ALAlabama History

Mobile was the capital of French Louisiana two decades before New Orleans existed. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founded it in 1702 at Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff, shifted it downstream to the present site in 1711, and governed the colony from there until the seat moved to Biloxi in 1720. Four more governments have flown a flag over that harbor since.

Moundville and the people de Soto met

Twenty-nine earthen platform mounds stand on a bluff above the Black Warrior River south of Tuscaloosa. Moundville was occupied from roughly 1120 to 1450 and was briefly one of the largest towns north of Mexico, working copper traded down from the Great Lakes and marine shell carried up from the Gulf.

Hernando de Soto's expedition arrived in 1540 and on October 18 fought a chief the Spanish called Tascalusa at a palisaded town named Mabila. The Spanish burned it and claimed thousands of defenders died. Archaeologists have never located the site. Epidemic and collapse followed, and out of it the Muscogee, called Creeks by the English, assembled a confederacy of towns along the Coosa, Tallapoosa and Chattahoochee. The Choctaw held the southwest, the Chickasaw the northwest corner, the Cherokee the northeastern hills.

Five governments, one harbor

France held Mobile until the Treaty of Paris closed the Seven Years War in 1763 and handed the Gulf coast east of the Mississippi to Britain as part of West Florida. Bernardo de Galvez took the port for Spain in 1780 during the American Revolution. The United States claimed the interior through the Mississippi Territory in 1798 but did not hold Mobile itself until General James Wilkinson occupied it in 1813. France, Britain, Spain, the United States and later the Confederacy: that is why the Alabama coat of arms carries five sets of emblems.

The Creek War and Alabama Fever

The Muscogee split over how to answer American pressure. The Red Stick faction, carrying Tecumseh's message south, overran Fort Mims north of Mobile on August 30, 1813 and killed most of the several hundred people inside. Andrew Jackson's Tennessee militia, fighting beside Cherokee and Lower Creek allies, destroyed the Red Stick stronghold at Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814. The Treaty of Fort Jackson that August took roughly 23 million acres, including land belonging to towns that had fought on Jackson's side.

The rush that followed was called Alabama Fever. Planters and the people they enslaved filled the Black Belt, a crescent of dark prairie soil across the middle of the state. Congress created Alabama Territory in 1817 with its capital at St. Stephens, and on December 14, 1819 Alabama became the twenty-second state, a slave state balancing free Illinois. The capital moved from Cahaba to Tuscaloosa in 1826 and to Montgomery in 1846.

Montgomery makes a country, 1861

Alabama seceded on January 11, 1861. Three weeks later delegates from six seceded states met in the Alabama statehouse, wrote a constitution, and on February 18 swore in Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederate States on the portico steps. The order to fire on Fort Sumter was telegraphed from Montgomery. The capital moved to Richmond in May, and Alabama spent the war supplying it, casting cannon at the Selma Naval Ordnance Works and running the blockade out of Mobile until David Farragut forced the bay on August 5, 1864.

Wilson's cavalry burned Selma in April 1865. Alabama was readmitted in 1868 and Democrats recaptured the legislature in 1874. The constitution of 1901 completed the reversal with poll taxes, literacy tests and property requirements. Black registration fell from roughly 181,000 in 1900 to about 3,000 three years later, and tens of thousands of poor white men lost the vote with them.

Iron ore, boll weevils and rockets

Birmingham did not exist before 1871. A land company laid it out where two railroads crossed in Jones Valley, because coal, iron ore and limestone all outcrop within a few miles of each other there. It grew fast enough to be nicknamed the Magic City, Sloss Furnaces went into blast in 1882, and United States Steel bought the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company in 1907. Much of the underground work was done by leased convicts, a system Alabama kept until 1928, longer than any other state.

The boll weevil arrived around 1910 and wrecked the cotton crop. Coffee County farmers who switched to peanuts did well enough that in 1919 the town of Enterprise erected a monument to the insect, which still stands. Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals was finished in 1924 and handed to the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933. In 1950 the Army moved Wernher von Braun's rocket team to Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville. Marshall Space Flight Center opened there in 1960, the Saturn V was designed there, and Huntsville has since passed Birmingham as the largest city in the state.

Bus seats, a bridge, and the Voting Rights Act

On December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks, secretary of the Montgomery NAACP branch, refused to give up her bus seat. The boycott ran 381 days and made a twenty-six-year-old pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr., a national figure.

Birmingham in the spring of 1963 produced the photographs of fire hoses and police dogs turned on schoolchildren that pushed federal civil rights legislation forward. On September 15 a bomb at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. In March 1965 marchers leaving Selma were beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. A third attempt reached the capitol, and Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. Alabama voters approved a constitution stripped of the 1901 racist language in 2022.

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