
Before the state of the U.S. Civil War, Alabamian Edmund Winston Pettus asked his older brother John Jones Pettus, the Governor of Mississippi, to call for the state of Mississippi to leave the Union. Governor John Jones Pettus heeded his brother’s call and lead Mississippi to secede from the Union.

When the war began he enlisted in the army and was promoted to the Brigadier General for the Western Confederate Army.

After the war, Edmund Winston Pettus served as a U.S. Senator of Alabama and as a Grand Wizard of the Alabama Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
Author’s Note:
The Edmund Winston Pettus has a bridge named after him in Selma, Alabama over thirty years after his death.