Alabama

This is Part 22 of 50 in a sporadic series.

 

Alabama's story is a lot like Mississippi's story, and it involves a lot of the same players. The difference is that Alabama was a little off the beaten path. Mississippi benefited from having that river right there, while Alabama was off to itself in a sort of no-man's land of conflicting claims. Things didn't really take off until the Americans came along and figured the place out, and then it tried like hell to catch up.

 

The first European guy to set foot in Alabama was probably one of the Spaniards connected to the 1528 Pánfilo de Narváez expedition I mentioned in the Louisiana story, but the main thrust of that tale involved people who were lost all the time. If they touched Alabama, they didn't write it down anywhere. They started out in Florida and followed the coast to present-day Galveston, Texas, though, so they probably at least saw Alabama from the raft. A decade later in 1539, Hernando de Soto made things more official by making an arduous trek along several of the rivers that pass through Alabama on their way to Mobile Bay. Along the way, he met some of the last remnants of the dying Mississippian mound building culture intermingled with the forerunners of the cultures that would exist when the United States finally came along, and he probably contributed to everybody's downfall by giving everyone small pox.

 

Next up were probably the French, though things start getting a little muddled for a while. England's King Charles II included portions of Alabama in charters he granted to a few North Carolina colonists in 1663 and 1665, and the North Carolina folk probably made a few expeditions along the Alabama River to trade with the natives in the 1680s. But no European lived in Alabama until the French built a fort near the mouth of the Mobile River in 1702. A small, short-lived settlement grew up around the fort and lasted until a flood wiped it out in 1711. The settlers then moved a short distance south to build what would become the current city of Mobile in 1712.

 

But nothing much more happened in Alabama for a long time. The problem with the place was that it was stuck out almost literally in the middle of nowhere. It was too far west for the English in the Carolinas or Georgia to take any real interest. Aside from the little piece of northern Alabama that dips into the Tennessee Valley, all the rivers flowed directly to the Gulf with no inland connection to the growing French commercial ports along the Mississippi. And though the Spanish liked to say their Florida claim included at least the southern half of Alabama, they never committed all that much to settling Florida, much less anything north of it. European settlement thrived throughout the 1700s all around Alabama, but almost nobody settled inside the territory.

 

Things started shifting between the two Treaties of Paris of 1763 and 1783. The first, you'll recall, kicked the French off the continent and gave Britain control over Spanish Florida. The second ended the American Revolution and gave Florida back to Spain. At some point in the interim, an English surveyor made note of a spot along the Tombigbee River that might make for a good inland port. The English never did anything with the information, but in 1787, the Spanish governor at Mobile had a fort built at the spot, and a settlement called St. Stephens soon grew up around it. But the settlers of St. Stephens weren't Spanish. They were Americans, citizens of the newly-minted United States who started pouring themselves west from the former English colonies with a vengeance. They all knew the Spanish claim was weak, anyway, and they figured possession of the land would be 9/10ths of the law. And, as it turned out, they were right.

 

Spain tried to hold onto its claim of at least the southern halves of Alabama and Mississippi, which it saw as an extension of both the old Florida claim and the more recent claim on the Louisiana territory Spain had been given in 1763. But the American settlers just kept coming, as was their way, and the Spanish crown had too much on its plate back home to really commit to holding onto everything it wanted. It finally let the Americans have most of Alabama and Mississippi in the Treaty of San Lorenzo of 1795, granting the Americans everything north of Florida and keeping only a narrow strip of the territory--the segments of both states I think of as the "stems"--along the Gulf Coast to connect Florida and Louisiana. The Americans would eventually just claim that strip outright in 1812, and the Spanish would be too distracted by Napoleon by that point to stop them.

 

This all happened just as the United States was getting the ball rolling on its project of western settlement, and for a while there was a fight over what to do with the new territory. At first, Georgia tried to pull a Virginia and claim all of Mississippi and Alabama for itself, but the other states weren't having any of that. The federal government finally talked Georgia into establishing a firm western border for itself in 1798, and everything south of Tennessee and north of what was left of Spanish Florida between Georgia and the Mississippi River was declared the Mississippi Territory.

 

Stars (and Settlers) Fell on Alabama

 

So just who were all these new settlers finally flooding into the Alabama half of the Mississippi Territory? The answer here looks a lot like the people who came flooding into the Mississippi half, only with a few differences imposed by geography. Unlike the western half of the Mississippi Territory, there was a lot of Alabama that wasn't suited for the big cotton plantations the wealthier settlers in the west wanted to build. The swampy country in the south and the hilly country in the north were better suited for small-hold farms--or in some cases, for nothing at all. The men who dreamed of cotton were better off if they kept to a narrow strip of Alabama just south of the centerline known as the Black Belt.

 

Now, you might think the term "Black Belt" applied to a segment of Alabama was meant to be a descriptor of race, and in the modern era, that's largely what it is. But in settlement days, the term was meant to describe a particular type of dark soil that had developed over centuries above an impermeable layer of chalk. The nature of this soil meant that though fertile, the land tended to dry out in the summer, and the region's landscape was mostly dominated by short-grass prairie. But it was particularly good soil for growing cotton, so the wealthiest and most successful Alabama cotton plantations built over top of it. And because this strip was where most of the plantations were founded, it was where most of the slaves were bought and sold. And once the Civil War freed all the slaves, this strip was where the slaves stayed.

 

Just to get ahead of myself for a moment, this makes for some interesting maps in the modern era. The blue on this map of Alabama soils shows where the Black Belt prairie soils dominated. Here's how Alabama's African-American population was distributed in the 2000 census. Here's a map of Alabama poverty. And almost any map of Alabama elections results looks like this.

 

It's interesting to ponder just how much this pattern of racial population distribution would affect the nation as a whole in the coming century. Montgomery is in the middle of this belt, where Rosa Parks would kick off a bus boycott. Martin Luther King, Jr. would lead a march to a bridge located in this belt. The Civil Rights Movement as a whole would rise from this place, and it all traces back to the geographic oddity of a particular type of soil.

 

Heart of Dixie

 

Once the Americans started coming into Alabama and settling, the place grew quickly. This soon turned into a bad thing for Alabama's population of Native Americans, who had up to this point mostly been left alone. The Choctaws and Creeks and other regional tribes tried their best to assimilate into American culture as it advanced, and for a while the natives of the area were known to Americans as the "Five Civilized Tribes." But as I've pointed out many times before, Americans would only allow so much assimilation among people with darker skin, and they soon started working as hard to drive the Indians out of Alabama as they had anywhere else. There was an Indian war against the Creeks wrapped up in the War of 1812, and the policy from that point on was that all of Alabama was United States territory meant for United States men. Mostly of the white variety.

 

And what to do with that territory? It was all part of Mississippi, after all, and it would have made a certain amount of sense to have kept the thing whole and have it all join the Union as a single state.

 

But there was this thing going on I've referred to a couple of times now as the Americans have carved new states from the western wilderness. There was a kind of political arms race happening in the frontier between states that wanted to allow slavery and states that wanted to prohibit it. American shorthand for this paints it as a fight between "slave states" and "free states." The number of each type of state matters because of the way the framers of the Constitution had set up the Congress, with each state getting two representatives in the US Senate without consideration of the state's size or population. If slave states had a numerical advantage in the Senate, they could drive legislation that would expand slavery throughout the nation and ruin things for the abolitionists. (And also the slaves.) If free states had an advantage, they could establish laws limiting or even banning slavery. Both sides wanted the advantage, and the settlement patterns of the first half of the 19th century were driven in large part by each side trying to get one up on the other.

 

And how did that affect the Mississippi Territory? Well, the Mississippi Territory was just large enough to justify breaking the thing up into two states, each with its own set of senators. So the western half of the territory was admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1817, bringing the number of slave states and free states into balance. Illinois gave the free states a brief numerical advantage in 1818. But in 1819, slave-holding Alabama brought it all back into balance when it was admitted as the 22nd state of the Union. With Alabama, the count of slave states to free states stood at an 11-11 tie.

Done