Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama

by Walter L. Fleming

Each figure represents some person who became prominent before 1865, and indicates his native state. The location of the figure on the map indicates his place of residence. Note the segregation along the rivers and the Black Belt.

The wealthy people were found in the Tennessee valley, in the Black Belt extending across the centre of the state, and in Mobile, the one large town. They were (except a few of the Mobilians) all slaveholders. The poorer white people went to the less fertile districts of north and southeast Alabama, where land was cheap, preferring to work their own poor farms rather than to work for some one else on better land. But nearly every slave county had its colony of poorer whites, who were invariably settled on the least fertile soils. Among these settlers there was a certain dislike of slavery, because they believed that, were it not for the negro, the whites might themselves live on the fertile lands. Yet they were not in favor of emancipation in any form, unless the negro could be gotten entirely out of the way—a free negro being to them an abomination. If the negro must stay, then they preferred slavery to continue.

Over the greater part of Alabama there were no class distinctions before 1860; the state was too young. In the wilderness classes had fused and the successful men were often those never heard of in the older states. A candidate of “the plain people” was always elected, because all were frontier people. This does not mean that in Huntsville, Montgomery, Greensboro, and Mobile there were not the beginnings of an aristocracy based on education, wealth, and family descent. But these were very small spots on the map of Alabama, and there were no heartburnings over social inequalities.[2]

Such was the composition of the white population of Alabama before 1860. No matter what might be their political affiliations, in practice nearly all were Democrats of the Jeffersonian school, believing in the largest possible liberty for the individual and in local management of all local affairs, and to the frontier Democrat nearly all questions that concerned him were local. The political leaders excepted, the majority of the population knew little and cared less about the Federal government except when it endeavored to restrain or check them in their course of conquest and expansion in the wilderness. The relations of the people of Alabama with the Federal government were such as to confirm and strengthen them in their local attachments and sectional politics. The controversies that arose in regard to the removal of the Indians, and over the public lands, nullification, slavery, and western expansion, prevented the growth of attachment to the Federal government, and tended to develop a southern rather than a “continental” nationality. The state came into the Union when the sections were engaged in angry debate over the Missouri Compromise measures, and its attitude in Federal politics was determined from the beginning. The next most serious controversy with the Federal government and with the North was in regard to the removal of the Indians from the southern states. The southwestern frontiersmen, like all other Anglo-Americans, had no place in their economy for the Indian, and they were determined that he should not stand in their way.

Indians and Nullification

For half a century, throughout the Gulf states, the struggle with the Indian tribes for the possession of the fertile lands continued, and in this struggle the Federal government was always against the settlers. Before the removal of the Indians, in 1836, the settlers of Alabama were in almost continual dispute with the Washington administration on this subject.[3] The trouble began in Georgia, and thousands of Georgians brought to Alabama a spirit of jealousy and hostility to the United States government, and a growing dislike of New England and the North on account of their stand in regard to the Indians. For when troubles, legal and otherwise, arose with the Indians, their advisers were found to be missionaries and land agents from New England. The United States wanted the Indians to remain as states within states; the Georgia and Alabama settlers felt that the Indians must go. The attitude of the Federal government drove the settlers into extreme assertions of state rights. In Georgia it came almost to war between the state and United States troops during the administration of John Quincy Adams, a New Englander, who was disliked by the settlers for his support of the Indian cause; and the whole South was made jealous by the decisions of the Supreme Court in the Indian cases. Had Adams been elected to a second term, there would probably have been armed resistance to the policy of the United States. Jackson, a southern and western man, had the feeling of a frontiersman toward the Indians; and his attitude gained him the support of the frontier southern states in the trouble with South Carolina over nullification.

GAINESWOOD.
A Marengo County Plantation Home. Abandoned since the War.

Immediately after the nullification troubles, the general government attempted to remove the white settlers from the Indian lands in east Alabama. The lands had been ceded by the Indians in 1832, and the legislature of Alabama at once extended the state administration over the territory. Settlers rushed in; some were already there. But by the treaty the Indians were entitled to remain on their land until they chose to move; and now the United States marshals, supported by the army, were ordered to remove the 30,000 whites who had settled in the nine Indian counties. Governor Gayle, who had been elected as an opponent of nullification, informed the Secretary of War that the proposed action of the central government meant nothing less than the destruction of the state administration, and declared that he would, at all costs, sustain the jurisdiction of the state government. The troops killed a citizen who resisted removal, and the Federal authorities refused to allow the slayers to be tried by state courts. There was great excitement in the state, and public meetings were everywhere held to organize resistance. The legislature authorized the governor to persist in maintaining the state administration in the nine Indian counties. A collision with the United States troops was expected, and offers of volunteers were made to the governor,—even from New York. Finally the United States government yielded, the whites remained on the Indian lands, the state authority was upheld in the Indian counties, the soldiers were tried before state courts, and the Indians were removed to the West. The governor proclaimed a victory for the state, and the 30,000 angry Alabamians rejoiced over what they considered the defeat of the unjust Federal government.[4]