15th Governor of Alabama. John Anthony Winston received a place in American history for serving as the governor of the State of Alabama from August 1, 1853 until  December 1, 1857. He had an easy political campaign, as his opponent dropped out of the race . Born in the Alabama Territory, he became the first native-born governor of Alabama. After receiving a private early education, he was educated at LaGrange College, which became the University of North Alabama and at Cumberland College, which became the University of Nashville in Tennessee. He entered the cotton business upon graduation becoming a planter. After purchasing his first plantation in Sumter County in 1834, he became a successful wealthy business man, acquiring additional plantations in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas and the population of slaves to manage the cotton fields on each. In 1834 he became the cotton commissioner in Sumter County, Alabama, establishing the John A. Winston Cotton Commission House in 1844, an enterprise he continued throughout his life. As a Jacksonian Democrat supporting the States Rights philosophy, he entered politics in 1840, serving in the Alabama House of Representatives for a two-year term. After being reelected for another term in 1842, he was elected to the Alabama Senate in 1843. He remained in the Senate until 1853, serving as president from 1845 to 1849. He represented Alabama at the 1848 Democratic Convention in Baltimore and in the 1850 convention in Nashville, with several secessionists from Southern states attending. During the Mexican War, many troops from Alabama were sent to fight in Texas. He rallied troops in 1846 for a unit but they were never deployed to Texas. After being elected governor in 1853, he was successful in improving the state's educational system, signing a bill in 1854 creating Alabama's public school system and the Alabama Educational Association was organized. During his term, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad was charted. He deplored the use of state funds for the endeavors of private companies, vetoing thirty bills passed by the legislature. The Republican Party was organized. On May 30, 1854 the United States Congress passed a law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed states to decide if citizens of the state wanted slavery or not. Winston was reelected to a second gubernatorial term on August 6, 1855 with more ballots caste for him than for any antebellum governor of Alabama. Leaving the office of governor with the wind full of a pending war, Winston was succeeded by Andrew B. Moore. In 1857 he attempted to be a candidate for the United States Senate but lost the support of many with his opposing tax-supported funding of privately-owned railroads. Continuing to be active in politics, he served as a delegate to the 1860 Democratic Convention held in South Carolina, and he was on the ticket as a presidential elector for Stephen A. Douglas that year. The Democratic Party fragmented as most of the delegates left the convention when a 2/3 vote could not be met after 57 votes in 10 days. He was appointed an Alabama commissioner to Louisiana in 1861. During the American Civil War, he rallied troops for combat. He was a colonel in the Alabama Eighth Infantry of the Confederate States Army seeing action in the Virginia peninsula campaign at the Battle of Seven Pines. in May of 1862, but resigned his commission with a decline in his health. Both sides claimed victory in that battle, yet 11,163 lives were lost. He was a strict officer, thus not well-liked by his troops. After the war, he was a member of the 1865 Alabama Constitutional Convention. Maintaining his antebellum States Rights philosophy, he bitterly fought Congressional Reconstruction the rest of his life, supporting segregation with no civil rights for former slaves. In 1867 Winston was elected to the United States Senate, but he was disenfranchised when he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the United States. According to many sources, he married his first cousin Mary Agness Jones on August 7, 1832, and the couple had a daughter before his wife's death in 1842. He remarried to Mary W. Longwood, but this marriage ended in a divorce granted by the legislature in 1850 after he proved his wife was unfaithful. In 1847 he shot and kill his wife's lover, Dr. Sidney S. Perry, who was a North Carolina native, in an act of "justifiable homicide." At the time of Perry's death, he and Perry were both serving from the same county in the Alabama House of Representatives. The next day his wife was sent to a permanent stay in Tennessee. A North Carolina newspaper documented this incident. After dying in his daughter's Mobile home, Winston was buried in a family cemetery on private property.