John Brown Gordon was an attorney, a slaveholding plantation owner, general in the Confederate States Army, and politician in the postwar years. By the end of the Civil War, he had become "one of Robert E. Lee's most trusted generals."
After the war, Gordon strongly opposed Reconstruction during the late 1860s. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected by the Georgia state legislature to serve as a US Senator, from 1873 to 1880, and again from 1891 to 1897. He also was elected as the 53rd Governor of Georgia, serving from 1886 to 1890.