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Joseph F. Johnston, 1896–1900 MicHAel PerMAn Jr. Joseph Forney Johnston was elected governor for two terms, just as the challenge from the Populists and from the Jeffersonians led by reuben F. Kolb began to ebb in the late 1890s.once in office,he tried to redirect the Democratic Party toward a course of reform through the incorporation of most of the electoral base and policies of these two dissenting organizations. but his intentions were foiled by his opponents who controlled the party machinery as well as by the movement for disfranchisement, which Johnston himself had hoped could be an agent for reform but rather became the primary obstacle preventing its attainment. Johnston was born on march 23, 1843, in north Carolina and grew up on the family farm.in 1860 he moved with his parents to Alabama. he was an eighteen-year-old attending school in Talladega when the CivilWar broke out. right away, Johnston enlisted in the Confederate army; he rose from the rank of private to captain and was wounded on four separate occasions. After the war, he decided to become a lawyer and was admitted to the bar in 1866. moving to selma in 1867, he practiced law in the black belt city for the next seventeen years. he also became active in the Democratic Party of Dallas County, playing an important part in its opposition to reconstruction and soon becoming influential in party affairs at the state level. From 1878 to 1882, he led the party as chair of the state executive committee.Then in 1884 he left selma and the law to embark on a career as a banker in the booming new town of birmingham. 150 / Joseph F. Johnston 1896–1900 After three years as president of the Alabama national bank, Johnston became president of the city’s largest manufacturing firm, the sloss iron and steel Company. his remarkable accomplishments in business were paralleled by his political achievements.Already successful as a party manager, he began to link his black belt connections with the banking and steel barons in birmingham,thereby aligning himself with the twin pillars of Alabama’s Democratic Party in the late nineteenth century. Johnston had thereby positioned himself to play a pivotal role in Alabama politics in the 1890s, a decade that proved to be possibly the most turbulent in the state between the Civil War and the civil rights movement one hundred years later. in the first half of the decade, Johnston was a leading figure in the Democrats ’ triumph over reuben F. Kolb and the agrarians. in 1890 he was one of four Democratic gubernatorial contenders who participated in a scheme at the party’s convention to deprive Kolb of the nomination by combining all the other candidates behind Thomas G. Jones. At the next state election two years later, Kolb decided to run as an independent. As chair of the platform committee at the Democratic convention,Johnston was responsible for the critical thirteenth plank, which directed the assembly to enact legislation to secure “the government of the state in the hands of the intelligent and the virtuous.” Although Johnston had initially intended that a constitutional convention be called for this purpose, the legislature produced instead the notorious sayre law of 1893, a simple yet devastatingly effective remedy that made voting so difficult that thousands of the Democrats’ opponents in 1892 found themselves disfranchised two years later. Johnston again sought the party’s gubernatorial nomination in 1894 but was defeated by the seven-term congressman from the black belt,William C. oates. in contrast to the profoundly conservative oates, Johnston was the leader of an emerging element in the party that advocated free silver and was willing to adopt some of the reforms proposed by Kolb and his splinter party, the Jeffersonians, as well as by the Populists. Fearing that the Democrats were becoming too conservative and inflexible when confronted by the revolt of the farmers and by a series of strikes in 1894 among the state’s coal miners and steel operatives,Johnston urged his party to consider reform. meanwhile,oates defeated Kolb by a greater margin than Jones had in 1892, though with fifty thousand fewer votes cast. in 1896, when the Populists fused with the Democrats in the presidential election, Joe Johnston ran as the reform, free silver candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and defeated the “goldbug” congressman richard h. Clarke. he went on to the governorship by beating Albert T. Goodwyn, the...

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