John Winston

John Anthony Winston (born September 4, 1812 in Madison County; died December 21, 1871 in Mobile) was the 15th Governor of Alabama, from 1853 to 1857, and the first to have been born in the state.

He was a son of William and Mary Cooper Winston of Tuscumbia. He was educated in private schools and attended Cumberland College in Nashville, Tennessee. He married his first cousin, Mary Agnes Walker on August 7, 1832 and settled on a plantation in Sumter County in 1835. They had one daughter, Mary Agnes, before she died in 1842.

Winston was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives in 1840 and 1842, and to the Alabama State Senate in 1843 and became a leader of the more moderate States' Rights supporters in the Alabama Democratic Party. By 1844 he was operating a successful cotton commission firm in Mobile and reinvested the profits in additional cotton plantations in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas.

Winston remarried, to Mary W. Longwood. He discovered in 1847 that she had been unfaithful to him with their family doctor, Sidney Perry. Winston shot Perry to death, but county magistrates ruled the shooting a "justifiable homicide". The couple were divorced in 1850.

Winston urged members of the Alabama delegation to the 1848 Democratic Convention in Baltimore not to walk out after William Lowndes Yancey's "Alabama Platform" was rejected. He led the state's Southern Democrats through a crisis in 1850 when Northern party members formed an alliance with Whigs to oppose Secession. His efforts made him the party's nominee for the 1853 gubernatorial election, which he won without opposition after the Whig candidate dropped out.

Winston was sent to Washington D.C. in January 1867, having been elected to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate, but was prevented from taking his seat due to Reconstruction.

Winston died in December 1871 in Mobile and is buried in a family cemetery near Gainesville in Sumter County.