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Alabama is a state that is located in the southern part of the United States. The Native American has a strong tie to Alabama. At one point the following Native American people were once present in Alabama: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Koasati, and Mobile.
The French established the first European settlement in the state with the establishment of Mobile in 1702. Southern Alabama was French from 1702–1763, part of British West Florida from 1763–1780, and part of Spanish West Florida from 1780–1814. Northern and central Alabama was part of British Georgia from 1763–1783 and part of the American Mississippi territory thereafter. Its statehood delayed by the lack of a coastline (rectified when Andrew Jackson captured Spanish Mobile in 1814), Alabama became the 22nd state in 1819.
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, and these form a part ($3,445,000) of its present indebtedness.
The Indian problem was important. With the encroachment of the white settlers upon their hunting-grounds the Creek Indians began to grow restless, and the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who visited them in 1811, fomented their discontent. When the outbreak of the second war with Britain in 1812 gave the Creeks assurance of British aid they rose in arms, massacred several hundred settlers who had taken refuge in Fort Mims, near the junction of the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, and in a short time no white family in the Creek country was safe outside a palisade. The Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians, however, remained the faithful allies of the whites, and volunteers from Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, and later United States troops, marched to the rescue of the threatened settlements. In the campaign that followed the most distinguished services were rendered by General Andrew Jackson, whose vigorous measures broke for ever the power of the Creek Confederacy. By the treaty of Fort Jackson (August 9, 1814) the Creeks ceded their claims to about one-half of the present state; and cessions by the Cherokees, Chickasaws and Choctaws in 1816 left only about one-fourth of Alabama to the Indians.
In 1832 the national government provided for the removal of the Creeks; but before the terms of the contract were effected, the state legislature formed the Indian lands into counties, and settlers flocked in. This caused a disagreement between Alabama and the United States authorities; although it was amicably settled, it engendered a feeling that the policy of the national government might not be in harmony with the interests of the state--a feeling which, intensified by the slavery agitation, did much to cause secession in 1861. From January 11 until February 18, 1861 Alabama was declared the Alabama Republic.
The early political history of Alabama may be divided into three periods, that prior to 1860, the years from 1860 to 1876, and the period from 1876 onwards.
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. It 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. During the agitation over the Wilmot Proviso which would bar slavery from territory acquired from Mexico, Yancey induced the Democratic State Convention of 1848 to adopt what is known as the "Alabama Platform." It declared that neither Congress nor the government of a territory had the right to interfere with slavery in a territory, that those who held opposite views were not Democrats, and that the Democrats of Alabama would not support a candidate for the presidency if he did not agree with them on these questions. This platform was endorsed by conventions in Florida and Virginia and by the legislatures of Georgia and Alabama. Old party lines were broken by the Compromise of 1850. The State's Rights faction, joined by many Democrats, founded the Southern Rights party, which demanded the repeal of the Compromise, advocated resistance to future encroachments and prepared for secession, while the Whigs, joined by the remaining Democrats, formed the party known as the "Unionists," which unwillingly accepted the Compromise and denied the "constitutional" right of secession. The "Unionists" were successful in the elections of 1851 and 1852, but the feeling of uncertainty engendered in the south by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the course of the slavery agitation after 1852 led the State Democratic convention of 1856 to revive the "Alabama Platform"; when the "Alabama Platform" failed to secure the formal approval of the Democratic National convention at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1860, the Alabama delegates, followed by those of the other cotton "states," withdrew. Upon the election of Abraham Lincoln, Governor Andrew B. Moore, according to previous instructions of the legislature, called a state convention. On January 11 it adopted an ordinance of secession from the United States; Alabama soon joined the Confederate States of America, whose government was organized at Montgomery on February 4, 1861. 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.
In the early part of the Civil War Alabama was not the scene of military operations, yet the state contributed about 120,000 men to the Confederate service, practically all her white population capable of bearing arms, Thirty-nine of these attained the rank of general. In 1863 the Federal forces secured a foothold in northern Alabama in spite of the opposition of General Nathan B. Forrest. In 1864 the outer defenses of Mobile were taken by a Federal fleet, but the city held out until April 1865.
According to the presidential plan of reorganization, a provisional governor for Alabama was appointed in June 1865; a state convention met in September of the same year, and declared the ordinance of secession null and void and slavery abolished; a legislature and a governor were elected in November, the legislature was at once recognized by President Andrew Johnson, but not by Congress, which refused to seat the delegation. Johnson ordered the Army to allow the inauguration of the governor after the legislature ratified the thirteenth amendment in December, 1865. But the passage, by the legislature, of Black Codes or vagrancy and apprenticeship laws designed to control the Freedmen who were flocking from the plantations to the towns, and its rejection of the fourteenth amendment, intensified the congressional hostility to the presidential plan. In 1867 the congressional plan of Reconstruction was completed and Alabama was placed under military government. The Freedmen were now enrolled as voters and large numbers of white citizens were disfranchised. The new Republican party, comprised of Freedmen, Scalawags and Carpetbaggers now took control, two years after the war ended. A constitutional convention, controlled by this element, met in November 1867, and framed a constitution which conferred universal manhood suffrage. Whites who had fought for the Confederacy were disfranchised. The Reconstruction Acts of Congress required every new constitution to be ratified by a majority of the legal voters of the state. The whites of Alabama largely stayed away from the polls, and, after five days of voting, the constitution wanted 13,550 to secure a majority. Congress then enacted that a majority of the votes cast should be sufficient, and thus the constitution went into effect, the state was readmitted to the Union in June 1868, and a new governor and legislature were elected.
The next two years are notable for legislative extravagance and corruption, according to white Alabamians. The state endorsed railway bonds at the rate of $12,000 and $16,000 a mile until the state debt had increased from eight millions to seventeen millions of dollars, and similar corruption characterized local government. The native white people united, formed a Conservative party and elected a governor and a majority of the lower house of the legislature in 1870; but, as the new administration was largely a failure, in 1872 there was a reaction in favor of the Radicals, a local term applied to the Republican party. In 1874, however, the power of the Radicals was finally broken, the Conservative Democrats electing all state officials. A commission appointed to examine the state debt found it to be $25,503,000; by compromise it was reduced to $15,000,000. A new constitution was adopted in 1875, which omitted the guarantee of the previous constitution that no one should be denied suffrage on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude, and forbade the state to engage in internal improvements or to give its credit to any private enterprise.
After 1874 the Democratic party had constant control of the state administration. The Republicans were by now largely a Black party which held no local or state offices, but did have some federal patronage. It failed to make nominations for office in 1878 and 1880 and endorsed the ticket of the Greenback party in 1882. The development of mining and manufacturing was accompanied by economic distress among the farming classes, which found expression in the Jeffersonian Democratic party, organized in 1892. The regular Democratic ticket was elected and the new party was then merged into the Populist party. In 1894 the Republicans united with the Populists, elected three congressional representatives, secured control of many of the counties, but failed to carry the state, and continued their opposition with less success in the next campaigns. Partisanship became intense, and Democratic charges of corruption of the ignorant Black electorate were matched by Republican and Populist accusations of fraud and violence by Democrats. Consequently, after division on the subject among the Democrats themselves, as well as opposition of Republicans and Populists, a new constitution with restrictions on suffrage was adopted in 1901.
Feldman (1999) has shown that the KKK was not a mere hate group; it showed a genuine desire for political and social reform. Alabama Klansmen were among the foremost advocates of better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other "progressive" measures. By 1925 the Klan was powerful political force in the state, as powerful figures like J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black manipulated the KKK membership against the power of the "Big Mule" industrialists and Black Belt planters who had long dominated the state. In 1926 Bibb Graves, a former chapter head, won the governor's office with KKK members' support. He led one of the most progressive administrations in the state's history, pushing for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation. At the same time KKK vigilantes---thinking they enjoyed governmental protection--launched an wave of physical terror across Alabama in 1927, targeting both blacks and whites. The conservative elite counterattacked. The major newspapers kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan as violent and un-American. Sheriffs cracked down on Klan violence. The counterattack worked; the state voted for Al Smith in 1928, and the Klan's official membership plunged to under six thousand by 1930.
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