John Motley Morehead was an American lawyer and politician. He was 29th Governor of the United States state of North Carolina from 1841 to 1845.
Background
John Motley Morehead was born on July 4, 1796, in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. He was the son of John Morehead and his wife, Obedience Motley, who were respectively of Scotch and Welsh descent. He was the second cousin of Charles Slaughter Morehead and James Turner Morehead.
The Morehead family had been identified with Virginia affairs since 1630, when Charles Morehead, probably an ancestor, settled in the Northern Neck. John Morehead removed to Rockingham County, North Carolina, in 1798.
Education
Morehead was sent to the "log college" of David Caldwell, then entered at the University of North Carolina in 1815, and was graduated with the class of 1817. He read law with Archibald De Bow Murphey and began the practice of his profession in Wentworth, Rockingham County.
Morehead was a tutor in 1817-1818, studied law and was admitted to the Wentworth, North Carolina, bar in 1819. He represented Rockingham County in the North Carolina House of Commons in 1821. He subsequently moved to Greensboro, where he represented Guilford County in the North Carolina House of Commons in 1826-1827.
Morehead, who identified with the western group in North Carolina’s politics, was a Jackson Democrat until 1835 when he became a Whig. He was a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1835 and president of the national Whig party convention in 1848. Besides being a successful lawyer, he was a businessman who established and controlled large cotton factories in North Carolina and served during the 1840s as the first president of the North Carolina Railroad.
Morehead gave state aid to the railroads and favored internal improvements during his term as governor of North Carolina from 1841 to 1845. In addition to his business enterprises, he founded and owned the Edgeworth Seminary for young ladies during the 1850s. Morehead was a state senator in 1860 and a delegate to the Washington Peace Conference in 1861.
As the crisis of 1860-1861 approached he was a conservative, opposed to a dissolution of the Union, and was a delegate from North Carolina to the peace conference held at Washington in February 1861. After secession, he represented North Carolina in the provisional Congress of the Confederacy, in which body he was influential in obtaining an extension of the Richmond & Danville Railroad from Richmond, Virginia, to Greensboro, North Carolina.
Achievements
John Morehead did successfully urge the establishment of a state institution for the deaf, which was opened in Raleigh and to which the blind was admitted sometime later. His greatest services were not in politics but in the realm of state business.
Morehead was a builder of the magnificent "Blandwood" estate in Greensboro and the first governor inaugurated in the present Capitol, presided over an era of industrial development. He also promoted the construction of the North Carolina Railroad.
Politics
John Morehead was a Jacksonian Democrat before 1835, and in that year he joined the rising Whig forces and in 1840 was elected governor of North Carolina, as he was again in 1842.
Membership
Morehead was also a distinguished member of The Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies at the University of North Carolina.
Connections
On September 6, 1821, John M. Morehead married Ann Eliza Lindsay, the daughter of Robert Lindsay of Guilford County, who bore him eight children.
