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History of slavery in Alabama

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The African slave trade was first brought to Alabama when the region was part of the French Louisiana Colony.[1]

During the colonial era, Indian slavery in Alabama soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery in large part due to the rapid growth of the cotton industry.[2][3]

Settlement and early slavery

The main house, built in 1833, at the slave plantation Thornhill in Greene County. It is a former Black Belt plantation.

Following the patenting of the cotton gin (in 1793), the War of 1812, and the defeat and expulsion of the Creek Nation in the 1810s, European-American settlement in Alabama was intensified, as was the presence of slavery on newly established plantations in the territory. Like its neighbors, the Alabama Territory was fertile ground for the surging cotton crop, and soon became one of the major destinations for African-American slaves who were being shipped to the Southeastern United States.

Most of the settlers came from the nearby states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, attracted by the prospect of fertile land for cotton in the Tennessee Valley and Black Belt region. The plantation system was solidified throughout the first half of the 19th century, and Alabama was one of the first seven states to withdraw from the Union prior to the American Civil War. The 1860 U.S. Census taken six months before Alabama's secession showed slaves accounted for 45% of Alabama's population, and free Blacks 3%.[4]

Cotton industry expansion and land rush era

Alabama was admitted as the 22nd state on December 14, 1819, with Congress selecting Huntsville as the site for the first Constitutional Convention. From July 5 to August 2, 1819, delegates met to prepare the new state constitution. Huntsville served as temporary capital from 1819 to 1820, when the seat of government moved to Cahaba in Dallas County.[5] Cahaba, now a ghost town, was the first permanent state capital from 1820 to 1825.[6]

The Alabama Fever land rush was underway when the state was admitted to the Union, with settlers and land speculators pouring into the state to take advantage of fertile land suitable for cotton cultivation.[7][8] Part of the frontier in the 1820s and 1830s, its constitution provided for universal suffrage for white men.[9]

Southeastern planters and traders from the Upper South brought slaves with them as the cotton plantations in Alabama expanded. The economy of the central Black Belt (named for its dark, productive soil) was built around large cotton plantations whose owners' wealth grew mainly from slave labor.[9] The area also drew many poor, disenfranchised people who became subsistence farmers. Alabama had an estimated population of under 10,000 people in 1810, but it increased to more than 300,000 people by 1830.[7] Most Native American tribes were completely removed from the state within a few years of the passage of the Indian Removal Act by Congress in 1830.[10]

Civil war and abolition

Slavery was officially abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment which took effect on December 18, 1865. Slavery had been theoretically abolished by President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation which proclaimed, in 1863, that only slaves located in territories that were in rebellion from the United States were free. Since the U.S. government was not in effective control of many of these territories until later in the war, many of these slaves proclaimed to be free by the Emancipation Proclamation were still held in servitude until those areas came back under Union control.[citation needed]


See also

References

  1. ^ Sellers, James Benson (1994). Slavery in Alabama. University of Alabama Press. p. 3. ISBN 9780817305949.
  2. ^ Ethridge, Robbie Franklyn, and Sheri Marie Shuck-Hall. 2009. Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South. University of Nebraska Press
  3. ^ Baine, Rodney M. 1995. "Indian Slavery in Colonial Georgia." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 79 (2).
  4. ^ AL.com, al com | (2019-12-28). "Alabama's population: 1800 to the modern era". al. Retrieved 2021-08-25.
  5. ^ "Huntsville". The Encyclopedia of Alabama. Alabama Humanities Foundation. Archived from the original on January 22, 2013. Retrieved January 22, 2013.
  6. ^ "Old Cahawba, Alabama's first state capital, 1820 to 1826". Old Cahawba: A Cahawba Advisory Committee Project. Archived from the original on August 21, 2012. Retrieved September 22, 2012.
  7. ^ a b LeeAnna Keith (October 13, 2011). "Alabama Fever". Encyclopedia of Alabama. Auburn University. Archived from the original on January 17, 2013. Retrieved September 22, 2012.
  8. ^ "Alabama Fever". Alabama Department of Archives and History. State of Alabama. Archived from the original on January 17, 2013. Retrieved September 22, 2012.
  9. ^ a b Tullos, Allen (April 19, 2004). "The Black Belt". Southern Spaces. Emory University. doi:10.18737/M70K6P. Archived from the original on January 11, 2011. Retrieved September 23, 2006.
  10. ^ Wayne Flynt (July 9, 2008). "Alabama". Encyclopedia of Alabama. Auburn University. Archived from the original on September 6, 2012. Retrieved September 22, 2012.

Further reading

External links

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