Alabama History

Precolombian History

• Alabama has been inhabited for some 9,000–10,000 years.
  • The earliest evidence of human habitation, charcoal from an ancient campfire at Russell Cave in northeastern Alabama, is about 9,000 years old.
• These early peoples moved from caves and open campsites to permanent villages about AD 1000.
• Mound Builders erected huge earthen temple mounds and simple huts along Alabama’s rivers, beginning around 1100.
  • Moundville (near Tuscaloosa), one of the most important Mound Builder sites in the southeastern US, includes 20 “platform mounds” for Indian buildings, dating from 1200 to 1500.
  • Trade with the Northeast via the Ohio River began during the Burial Mound Period (1000 BC-A.D. 700) and continued until European contact.
  • Meso-American influence is evident in the agrarian Mississippian culture that followed.
• When the first Europeans arrived, Alabama was inhabited by Indians, half of them either Creek or members of smaller groups living within the Creek confederacy.
  • The Creeks resided in central and eastern Alabama; Cherokee Indians inhabited northeastern Alabama, the Chickasaws lived in the northwest, and the Choctaws settled in the southwest.

European History

• During the 16th century, five Spanish expeditions entered Mobile Bay or Alabama.
  • Hernando de Soto’s army marched from the Tennessee Valley to the Mobile Delta in 1540.
• In 1702, two French naval officers—Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville; and Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville—established Ft. Louis de la Mobile, the first permanent European settlement in Alabama.
  • Mobile remained in French hands until 1763, when it was turned over to the British under the terms of the Treaty of Paris.
  • Because a British garrison held Mobile during the American Revolution, that city was captured in 1780 by the forces of Spain, an ally of the Americans.
  • In 1803, the United States claimed the city as part of the Louisiana Purchase, but in vain. Spanish control of Mobile lasted until the city was again seized during the War of 1812, this time by American troops in 1813. West Florida, including Mobile, was the only territory added to the US as a result of that war.
• Northern and central Alabama was part of British Georgia from 1763 to 1783 and part of the American Mississippi Territory thereafter.
  • The 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ended the French and Indian War, terminated the French occupation of Alabama. Great Britain came into undisputed control of the region between the Chattahoochee and the Mississippi Rivers. The portion of Alabama below the 31st parallel then became a part of West Florida, and the portion north of this line a part of the Illinois Country,” set apart, by royal proclamation, for the use of the Indians.
  • 1776 American War of Independence

Colonial Period

• At the start of the 1800s, Indians still held most of present-day Alabama.
• 1789 The United States is formed
• 1795 The Pinckney Treaty between Spain and the United States fixes the southern boundary of the United States at 31° N latitude (Mobile and Baldwin counties). The Ellicott Line is surveyed to delineate the Boundary. “Squatters” (those having no legal claim to the lands they settled) began to move into Alabama forcing the various Indian tribes off their lands.
• 1798 The Mississippi Territory is formed covering most of southern Alabama and Mississippi
• 1799 Saint Stephens was founded on the lower Tombigbee River as the capital of the Alabama Territory. It was originally a Spanish fort, St. Estevan. A graveyard is still extant on the site.
  • St. Stephens had been the eastern most city of the Mississippi Territory. St. Stephens was named by Congress the capital of Alabama Territory in 1817. When Alabama became a state, in 1819, St. Stephens was not chosen as the capital. That blow, combined with yellow fever epidemics, caused St. Stephens to fade. St. Stephens is now a ghost town and historical park.
• 1800 Washington County, the first Alabama county, was created from the Mississippi Territory.
• 1802 In the Georgia Cession, Indian tribes cede most of northern Mississippi and Alabama to the United States. This in incorporated into the Mississippi Territory in 1804.
• 1812 Spanish West Florida (including Baldwin and Mobile counties) is annexed to the Mississippi Territory.
• 1813 The Creek War broke out between American settlers and a Creek faction known as the Red Sticks, who allied with the British during the War of 1812
  • The Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, and other Creek factions remained neutral or allied to the United States, some serving with American troops.
  • A faction of Creeks known as Red Sticks (or Upper Creeks) sought to return their society to a traditional way of life. Red Stick leaders such as William Weatherford (Red Eagle), Peter McQueen, and Menawa, who were allies of the British, violently clashed with other chiefs within the Creek Nation over white encroachment on Creek lands and the “civilizing” programs administered by U.S. Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins. Before the Creek Civil War began, the Red Sticks attempted to keep their activities secret from the old chiefs
  • It began as a civil war within the Creek nation, but the United States was pulled into the conflict at the Battle of Burnt Corn Creek in 1813. The Red Sticks had received munitions from the Spanish governor at Pensacola.
  • Violence between Creeks and Americans escalated, culminating in the Fort Mims massacre.
  • Volunteer militias from Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee (led by Andrew Jackson) marched into Alabama to fight the Red Sticks. The friendly (Lower) Creeks under Major William McIntosh and the Cherokee Nation joined the Americans.
  • The Upper Creek constituted about two thirds of the Creek Nation. Their towns were along the Alabama, Coosa, and Tallapoosa Rivers in the heart of Alabama. In contrast, the Lower Creek were settled along the Chattahoochee River. Many Creek tried to remain friendly to the United States; but, after Fort Mims, few Americans in the southeast made any distinction between friendly and unfriendly Creeks. At most, the Red Stick force consisted of 4,000 warriors, possessing perhaps 1,000 guns.
  • After General Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee militia crushed the Red Sticks in 1814 at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in central Alabama, he forced the Creek to sign a treaty ceding some 40,000 sq mi of land to the US, thereby opening about three-fourths of the present state to white settlement. Jackson recognized no difference between the Creeks that had fought with him and the Red Sticks that fought against him, taking the lands of both.
  • With the Red Stick menace subdued, Andrew Jackson invaded Spanish Florida and drove a British force out of Pensacola. He next defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans. In 1818, Jackson again invaded Florida, where some of the Red Stick leaders had fled, an event known as the First Seminole War.
  • Later cessions by the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw in 1816 left only about a quarter of Alabama to the Indians.
  • By 1839, nearly all Alabama Indians had been removed to Indian Territory.
  • David Barnette’s account of David Moniac, Creek Indian, first non-white to graduate fro West Point
• From 1814 onward, pioneers, caught up by what was called “Alabama fever,” poured out of the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky into what Andrew Jackson called “the best unsettled country in America.”
  • The sudden extinguishment of Indian title to large areas of land, coupled with the development of new cotton hybrids that could be grown in Alabama, fueled a rush of settlement and development.
  • Alabama experienced its greatest population growth from 9,046 in 1810 to 127,901 in 1820, as migrants from older states on the eastern seaboard poured in. Thousands of farmers, hoping to find fertile land or to become wealthy cotton planters, brought their families and often their slaves into the young state, more than doubling Alabama’s population between 1820 and 1830. By 1860, Alabama had almost 1,000,000 residents, nearly one-half of whom were black slaves.
  • Wealthy migrants came in covered wagons, bringing their slaves, cattle, and hogs. But the great majority of pioneers were ambitious farmers who moved to the newly opened area in hopes of acquiring fertile land on which to grow cotton. Cotton’s profitability had increased enormously with the invention of the cotton gin.
• 1817 The Alabama Territory is created when Congress passes the enabling act allowing the division of the Mississippi Territory and the admission of Mississippi into the union as a state.
  • The first legislature of the Alabama Territory convenes at the Douglass Hotel in the territorial capital of St. Stephens. The Alabama, the area’s first steamboat, constructed in St. Stephens. Cedar Creek Furnace, the state’s first blast furnace and commerical pig-iron producer, established in present-day Franklin County.
• 1819 A state constitution is adopted; and on the following 14 December, Alabama was admitted to statehood.
  • Cahaba, located at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba Rivers, is designated by the territorial legislature as Alabama’s state capital. Huntsville would serve for a short time as the temporary capital. The selection of Cahaba was a victory for the Coosa/Alabama River contingent, which won-out over a Tennessee/Tombigbee Rivers alliance group that wanted to place the capital at Tuscaloosa. The power struggle would continue between the two sections of the state; in 1826 the capital was moved to Tuscaloosa, but in 1847 it was moved to the Alabama River at Montgomery.
  • Alabama’s first Governor was William Wyatt Bibb. After taking the oath of office, swearing to uphold the constitution, the next order of business was to create the charter of Alabama’s first bank, The Tombecbee Bank.
• Alabama was sparsely populated. In 1819, its residents comprised 1.3% of the US population. That percentage had grown to only 2% in 1980.

Antebellum Period

• One of the first problems of the new commonwealth was that of finance.
  • Since the amount of money in circulation was not sufficient to meet the demands of the increasing population, a system of state banks was instituted.
  • State bonds were issued and public lands were sold to secure capital, and the notes of the banks, loaned on security, became a medium of exchange.
  • Prospects of an income from the banks led the legislature of 1836 to abolish all taxation for state purposes. This was hardly done, however, before the Panic of 1837 wiped out a large portion of the banks’ assets. Next came revelations of grossly careless and even of corrupt management, and in 1843 the banks were placed in liquidation. After disposing of all their available assets, the state assumed the remaining liabilities, for which it had pledged its faith and credit
• During the antebellum era, 95% of white Alabamians lived and worked in rural areas, primarily as farmers.
  • Although “Cotton was king” in 19th-century Alabama, farmers also grew corn, sorghum, oats, and vegetables, as well as razorback hogs and cattle.
  • By 1860, 80% of Alabama farmers owned the land they tilled.
  • Only about 33% of all white Alabamians were slaveowners.
  • Whereas in 1820 there were 85,451 whites and 41,879 slaves, by 1860 the number of slaves had increased to 435,080, constituting 45% of the state population.
  • Large planters (owners of 50 slaves or more) made up less than 1% of Alabama’s white population in 1860. However, they owned 28% of the state’s total wealth and occupied 25% of the seats in the legislature.
  • Although the preponderance of the wealth and the population in Alabama was located in the north, the success of Black Belt plantation owners at forging coalitions with industrialists enabled planters to dominate state politics both before and after the Civil War. The planters led the secessionist movement, and most other farmers, fearing the consequences of an end to slavery, eventually followed suit.
• Until 1832, there was only one party in the state, the Democratic, but the question of nullification caused a division that year into the (Jackson) Democratic party and the State’s Rights (Calhoun Democratic) party; about the same time an opposition party emerged, the Whig party.
  • The Whigs drew support from plantation owners and townsmen, while the Democrats were strongest among poor farmers and Catholics in the Mobile area.
  • For some time, the Whigs were almost as numerous as the Democrats, but they never secured control of the state government.
  • The State’s Rights faction were in a minority; nevertheless under their active and persistent leader, William L. Yancey (1814-1863), they prevailed upon the Democrats in 1848 to adopt their most radical views.
  • Secession had been opposed by many prominent men, and, in North Alabama, an attempt was made to organize a neutral state to be called Nickajack; but, with President Lincoln’s call to arms, most opposition to secession ended.
• The cotton growing areas had the best soil and were home to the plantation aristocracy. The Black Belt is named that because of the rich luminous soil that is conducive to growing cotton, and therefore held the majority of the state’s slaves.
  • In contrast to the Black Belt, the rural hill counties of north Alabama were home to yeomen farmers who lived off their forty acres and a mule. The farmers of north Alabama and the Wiregrass had nothing in common with the Black Belt planters. Their soil was more suited for small crops of vegetables and livestock.
  • It is not surprising that the north Alabama hill farmers were not excited about fighting a war over slavery because they did not own any. Therefore the Civil War brought wide division when it came to secession. One north Alabama county, Winston, even went as far as to secede from Alabama and stayed with the Union as the free State of Winston.
  • The Black Belters and Tennessee Valley cotton interests controlled state government and dictated Alabama’s entry into the Civil War.
• 1830 The First Railroad in Alabama, the Tuscumbia Railway Company, was formed. This was the first railroad on the American frontier, the first chartered and constructed west of the Appalachian Mountains, built connecting the two Alabama cities of Tuscumbia, and Decatur.
• 1831 The University of Alabama formally opens its doors.
• 1833 Stars Fell on Alabama, a spectacular meteor shower on November 12-13, 1833 for years was used to date events and became part of Alabama folklore.
• 1836-1839 Trail of Tears. The United States government forcibly removed more than 16,000 Cherokee Indian people from their homelands in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia, and sent them to Indian Territory (today known as Oklahoma). Hundreds of Cherokee died during their trip west, and thousands more perished after relocation.
• 1846 Montgomery becomes the capital of Alabama.
• 1854 The Alabama Public School Act created the first state wide education system by establishing an office of State Superintendent of Education.
• Alabama seceded from the Union in January 1861 and shortly thereafter joined the Confederate States of America.
  • On January 11, 1861 The State of Alabama adopted the ordinances of secession from the Union (by a vote of 61-39). Until February 18, 1861 Alabama was informally called the Alabama Republic. It never changed its formal name which always has been “State of Alabama.”
  • The Confederacy was organized in Alabama’s senate chamber in Montgomery, and Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president on the steps of the capitol. Montgomery served as capital of the Confederacy until May, when the seat of government was moved to Richmond, VA.
  • Alabama experienced only occasional Union raids during the first three years of the conflict.
  • In the summer of 1864, Confederate and Union ships fought a major naval engagement in Mobile Bay, which ended in surrender by the outnumbered southern forces.
  • During the spring of 1865, federal troops swept through Tuscaloosa, Selma, and Montgomery. Selma, one of the Confederacy’s main industrial centers, was left almost as heavily devastated as Richmond or Atlanta.
  • Estimates of the number of Alabamians killed in the Civil War range from 25,000 upward.
  • 2,500 white Alabamians served in the Union Army, and an estimated 8,000–10,000 others acted as Union scouts, deserted Confederate units, or hid from conscription agents.
  • The Civil War brought Alabama’s population growth almost to a standstill, largely because of heavy losses on the battlefield. The total population gain between 1860 and 1870 was only about 30,000 whereas between 1870 and 1970, Alabama’s population rose 150,000–300,000 every decade.

Reconstruction

• During Reconstruction, Alabama was under military rule until it was readmitted to the Union in 1868.
  • For the next six years, Republicans held most top political positions in the state.
  • With the help of the Ku Klux Klan, Democrats regained political control of the state in November 1874.
• Cotton remained the foundation of the Alabama economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
  • With the abolition of slavery cotton was now raised by sharecroppers—white and black landless farmers who paid for the land they rented from planters with the cotton they harvested.
• Alabama attempted to create a “New South” in which agriculture would be balanced by industry.
  • In the 1880s and 1890s, at least 20 Alabama towns were touted as ironworking centers.
  • Birmingham, founded in 1871, became the New South’s leading industrial center. Its promoters invested in pig iron furnaces, coal mines, steel plants, and real estate.
  • Small companies merged with bigger ones, which were taken over, in turn, by giant corporations. In 1907, Birmingham’s Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Co. was purchased by the nation’s largest steelmaker, US Steel.
• Another major Alabama enterprise was cotton milling.
  • By 1900, 9,000 men, women, and children were employed in Alabama mills; most of these white workers were farm folk who had lost their land after the Civil War because of mounting debts and low cotton prices.
  • Wages in mills were so low that entire families had to work hours as long as those they had endured as farmers.
• The rise in the rate of farm tenancy produced a corresponding increase in social and political unrest.
  • Discontented farmers and factory workers allied during the 1890s in the Populist Party in an attempt to overthrow the Bourbon Democrats who had dominated Alabama politics for two decades. Although a number of Populists were elected to the Alabama legislature, no Populist candidate succeeded in winning the governorship, primarily because Democrats manipulated the black vote to their own advantage.
• In 1901, Alabama adopted a new state constitution containing numerous restrictions on voting, supposedly to end vote manipulation and restore honest elections.
  • When our current 1901 Constitution was written and adopted the Black Belt planters were in control. At the Constitutional Convention there were no female delegates, no black delegates, and no Republican delegates.
  • The Constitution was conceived and written by Black Belt planters with the intent to entrench their economic interests and to permanently keep blacks, as well as poor whites, from voting with literary tests, cumulative poll taxes, and requirement to own land.
  • The vote to have the Convention came in April of 1901. The vote was split along the traditional political lines. The north Alabama and Wiregrass farmers voted against a convention. Jefferson County was split evenly and the cotton counties of the Tennessee Valley and Black Belt delivered an overwhelming vote for a convention.
  • There were ten Black Belt counties where more votes were cast for ratification than there were legal voters. In these counties almost every eligible black was “voted” although thousands never approached the polls.
• As one of the poorest states in the country, Alabama benefited disproportionately from the New Deal. Yet, like other southern states, Alabama viewed the expansion of the national government’s role with mixed feelings. Alabamians embraced federal aid, even lobbying for military bases, while seeing federal power as a threat to the “Southern way of life” that included racial segregation.
• The Big Mules is the traditional name for a confederation of large landowners and Birmingham-area industrial barons who once dominated Alabama government.

Modern History

• During the 1950s and 1960s, national attention focused on civil rights demonstrations in Alabama, including the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, the Birmingham and University of Alabama demonstrations of 1963, and the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
  • The primary antagonists were Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and Governor George C. Wallace, an opponent of integration.
  • These black protests and the sometimes violent reactions to them, such as the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham in which four young black girls were killed, helped influence the US Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Four former Ku Klux Klansmen were suspects of the church bombing.
  • After the passage of the Civil Rights Laws of 1964 and 1965, African Americans regained the right to vote and de jure segregation and Jim Crow disappeared.
  • Once the most tightly segregated city in the nation, Birmingham has become thoroughly integrated in public facilities, and in 1979 the city elected its first black mayor, Richard Arrington.
  • The civil rights era brought other momentous changes to Alabama. Hundreds of thousands of black voters are now an important force in state politics. Blacks attend school, colleges, and universities of their choice and enjoy equal access to all public facilities. On the whole, new racial attitudes among most whites have contributed to a vast improvement in the climate of race relations since 1960.