The history of the is now Alabama stems back thousands of years ago when it was inhabited by indigenous peoples. The Woodland period spanned from around 1000 BC to 1000 AD and was marked by the development of the Eastern Agricultural Complex. This was followed by the Mississippian culture of Native Americans, which lasted to around the 1600 AD. The first Europeans to make contact with Alabama were the Spanish, with the first permanent European settlement being Mobile, established by the French in 1702.
After being a part of the Mississippi Territory (1798–1817) and then the Alabama Territory (1817–1819), Congress admitted Alabama as a state on December 14, 1819. After Indian Removal forcibly displaced most Southeast tribes to west of the Mississippi River to what was then called Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), European Americans arrived in large numbers, with some of them bringing or buying African Americans in the domestic slave trade.
From the early to mid-19th century, the state's wealthy planter class considered slavery essential to their economy. As one of the largest slaveholding states, Alabama was among the first six states to secede from the Union. It declared its secession in January 1861, joining the Confederate States of America in February 1861. During the ensuing American Civil War (1861–1865) Alabama saw moderate levels of warfare and battles. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed all the enslaved people as soonas the U.S. arrived. Alabama transitioned into the Reconstruction era (1863–1877). During that time, its biracial government established the first public schools and welfare institutions in the state.
For a half century following the Civil War, Alabama was mostly economically poor and heavily rural, with few industries within the state. Agriculture production, based primarily on cotton exports, was the main economic driver. Most farmers were tenants, sharecroppers or laborers who did not own land. Reconstruction ended when Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers" regained control of the state legislature by both legal and extralegal means (including violence and harassment). In 1901, Southern Democrats in Alabama passed a state Constitution that effectively disfranchised most African Americans (who in 1900 comprised more than 45 percent of the state's population), as well as tens of thousands of Poor Whites in the state.Glenn Feldman. The Disenfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004, p.136Historical Census Browser, 1900 Federal Census, University of Virginia , accessed March 15, 2008 By 1941, a total 600,000 poor whites and 520,000 African Americans had been disfranchised.
African Americans living in Alabama in the early-to-mid 20th century experienced the inequities of disfranchisement, legalized segregation, violence and underfunded schools. Tens of thousands of African Americans from Alabama joined the Great Migration out of the South from 1915 to 1930 and moved for better opportunities in industrial cities, mostly in the North and Midwest. The black exodus escalated steadily in the first three decades of the 20th century; 22,100 emigrated from 1900 to 1910; 70,800 between 1910 and 1920; and 80,700 between 1920 and 1930.Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land, 37. As a result of African American disenfranchisement and rural white control of the legislature, state politics were dominated by Democrats, as part of the "Solid South."
The Great Depression in the United States of 1929-1939 hit Alabama's state economy hard. However, New Deal farm programs raised the price of cotton, bringing some economic relief. During and after World War II, Alabama started to see some economic prosperity, as the state developed a manufacturing and service base. In the mid-20th century cotton faded in economic importance. Many poor people left the cotton districts for towns or Northern cities. Following years of civil rights movement activities, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 abolished legalized segregation, along with African Americans being able to again exercise their constitutional right to vote.
In the mid-to-late 20th century, the formation of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, boosted economic growth by developing an aerospace industry. In 1986, the election of Guy Hunt as governor marked a shift in Alabama toward becoming a Republican stronghold in Presidential elections as its voters also leaned Republican in statewide elections. The Democratic Party still dominated many local and legislative offices, but total Democrat dominance had ended. In the early 21st century, Alabama's economy was fueled in part by aerospace, agriculture, auto production, and the service sector.Alabama - HISTORY. history.com. Retrieved January 26, 2022.
Indigenous peoples, early history
Precontact
At least 12,000 years ago, Native Americans or Paleo-Indians appeared in what is today referred to as "The South". Paleo-Indians in the Southeast were hunter-gatherers who pursued a wide range of animals, including the megafauna, which became extinct following the end of the Pleistocene age. Their diets were based primarily on plants, gathered and processed by women who learned about nuts, berries and other fruits, and the roots of many plants. The Woodland period from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE was marked by the development of pottery and the low intensity agriculture of the Eastern Agricultural Complex.
The Mississippian culture arose as the intensified cultivation of Mesoamerican crops of corn and beans led to crop surpluses and population growth. Increased population density gave rise to urban centers and regional chiefdoms. Mississippian polities were led by hereditary religious elites. Their governments developed a web of political and military offices with complex bureaucracies. They existed throughout what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from 800 to 1500 C.E. The largest was Cahokia, in present-day Illinois near the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. Cahokian influence spread along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries. The capital's population of 20,000 to 30,000 at its peak exceeded any European city in North America until 1800.
Trade with the Northeast indigenous peoples via the Ohio River began during the Burial Mound Period (1000 BC–AD 700) and continued until European contact. Various Mississippian polities such as Bottle Creek Province covered most of the state from 1000 to 1600 AD, with Alabama's largest being Moundville Province, the second-largest complex of this period in the United States. Some 29 earthwork mounds survive at the capital, with many more mounds and settlements formerly encircling the capital.
Analysis of artifacts recovered from archaeological excavations at Moundville were the basis of scholars' formulating the characteristics of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC). Contrary to popular belief, the SECC appears to have no direct links to Mesoamerican culture, but developed independently. The Ceremonial Complex represents a major component of the religion of the Mississippian peoples; it is one of the primary means by which their religion is understood.
The early historic Muscogee are considered likely descendants of the Mississippian culture along the Tennessee River in modern Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. They may have been related to the Utinahica of southern Georgia. At the time the Spanish made their first forays inland from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, many political centers of the Mississippians were already in decline, or abandoned.
Among the historical tribes of Native American people living in the area of present-day Alabama at the time of European contact were the Muskogean-speaking Alabama (Alibamu), Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Koasati, and Mobile peoples. Also in the region were the Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee, from a different family and cultural group. They are believed to have migrated south at an earlier time from the Great Lakes area, based on their language's similarity to those of the Iroquois Confederacy and other Iroquoian-speaking tribes around the Great Lakes. The history of Alabama's Native American peoples is reflected in many of its place names.
European colonization
The Spanish were the first Europeans to enter Alabama, claiming land for their Crown. They named the region as La Florida, which extended to the southeast peninsular state now bearing the name.
Although a member of Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition of 1528 may have entered southern Alabama, the first fully documented visit was by explorer Hernando de Soto. In 1539 he made an arduous expedition along the Coosa, Alabama and Tombigbee rivers.
The Alabama region at the period of European contact is best described as a collection of moderately sized native chiefdoms (such as the Coosa chiefdom on the upper Coosa River and the Tuskaloosa chiefdom on the lower Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Alabama Rivers), interspersed with completely autonomous villages and tribal groups. Many of the settlements de Soto encountered had platform mounds and villages fortified with defensive palisades with bastions for archers. The South Appalachian Mississippian culture Big Eddy phase has been tentatively identified as the protohistoric Province of Tuskaloosa encountered by the de Soto expedition in 1540. The Big Eddy phase Taskigi Mound is a platform mound and fortified village site located at the confluence of the Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Alabama Rivers near Wetumpka, Alabama. It is preserved as part of the Fort Toulouse-Fort Jackson State Historic Site and is one of the locations included on the University of Alabama Museums "Alabama Indigenous Mound Trail".
The English also laid claims to the region north of the Gulf of Mexico. Charles II of England included most of the territory of modern Alabama in the Province of Carolina, with land granted to certain of his favorites by the charters of 1663 and 1665. English traders from Carolina frequented the valley of the Alabama River as early as 1687 to trade for deerskins with the Native American peoples.
The French also colonized the region. In 1702 they founded a settlement on the Mobile River near its mouth, constructing Fort Louis. For the next nine years this was the French seat of government of New France, or La Louisiane (Louisiana). In 1711, they abandoned Fort Louis because of repeated flooding. Settlers rebuilt a fort on higher ground known as Fort Conde. This was the start of what developed as present-day Mobile, the first permanent European settlement in Alabama. Biloxi was another early French settlement on the Gulf Coast, to the west in what is now Mississippi.
The French and the English contested the region, each attempting to forge strong alliances with Indian tribes. To strengthen their position, defend their Indian allies, and draw other tribes to them, the French established the military posts of Fort Toulouse, near the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers, and Fort Tombecbe on the Tombigbee River.
The French and the English engaged in competition for Indian trade in what is now the state of Alabama between roughly the 1690s and the 1750s, at which point the French and Indian War broke out. It was the North American front of the Seven Years' War between these two nations in Europe. Though the French claimed the territory as their own and attempted to rule it from Fort Toulouse, so as to engage in trade with the Indians, English traders based out of the Carolinas infiltrated the region, also engaging in trade. The Chickasaw frequently favored the English in this contest.