishment of the institution, Pickens took no action and, in fact, used university endowment to raise capital for his...