Jacob on Thomas Seay Was Governor of Alabama in 1886 and Again in 1888
Thomas Seay (1846-1896) was Alabama's governor from 1886 to 1890, years when frustration at Bourbon rule began to boil over. He was a Confederate veteran, served in the land Senate for x years, and every bit governor took an active role in funding instruction, though he had a mixed record regarding other progressive ideals.
Born to Reuben and Ann McGee Seay on November 20, 1846, the time to come governor spent his boyhood on a plantation in Greene (later Hale) County. In 1858, his family moved to Greensboro, where he subsequently began his higher teaching at Southern University (which afterwards merged with Birmingham College to create Birmingham-Southern College). Secession and the Civil War interrupted his studies, notwithstanding. In 1863, Seay enlisted and served equally a private in the Confederate Army. He saw activity in skirmishes effectually Mobile at Spanish Fort and Fort Blakeley and had the sick-fortune to be captured and imprisoned on Send Isle nearly Alabama's port metropolis.
Having survived war and brief incarceration, young Seay returned to his studies at Southern University and graduated in 1867. He read police, was admitted to the Alabama Land Bar, and settled down to the dual pursuits typical of his southern admirer class: practicing law in Greensboro and growing cotton wool in Unhurt County. In 1874, at the age of 28, he ran unsuccessfully for the Alabama Senate, but two years later he was elected to that body. He served for 10 years and was president of the Senate from 1884 to 1886. He married Ellen Smaw of Greene Canton in 1875, and the couple had two children earlier her death in 1879. Two years after, he married Clara de Lesdernier, with whom he had four more children.
By the time the Democratic convention met in June 1886, delegates confronted a iv-man race for governor. Seay was a dark-equus caballus candidate who nonetheless was supported by the politicians and industrial interests of Birmingham, Anniston, and Sheffield. After the 10th ballot, Seay gained strength, and on the 30th election the other candidates withdrew. Seay was nominated for governor by acclaim. The divisive Democratic convention revealed a growing factionalism within the party between the state's industrial-planter interests and small farmers. Seay was elected governor with 145,095 votes, against 37,118 for Republican Arthur Bingham and 576 for Prohibition candidate John T. Tanner. Although his political views did not differ essentially from his recent Bourbon predecessors, Seay's nomination was viewed every bit a victory of a younger politician over the older and better-known Bourbon politicians. Seay's $3,000 salary, the same as that received by his predecessors, was amidst the everyman in the S, along with those of North Carolina and Georgia.
Seay compiled an interesting and sometimes cryptic record. He took an aggressive stance against lynching, angering the sheriff of Lauderdale County with his protest of an incident there. He opposed the Prohibition movement and asserted that the issue was a moral 1 that should not exist politicized. Seay also supported legislation restricting the labor of women and children not all the same 18 to eight hours a day, the commencement such human activity passed by a southern state. Legislators in the adjacent session exempted two textile-mill counties from the human activity, even so, and in 1894 the never-enforced-beak was repealed. Seay was the offset Alabama governor to utilise state funds to provide small pensions for disabled Confederate veterans or the widows of slain Confederates.
Ultimately, Seay is best remembered for his support of education. He endorsed the controversial Blair Education Bill, a proposal in the U.S. Congress to grant federal funds for didactics to states on the footing of their illiteracy rates. His position ran counter to Alabama's powerful and popular senator John Tyler Morgan, who opposed it, fearing that it would atomic number 82 to federal command of educational activity. Seay further supported an appropriation for improvements in agronomical pedagogy at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama (now Auburn University) and urged the founding of a school for deaf African Americans, which the legislature approved in 1891 every bit role of the Alabama Institute for the Deafened and Blind. He oversaw the establishment of the Normal School at Troy (now Troy University) and the Normal School for Colored Students in Montgomery (now Alabama State University). He supported increased but cautious expenditures to education and simultaneously, and in good Bourbon style, lowered the tax charge per unit and ended his term of office with a surplus in the treasury from added revenues that came from improved property value.
Had these deportment comprised the total of Seay's administrations, the immature governor would be remembered for sharing many of the same progressive instincts of then-President Grover Cleveland, who visited Alabama in 1887. In counterpoint to these apparently progressive stands, however, Seay took positions that were typically Bourbon. Although he appointed Reuben F. Kolb as country commissioner of agriculture (and who later emerged equally Alabama'southward most famous Populist), Seay was no friend to the agrarian motion when its leaders looked to the state for relief during desperate economic times. In fact, Seay demonstrated his abiding conservatism when he reconsidered his acceptance of an invitation to speak to the 1889 Farmers Alliance Convention in Montgomery in a pointed display of his unhappiness with that grouping's drift toward politics.
In a similarly Bourbon action, Seay backed the interest of one of the state'south largest companies in a dispute over the convict-lease system. In 1888, a 10-year sectional contract for captive labor was awarded to the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (TCI), new owners of the Pratt mines, where the state's prisoners were normally leased. Losing bidders protested the laurels, and a legislative committee found that TCI had not fabricated the highest bid, nor were they taking the requisite number of convicts. Legislators recommended that the governor nullify the contract, which cost the country badly needed revenue, but Seay backed the company when it promised to live past the terms of its legal agreement with the state. TCI increased its payment for the convicts, only the country never required the company to follow all the terms of the contract. In 1888, Birmingham was the scene of a anarchism when ii thousand men stormed the jail with the intent of hanging Richard Hawes for murdering his wife and two small daughters. Seay sent in state troops to maintain constabulary and order, and the developing and prospering mineral commune of Birmingham and Bessemer applauded his potent activeness.
Seay was an interesting blend of old values and new directions. The reign of the Bourbons was nigh to undergo its first major challenge—not an ephemeral irresolute of the baby-sit but a major effort to alter the content and beneficiaries of public action. At the very time that Alabama's mining and manufacturing concerns grew and prospered, its small farmers struggled for survival. In reaction and counterpoint to their economical woes, those farmers bandage about for causes and for cures, including organizing the Grange, the Wheel, and the Farmers Alliance, and then aligning with the Populist Party and the Jeffersonian Democrats. As the winds of the Populist defection blew effectually him, Seay aptitude with them but was never swept away from the old moorings of the state Democratic Party.
In 1890, Seay was defeated in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat. He did not run for function again and died at the age of 49 on March 30, 1896, in Greensboro, where he is interred at City Cemetery.
Note: This entry was adapted with permission from Alabama Governors: A Political History of the State, edited past Samuel L. Webb and Margaret Armbrester (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001).
Additional Resources
Going, Allen Johnston. Bourbon Democracy in Alabama, 1874-1890. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Printing, 1951.
Rogers, William W. The Ane-Gallused Rebellion: Agrarianism in Alabama, 1865-1896. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Land University Printing, 1970.
Rogers, Willliam Westward., et al. Alabama, The History of a Deep S State. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994.
Source: http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1533
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