alabama

Geography has had a great influence on the history of Alabama. The state is bound by Tennessee on the north, Georgia on the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico on the south, and Mississippi on the west. Alabama is a state of contrasts, with mountainous regions in the north, the prairie lowlands called the Black Belt in the middle of the state, and coastal plain regions in the south. Cheaha Mountain is the highest point in the state, with an elevation of 2,407 feet.

The thirteen major rivers of Alabama construct a framework for intense agricultural production, transportation, and hydroelectric power. The Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers run southeast through the state, the Tennessee River loops through the northeastern part of the state, the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers merge in the west-central part of Alabama, and the Chattahoochee marks a portion of the eastern border with Georgia. Early on, rivers were central to the lives of the native inhabitants for accessing food supplies and for transportation. Early European settlers followed the Native Americans' pattern, establishing communities near water sources first.

Early Inhabitants

Archaeologists estimate that the first human settlements in Alabama date from around 9000 B.C. The first inhabitants lived in communities located near cave and bluff sites around the state, such as Russell Cave in Jackson County. Moundville, situated in Hale and Tuscaloosa counties on the Black Warrior River, is one of the largest prehistoric communities north of Mexico. By the 1600s, most of the Native Americans living in what would become Alabama belonged to four major nations: Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. These nations (which included the Alabama, Apalache, Coushatta, and Mobile tribes) were related through a common language, Muskogean, and many shared traditions. The Native Americans primarily lived in villages located on water sources, such as the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers. The largest group was the Creek Confederation, numbering about 22,000 when the Europeans first landed, but the effects of European communicable diseases were devastating to the Native Americans.

The state's name probably comes from the name of a Native American tribe that lived primarily in central Alabama. A major river in the state was named for this group, and the state was named for the river. Some experts believe that the name has roots in the Choctaw tongue; it is commonly translated as "thicket clearers."

European Contact

According to available documents, the first Europeans to reach Alabama were Spanish explorers Alonzo Alvares de Piñeda in 1519 and Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528. However, a 1507 German New World map depicts Mobile Bay in great detail, suggesting that an unknown individual charted the Alabama coast prior to the first Spanish explorers. Sometime in the 1540s Hernando de Soto entered the region. The treasurer from that expedition, Cabeza de Vaca, offered the first written account of the Alabama land, including the first description of the native inhabitants. A significant battle was fought at the village of Maubila between de Soto's Spaniards and Chief Tuscaloosa's (or Tascaluza's) warriors.

Don Tristán de Luna made the first attempt to establish a Spanish colony on the Alabama-Florida coast, but his efforts failed in 1561. The first permanent European settlement, Fort Louis de la Mobile, was established by Jean-Baptiste le Moyne de Bienville in 1702 at Mobile Bay (then part of Louisiana, ruled by the French). In 1717, Fort Toulouse was established on the Coosa River for trading purposes. The first African slaves arrived in Alabama in 1721, aboard the slave ship the Africane.

In 1780, during the Revolutionary War, Alabama was taken by Spain. The United States took back the Mobile area, considered the center of Spanish power, during the War of 1812. The Alabama Territory was created from Mississippi Territory land, and settlers disputed over rights to the land and fought to gain favor with the Creek Nation. The Creek War of 1813–1814 ended with the defeat of the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend. On 9 August 1814, Creek leader William Wetherford surrendered to General Andrew Jackson at Fort Jackson, where he signed a treaty that ceded the Creek lands to the federal government.

Becoming a State

After the defeat of the Creek nation, "Alabama Fever" swept the land. Thousands of settlers flocked to the state, seeking the temperate climate and rich soil that proved perfect for the production of cotton. Small farmers, planters, and professionals brought families from other Piedmont regions of the Southeast. The majority of newcomers to the state were farming-class families who brought with them few slaves and limited supplies. Most settled as squatters prior to land being made available for sale by the government.

William Wyatt Bibb, a former Georgia senator, was appointed the new territorial governor of Alabama in 1817. There have been five state capitals since the 1817 Congressional act that created Alabama: St. Stephens, Huntsville, Cahaba (at the juncture of the Cahaba and Alabama Rivers), Tuscaloosa, and finally Montgomery, on the Alabama River. The state's founders felt that a river location was important for the capital. The first steamboat, The Alabama, was built in St. Stephens in 1818.

Alabama was admitted to the Union on 14 December 1819 as the twenty-second state. The first Alabama Constitution was written in 1819, and William Wyatt Bibb was publicly elected that year as the first governor of the state. The 1830 Federal Census lists Alabama's population as 309,527; 190,406 were white and 119,121 were African American (with 117,549 designated as slaves and 1,572 as free blacks).

The Plantation and War

Alabama's cotton kingdom was built by the hands, minds, and spirits of slaves brought primarily from West Africa. Slavery, called the "peculiar institution," caused complicated social and cultural patterns to evolve in the state, the effects of which are still felt in Alabama. Plantations varied in size and aimed to be self-sufficient, but most farmers in the state worked small farms and owned no slaves.

In the 1830s, Alabama politicians aligned with President Andrew Jackson and his criticisms of the Bank of America and the idea of centralized wealth and power. European settlement continued to expand, and during Clement C. Clay's tenure as governor, the Creeks were exiled from the state. In 1832 the state's first railroad, the Tuscumbia Railway, opened. Its two miles of track ran from the Tennessee River to Tuscumbia. In 1854 the Alabama Public School Act was passed, creating a statewide education system.

As an agriculturally centered state, Alabama's politics were tied to the land. The dominant political parties were the Democrats and the Whigs, with the Democratic Party generally predominating. A fundamentally Jeffersonian and proslavery philosophy guided the Alabama government in the prewar years.

The debate over states' rights became more heated through the 1850s and early 1860s, and Alabama's leading advocate was William L. Yancy. Henry W. Hillard and supporters of sectional reconciliation could not dissuade those advocating secession. On 11 January 1861, the Alabama Secession Convention passed an Ordinance of Secession, making Alabama the fourth state to secede from the Union. The influence of Jacksonian democracy on the state was profound. Alabamians generally supported individualism and a steadfast perseverance for independence, combined with perceptions that hard work was a virtue and that education and wealth lead to corruption.

After the formation of the Confederate States, a government was built in Montgomery in central Alabama, creating the "Cradle of the Confederacy" (and the "Heart of Dixie"). Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederate States of America there on 18 February 1861.

During the Civil War, 202 land and naval events occurred within Alabama's borders and Alabama civilian involvement was great. Not only did 90,000 to 100,000 white men fight for the Confederacy, an estimated 2,700 white men from north Alabama and as many as 10,000 blacks from the Tennessee Valley area enlisted in the Union army. During the war, as in most other Southern states, women and children assisted the Confederacy by supplying as many goods as possible, even as they maintained homes and farms while a significant portion of the working white male population was gone. Women also established clinics in communities and on the battlefield to care for wounded soldiers all across the state.

Beyond the Civil War

After the war, Alabama rewrote its constitution. In February 1868, the constitution was ratified and Alabama was readmitted to the Union. The state was put under Federal control as congressionally warranted, and the new constitution allowed blacks suffrage for the first time.

When the political and social order of the Confederacy fell in spring 1865, Alabama entered a period of upheaval and was forced to redefine itself. Tensions grew between the planter class and the small farmers, between the races, and between political factions. Alabama was riddled with losses from the war—political, financial, and social loss, as well as loss of human life. Alabamians resented the Federal troops that came into the state under President Andrew Johnson's plan of Reconstruction. The state was politically split: the anti-Confederacy contingency in northern Alabama opposed the conservatives in the south, and the racial divide created a great chasm in the state. No group in the state wanted to lose power or status. There was a period of accommodation by white southerners toward blacks, but reactions against the Civil Rights Act of 1866—granting equal rights to people of every race and color—were violent. The freed black population complicated the political structure of the state, and the acts of violence and terror reflected whites' fear that blacks and a federal presence in the state would crumble the old Alabama power. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) moved into north Alabama after its birth in Tennessee and gradually moved through the state. Although federal response to Klan actions effectively stopped the group's activity for a while, the KKK would reappear later in Alabama's history.

Bourbon Democrats, claiming to have redeemed the people of Alabama from federal Reconstructionist rule by carpetbaggers and scalawags, passed a new constitution on 16 November 1875. Political dissension and corruption, along with animosity toward federal involvement in the welfare and control of the state, made Alabama a hotbed for trouble. While slavery had been abolished, sharecropping and farm tenancy systems—established to continue the state's agricultural production—were forms of legalized slavery. After the Civil War came the first movement of blacks away from Alabama: while some former slaves chose to stay where there was work, many immediately left the land and people that had held them in bondage.

Industry emerged in Alabama in the early 1870s. The textile industry made its start in the Chattahoochee River Valley and near Huntsville. North Alabama, especially around Birmingham, was dotted with an ever-growing expanse of coal and iron mines. Birmingham would for many years be the industrial center of the state. All the resources needed to make steel were available within twenty miles of the city, drawing investors like Henry DeBardeleben and James Sloss to the area. The Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI) moved its headquarters to Birmingham.

With the boom in industry, Alabama needed to strike a balance between the long-established agricultural constituency and the new industrial one. The level of poverty was intense, especially for farmers: it cost more to produce agricultural goods than they were worth. The Farmers' Alliance quickly gained ground in Alabama, creating cooperatives and becoming a voice of reform. Interest in the Populist Party grew along with reformist sentiments. The established Bourbon hegemony was threatened by the Populists' appeals to the working classes, including blacks.

The Democrats even used legal means to step around the Fifteenth Amendment, disenfranchising blacks and poor whites—thus setting in motion the widely accepted practice of legalized discrimination and violence toward blacks and, to a much lesser extent, other minority groups. In 1901 delegates from across the state met at the Constitutional Convention. They established suffrage requirements of residency, literacy, land ownership, and taxation that disenfranchised most black voters, as well many poor whites. The new Constitution of the State of Alabama was adopted on 3 September 1901.

War and the Great Depression

Alabamians rallied to the World War I effort. The state sent 86,000 men to combat; 6,400 of these were casualties. Military bases throughout the state offered training facilities to prepare soldiers for war.

As in the rest of the country, black and white women in Alabama were seriously advocating for their right to vote in the 1910s. When Tennessee ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, it was made law. Alabama ratified after that point, even though it was unnecessary. Women played a significant role in Alabama during the Progressive Era, leading education reforms, prohibition, child welfare, and prison reform. Both black and white women fought to improve the social and moral well-being of the state's inhabitants. Julia S. Tutwiler was one such reformer; she is remembered for advancing the educational opportunities for women and girls.

Although the early 1920s postwar era offered riches for some, most of the state remained poor. The boll weevil had come to Alabama in 1909, eventually forcing farmers to diversify crop production because of its devastating effects on cotton. While industry was a definite presence in the state, agriculture still reigned in the years between the World Wars. Because of poor conditions for crop production, the 1920s were a stark time for farmers all across the south. These conditions were echoed throughout the country during the Great Depression.

During the depression, some Alabama politicians played a significant role in the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, including the New Deal. Alabama's Senator Hugo C. Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, was appointed to the United States Supreme Court in 1937. One New Deal program in particular had an enormous effect on the state: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

The Great Depression was a time of such upheaval for families that many relocated to try to find work and stability. There was a mass migration of blacks leaving the state during this time and into the 1940s, when World War II's production demands offered work opportunities. New York, Chicago, Detroit, and other industrial cities offered blacks an opportunity for a better life.

World War II brought a measure of prosperity to the state. Most folks who wanted a job could find one. The Mobile Bay housed companies that built ships, and Childersburg was the home of the Alabama Ordnance Works, one of the nation's largest producers of smokeless gunpowder. Alabama sent 250,000 enlisted men to the war effort, with over 6,000 casualties.

Civil Rights

A shift occurred in Alabama's political allegiance to the Democratic Party starting in the 1940s, resulting mostly from questions and conflicts over civil rights.

As soon as federal troops left Alabama after Reconstruction, racial segregation was the understood, and eventually written, law of the state. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites were legal. But separate was not equal in Alabama, and the modern history of the state would be formed by the black struggle for equality.

When the KKK returned to Alabama in 1915, its actions were not solely directed toward blacks. Reacting to the heavy influx of immigrants into the state and the Progressive social movement, the Klan struck out against any one that seemed to threaten "traditional American values." By 1924, around 18,000 of Birmingham's 32,000 registered voters were Klan members, making the group a formidable presence.

The 1931 Scottsboro Boys incident placed Alabama and its politics in the international spotlight, raising questions about civil rights, the presence of the Communist Party, and northern political and social influence on the state. The incident started in March, when two white teenage girls riding a freight train near Scottsboro told police they had been raped by some black men on the train. Within fifteen days, nine young black men were arrested, charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced to die for the alleged rapes. The sentences met with international outrage over the mob atmosphere, and many activists called for a reversal of the rulings. This incident started a social and racial revolution in Alabama that would affect the racial dynamics of the entire country.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal schools were illegal. Alabama's officials chose not to enforce or even recognize this mandate. In 1955 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the University of Alabama to admit two black women who had been denied admission.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s presence in the state started when he began preaching at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. He later wrote "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" after being arrested for his involvement in nonviolent protests. On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the middle of a public bus to a white man. Her action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which crippled the city of Montgomery economically. The boycott was the first significant civil rights victory in Alabama. Black voter registration became an intense focus in the state, bringing Freedom Riders from all over the country to help with the cause.

Violence erupted in response to the civil rights movement, including bombings directed toward King and other prominent nonviolent leaders. In 1963, a bomb killed four girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham, possibly the most infamous act of violence during the civil rights movement. That same year, police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor turned his intimidation tactics, fire hoses, and attack dogs on the peaceful protesters in Birmingham.

Forced federal integration was ordered in 1963. Governor George C. Wallace stood on the stairs at the University of Alabama and professed, "Segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever." Driven by what he thought people in the state wanted to hear, Wallace was vocally racist for most of his political career. He was first elected as governor of Alabama in 1962 and served four terms in that position over the next twenty years, with several unsuccessful bids at the White House.

The Selma to Montgomery March, led by King and other civil rights leaders, began in Selma on 21 March 1965 and ended four days later at the state capital. After the conclusion of the march and the speeches, Klansmen murdered a Detroit housewife as she helped take members of the march back home. This act, and others associated with voter registration drives, created a constellation of activism and violence.

The time was one of conflict, but black Alabamians and thousands of their supporters successfully birthed the movement that instigated change. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and other federal interventions, made discrimination based on race illegal.

After the Civil Rights Movement

Divided into sixty-seven counties, the land area of Alabama is 32.5 million acres. In 2000, 28 percent was used as farmland. Although cotton was no longer the dominant crop in Alabama at the end of the twentieth century, it still figured prominently. Cotton is predominantly grown in the Tennessee Valley area, and some is grown in the Black Belt, Mountain, and Plateau regions. Peanuts, soybeans, corn, peaches, and pecans are also important crops. Cattle and poultry are major agricultural assets as well.

Forests are one of Alabama's most important agricultural resources. The timber industry is influential throughout all regions of the state, and it is vital to the state's economy. Other natural resources that figure into the state's economy are natural gas, sand and gravel, lime, clay, and coal.

Alabama has also made historic contributions to space exploration. The first U.S. satellite, Explorer I (launched on 31 January 1958), was developed in Huntsville. The George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, established in 1960, has played a significant role in the development of the space shuttle program and the space station.

At the end of the twentieth century, Alabama's rich resources made the state attractive to new industry. Tuscaloosa is known for electronics manufacturing, and Birmingham is home to cutting-edge biomedical research and engineering, and to telecommunications firms. New car manufacturing industries continued to come to the state. In 1989, the manufacturing sector of the state's economy employed 24 percent of Alabama's total workforce.

Alabama's rivers continue to be important to the state, especially for waterborne commerce. Alabama has more than 1,500 miles of navigable inland waterways. The Port of Mobile is a point of international shipping.

Alabama's population grew throughout the last thirty years of the century: 1970's population was 3,444,165, and 1990's population was 4,040,587. According to the 2000 Federal Census, there were 4,447,100 people living in Alabama, with the largest portion of the population aged 35 to 44 years old (685,512). There were 3,162,808 Alabamians who identified as white, 1,155,930 as black, 75,830 as Hispanic or Latino, 31,346 as Asian, 22,430 as American Indian and Alaska Native, and 1,409 as Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders.

Bibliography

Flynt, J. Wayne. Poor but Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989.

Jackson, Harvey H., III. Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Letwin, Daniel. The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Knopf, 1998.

McKiven, Henry M., Jr. Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Rogers, William Warren, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flynt. Alabama: The History of a Deep South State. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994.

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