William Crawford Sherrod

William Crawford Sherrod (August 17, 1835 – March 24, 1919) was an American politician, planter, and Confederate officer from Alabama who later served in the United States House of Representatives during Reconstruction. He was born at the Sherrod family estate near Courtland, in Lawrence County, Alabama, the youngest son of prominent “planter-baron” Benjamin Sherrod, whose extensive landholdings and influence placed the family among the leading slaveholding elites of northern Alabama. Raised in this environment of substantial agricultural enterprise and political engagement, Sherrod was early exposed to public affairs and the sectional controversies that would shape his adult life.

Sherrod attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he pursued a classical education typical of Southern planter families of his generation. After leaving the university, he returned to Alabama and engaged in planting, managing and expanding the family’s agricultural interests. On October 21, 1856, he married Amanda Morgan at Nashville, Tennessee. She was the daughter of Samuel Dold Morgan, a prominent Tennessee businessman and civic figure whose remains were later interred in the Tennessee State Capitol building by order of the Tennessee Legislature, underscoring the status and connections of the Morgan family and further linking Sherrod to influential circles in the upper South.

By the late 1850s Sherrod had entered public life in Alabama. He became a member of the Alabama legislature at about twenty-eight years of age and quickly emerged as an active participant in Democratic Party politics. In 1860 he served as a delegate from Alabama to the Democratic National Convention, including the pivotal Charleston convention of that year. In his later written recollections, Sherrod described the intense sectional conflict within the party over slavery in the territories. The Alabama state convention had instructed its delegation to withdraw if the national convention refused to guarantee the right of slaveholders to carry enslaved people into the territories and to demand federal protection for that right. Sherrod personally supported Senator Stephen A. Douglas and his doctrine of “popular” or “squatter” sovereignty, and he endorsed Douglas’s candidacy for the presidency. Nevertheless, believing that a state convention had the right to instruct its delegates, he obeyed Alabama’s instructions “to the letter” and joined the walkout when the platform committee declined to adopt the Alabama position. The Alabama delegation withdrew from the Charleston convention on or about April 23, 1860, and upon returning home split into factions: roughly one-third, including Sherrod, favored Douglas and popular sovereignty and were dubbed “Submissionists,” while the remaining “Secessionists” demanded unconditional federal protection of slavery. Rival conventions were held in Montgomery and Selma; the Secessionists sent delegates to Richmond, Virginia, while the Submissionists sent delegates to the reconvened Democratic convention at Baltimore, Maryland. Douglas was nominated by the regular Democratic convention, and John C. Breckinridge by the seceding convention, inaugurating what Sherrod later recalled as one of the warmest and most intense political campaigns Alabama had ever seen.

As the secession crisis deepened, Sherrod remained a Unionist. He served in the Alabama legislature when the governor called a special session that met concurrently with the secession convention at Montgomery, where delegates formed the government of the Confederate States of America. Sherrod opposed secession and, with two other members, refused to sign the ordinance of secession, later writing that he believed disunion would bring a disastrous war, the sacrifice of the South’s best young men, and the destruction of Southern property, particularly enslaved people. Although he did not think it best for the South to leave the Union, he also stated that he had no intention of separating himself from his section in time of war, preferring “to be with them believing them to be wrong than to be with the Northern army knowing it to be right.”

Once the Civil War began, Sherrod entered Confederate service. He served primarily in the cavalry and was attached to the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the Confederacy’s most noted cavalry leaders. Records list him in the 5th Regiment Alabama Cavalry as an acting assistant commissary of subsistence under the organization of Brigadier General Philip D. Roddey’s cavalry command as of November 20, 1864, and he was widely referred to as a colonel under Forrest. Sherrod later recalled that he was engaged in “special service” for much of the conflict and that he fought in what he described as the last battle east of the Mississippi River, after the surrenders of Generals Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston. At the Battle of Selma, Alabama, on April 2, 1865, Forrest’s outnumbered force of roughly four thousand Confederates confronted approximately ten thousand Federal cavalry under General James H. Wilson. Sherrod remembered that the last order he ever received in the field came personally from Forrest, directing him to have all dry grass removed from the breastworks so that it would not ignite under heavy fire and “smoke us out.”

With the collapse of the Confederacy, Sherrod returned to civilian life and soon entered national politics during Reconstruction. Aligning himself with efforts to restore Alabama to full participation in the Union, he was elected as a Democrat to the Forty-first Congress, representing Alabama’s 5th Congressional District from March 4, 1869, to March 3, 1871. In the House of Representatives he focused on economic development and national reconciliation rather than partisan or sectional disputes. The Southern Pacific Railroad bill, after having been abandoned by others, was turned over to him at the special request of General John C. Frémont, reflecting the confidence placed in his abilities in matters of internal improvements and infrastructure. Sherrod was noted for his cordial relations with colleagues across party lines; he knew “almost intimately every leading man in the 41st Congress” and maintained amicable relations with them regardless of political affiliation. He largely refrained from inflammatory political debate and was remembered for consistently laboring to promote and rebuild the country in the aftermath of war.

After leaving Congress, Sherrod continued his public service at the state level. In 1879 he represented Alabama’s Second Senatorial District in the upper house of the Alabama State Legislature. As a member of the finance committee, he played a significant role in framing a revenue bill that helped guide the state out of indebtedness, contributing to the fiscal stabilization of Alabama during a difficult postwar period. His legislative work reflected a sustained interest in sound public finance and economic recovery, complementing his earlier efforts in Congress to support large-scale infrastructure projects.

In the 1880s Sherrod shifted his principal energies to regional economic development and urban promotion in northern Alabama. He moved to Florence, Alabama, in June 1883, initially for the purpose of educating his children, but soon became a central figure in what became known as the “Florence Boom.” In June 1886, in partnership with W. B. Wood, he helped formulate an ambitious program of industrial and railroad development for the city and surrounding region. Sherrod was one of the originators of the Florence Land & Mining Company and played a leading role in a series of enterprises designed to attract capital and industry. He was a founder of the W. B. Wood Furnace Company, serving as its vice president, and was instrumental in organizing the Florence Coal, Coke & Iron Company. He also helped promote and direct several railroad ventures, including the Florence, Tuscaloosa & Railroad Company, the Tennessee and Alabama Railroad Company, the Alabama, Florence & Cincinnati Railroad Company, and the Florence & St. Louis Railroad Company, serving on the boards of directors of these concerns. Through these activities he sought to transform Florence into a significant industrial and transportation center in the Tennessee Valley.

William Crawford Sherrod lived to see the South transition from the antebellum plantation order through civil war, Reconstruction, and the early stirrings of the New South industrial era that he had helped to foster in Florence. He died on March 24, 1919, closing a long life that had encompassed service as a legislator before the Civil War, a Confederate cavalry officer under Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Reconstruction-era member of the United States House of Representatives, a state senator, and a leading promoter of industrial and railroad development in Alabama.