Alabama

Early Inhabitants

The approximately 52,000 square miles that make up the state of Alabama were occupied as early as some 10,000 years ago by North American Indians. The state gets its name from an Indian word that's been translated as thicket clearers or vegetation gatherers.

The first Europeans to reach the area were believed to be Spanish explorers who sailed into what is now Mobile Bay around 1519. In 1540, inland areas were explored by Hernando de Soto (c.1500-1542) of Spain. (De Soto was searching for gold, which he failed to find.) At that time, the main American Indian groups in the region were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek (Muskogee). The future state's first permanent settlement was established by the French in 1702 at Fort Louis de la Louisiane, near the present-day city of Mobile. Following the French and Indian War (1754-63), the British took control of the Mobile area in accordance with the Treaty of Paris.

Statehood, Secession and Union

With the end of the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), Britain gave up its North American colonies, and most of present-day Alabama became part of a new nation, the United States of America, except for the Mobile area, which had come under Spanish control. In 1813, the U.S. took over that area, too, and on December 14, 1819, Alabama became the 22nd state to join the Union. By the 1830s, almost all of the Native-American tribes in the region were forced to move westward.

In 1793, Eli Whitney (1765-1825) invented the cotton gin, a machine that separated cotton seed from the predominantly grown (and difficult to clean) short-staple or green-seed cotton. With the use of this new machine, cotton production in the South soared. At first, the Carolinas and Georgia grew most of the cotton, but by the early 19th century settlers began to pour into the fertile lands of Alabama. Poor settlers set up meager farms, but the wealthy ones established huge cotton plantations based on black slave labor, and their plantations prospered. By 1830, cotton production and slave labor were the dominant factors in the new state's economy.

When the divisions over slavery, states' rights and other issues deepened between the North and the South in the mid-19th century, Alabama became the fourth Southern state to secede from the Union, doing so in January 1861, just prior to the onset of the Civil War. Alabama's capital, Montgomery, was the first capital of the Confederate States of America, the group of 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union. (The Confederate capital was moved to Richmond, Virginia, within a year.) Union forces invaded Alabama in 1862, and Alabama troops fought in some of the great Civil War battles, including those at First Bull Run, Antietam and Gettysburg. One of the last Civil War battles was fought at Fort Blakely on Mobile Bay. A force of 16,000 Union soldiers, many of whom were African American, moved on the fort on April 2, 1865, taking it in seven days. Some 4,475 men died in this conflict; on April 9 alone, an estimated 2,900 Confederate soldiers lost their lives. On the same day, Confederate General Robert E. Lee (1807-70) surrendered his forces to Union Commander-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant (1822-85) at Appomattox, Virginia.

After the Civil War, Alabama and other former Confederate states entered the era of Reconstruction (1865-77), a period during which the Southern states were reorganized. Alabama was readmitted to the Union in 1868. After Reconstruction ended, most of the Deep South (and other parts of the nation) instituted laws and customs known as Jim Crow laws, which strictly segregated blacks and whites. Some activists struggled to address the needs of oppressed African Americans, among them educator Booker T. Washington (c.1856-1915), who was born into slavery and went on to become the first leader of the Tuskegee Institute (later Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Alabama. Established in 1881, the Tuskegee Institute trained black teachers and offered instruction in other occupational skills.