Alabama Admitted to the Union

Alabama Admitted to the Union

On December 14, 1819, Alabama became the 22nd state to enter the Union.

Alabama's existence as a state represents but a brief period in the span of its history. The region has been populated for at least 8,000 years, which is the age of the earliest known relics of human habitation found in rock caves within the state. The people who left the relics seem to have depended on hunting and fishing, and their main food must have been mussels, judging from the piles of shells found at the sites of habitation.

In the period before the Europeans came, Alabama was the home of Mound Builders who left distinctive flat-topped mounds (which were probably the sites of wooden temples) along the Alabama rivers. They grew corn and other crops, made excellent pottery and fine jewelry, worked copper, carved stone figurines with considerable skill, wove cloth, and generally left evidence of a high state of cultural development.

The largest native tribes encountered by the first European visitors were the Choctaw along the Gulf Coast in southwestern Alabama, the Creek in the southeastern and central parts, and the Cherokee and Chickasaw in the north. So far as is known, the first Europeans to arrive were the Spanish, notably the companies of Alonzo Alvarez de Piñeda in 1519 and of Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528. Both of them sailed along the Gulf Coast and came into contact with the natives there. The first to penetrate inland was Hernando de Soto and his troop of 900-armored soldiers, who entered the northern part of Alabama looking for gold in 1540. Their aggression aroused the resistance of natives they encountered, and in southwestern Alabama they fought the Choctaw, led by Chief Tascalusa.

After Tristán de Luna tried and failed to start a permanent settlement on Mobile Bay in 1559-1561, the region was not troubled by European interference for about a century. Eventually, however, the French penetrated the region. They were lured by the abundance of beaver, whose fur was highly prized in Europe. In 1699 Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, claimed the region for France and in 1702 his brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, established Fort Louis de la Mobile, the first permanent European settlement in Alabama. Because of flooding, the settlement was moved downriver in 1710-1711 to the site of what is now Mobile, which was the capital of French Louisiana until 1719 when France went to war with Great Britain and Spain and moved the government to Biloxi, where there was less chance of an attack.

The year 1719 was also notable as the date of the first arrival of slaves, an event that encouraged French settlers to clear land for indigo and rice plantations. Nevertheless, the main economic pursuit of the French continued to be trading in furs. In this activity, they faced competition from the British, who established close trading relations with the Chickasaw. Throughout the mid-1700s, the British and French vied for control of the fur trade. The contest merged into the French and Indian Wars and finally was settled in favor of the British in 1763, when the French ceded Canada and all of their possessions east of the Mississippi River to Britain under the Treaty of Paris of 1763.

During the American Revolution, a British garrison held the country around Mobile until 1780, when the governor of Spanish Louisiana forced the British to surrender. By the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the American Revolution, and by a related treaty with Spain, Britain ceded northern Alabama to the United States, while southern Alabama, including Mobile, went to Spain. In 1785 a boundary dispute arose between Spain and the United States, and it was not until 1795 that the Treaty of San Lorenzo settled the southern boundary of the American territory at the 31st Parallel, lying about 26 miles above Mobile. By an act of Congress in 1798, land lying above the 31st Parallel between the Chattahoochee River on the east and the Mississippi on the west was organized as the Mississippi Territory, which at first had its northern boundary at 32 degrees 28 minutes north latitude but was extended to the 35th Parallel in 1804. The territory thus came to include most of what are now Mississippi and Alabama.

After negotiating the Louisiana Purchase with France in 1803, the United States claimed, but Spain still controlled, the Mobile region. The United States did not annex the area until 1813. At that time most of the land in what is now Alabama, in practical fact, was still in the possession of the native tribes. Embittered by the Americans' treatment of them, the Creek killed about 500 people at Fort Mims in August 1813. Ultimately Andrew Jackson, with his Tennessee riflemen and his native allies, ended the Creek War as it was known by subduing the Creek at the battles of Talladega on November 9, 1813, and Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814. The Creek were forced to cede millions of acres of land, and their defeat paved the way for the removal of most of Alabama's Native Americans from the territory.

With the influx of settlers after the removal of the native tribes, the population of the region swelled. On March 3, 1817, Alabama was separated from Mississippi and organized as a territory on its own. Two years later, on March 2, 1819, Congress authorized the Alabama Territory to draft a state constitution, which was done at a constitutional convention meeting from July 5 to August 2. The first Alabama state legislature convened on October 25 of that year, and on November 9, 1819 the territorial governor, William Wyatt Bibb, was chosen as the first state governor. Alabama was admitted to statehood on December 14 by an act of Congress signed by President James Monroe. Until 1820 the seat of government was in Huntsville, then it was moved to Cahaba (the ruins of which are located near Selma) from 1820 to 1826, to Tuscaloosa from 1826 to 1846, and finally Montgomery from 1846 to the present.

Following the election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, a special state convention convened at Montgomery. On January 11, 1861, it passed an ordinance of secession, making Alabama the fourth state to declare its secession from the Union. On February 4 Montgomery became the site of a conference of six southern states-Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina-that created the provisional government of the Confederate States of America. The city was the seat of the new Confederate government until June of that year, when Richmond, Virginia, became the Confederate capital. After the Civil War, Alabama was occupied by Union troops. In September 1865 a constitutional convention revoked the ordinance of secession, ratified the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, and adopted a new constitution. A new governor and legislature were chosen and were recognized under President Andrew Johnson's liberal conditions for Reconstruction.

In 1866, however, Alabama and most other southern states refused to ratify the 14th Amendment, which under the more stringent congressional plan of Reconstruction by then in force, was a prerequisite for restoration to the Union. The amendment defines citizenship to include not only whites but blacks, guarantees equal protection of the laws for all persons, forbids deprivation by any state of any person's “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and disqualifies for office Confederates who had formerly held office. Congress responded by refusing to seat Alabama's chosen representatives to Congress. It also passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, placing Alabama and other southern states under military rule and calling for new constitutional conventions, which were to provide for state governments guaranteeing the vote to black males and ratifying the 14th Amendment. Delegates were to be elected by universal male suffrage. On June 18, 1868, after a new convention had drawn up a new state constitution and a new legislature had ratified the 14th Amendment, Alabama's rights and privileges of statehood were restored.