Clement Comer Clay’s election to the US Senate led to his resignation as Alabama’s governor in August 1837. Under the state constitution, Hugh McVay, the president of the state senate, was in line to succeed Clay. McVay became, in fact and law, Alabama’s governor for four months, but the press and many politicians usually characterized him as simply a “temporary” or “acting” governor.
At seventy-one years old, McVay was the oldest man to serve in the office prior to governor Robert Bentley (2011–2017). Born in 1766, near Greenville, South Carolina, he moved to Alabama’s Tennessee Valley with his wife and children in 1807, twelve years before statehood. McVay was not a wealthy man, and historians assert that he was a land “squatter” in his early years in the state. Later, he bought land and became a successful planter, and though he had no formal education, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in Madison County. He was elected to the territorial legislature from Madison but soon moved to Lauderdale County. McVay settled near Florence and was elected to the first of several terms in the state legislature from Lauderdale County in 1820. When his first wife died and left him with nine children, he remarried, but his new wife soon ran off with another man. McVay was forced to ask his legislative colleagues to grant him a divorce, and the lawmakers complied with his request.
McVay served continuously in the state senate for fourteen years before being selected as its president by a one-vote margin in 1837. After becoming governor he seemed to know little about the serious financial troubles facing the Alabama state bank. Some suggest that officials deliberately kept information about the bank’s condition from the governor. A staunch Jacksonian Democrat, McVay had little use for banks of any kind, and officials no doubt feared he would use deleterious information about the institution to damage it. The governor later admitted he did not know whether bonds issued by the state to reinforce the bank’s capital had sold or not. McVay left the governor’s office on November 22, 1837, but he did not leave politics. He was elected to the state senate again in 1840 and 1842 but did not seek re-election in 1844. McVay was remembered as a fiercely independent and plainspoken man who had little use for ostentation. He died at his plantation near Florence in 1851.
Photo Caption: Hugh McVay by Margaret Whetstone (1938). [Alabama Department of Archives and History]
This article was first featured in Alabama Heritage magazine Issue 122.
About the Author
Samuel L. Webb, a native of York, Alabama, holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Alabama School of Law and a PhD in history from the University of Arkansas. He taught history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham from 1988 to 2009 and is now an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama.
