alabama in the past

When the Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto first entered what is now Alabama, in the year 1540, it was a land of the Creek and the Choctaw Indians, and De Soto had to fight and win a bloody battle from them before he could cross the state. The battle was fought in what is now Clarke County, and it is said that 11,000 Indians were killed, and only 82 of De Soto's Spanish soldiers. In later years, the English and French as well as the Spanish claimed Alabama, and the French held it for nearly a hundred years.

For a time, Mobile was the capital of Louisiana. In 1763 France gave Alabama to the British. When the United States won its independence, Alabama was considered as part of Georgia, but in 1798 it was made part of the Mississippi territory, and in 1819 was admitted as a state. Alabama became one of the principal cotton-raising states, and the "Black Belt" was filled with big plantations whose rich owners lived in fine mansions and owned hundreds of slaves to raise the cotton. Although only a small number of Alabama's people owned slaves, the slave owners had great power.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in I860, and it appeared that the slaves would be set free, Alabama was one of the southern states that took the lead in seceding from the United States. Alabama seceded on January 11, 1861, the fourth state to do so. Jefferson Davis, who had been a Senator from Alabama, was elected the first president of the Confederate States of America, and the first Confederate capital was Montgomery (until July, 1861, when Richmond, Virginia, was made the capital). During the Civil War, Alabama contributed 122,000 men to the Confederate armies, and 35,000 of them were killed or wounded. Alabama's cities and farms were badly hurt by Union armies in the Civil War, and after the war Alabama was very poor. "Carpetbaggers" controlled the state government and robbed it of millions. Gradually, the original citizens of the state state got control of it back. Alabama was always considered part of the "solid South," meaning that it never voted for anyone but a Democratic candidate for office; but in 1948 it voted for the "Dixiecrat" candidate instead of for President Harry Truman. In 1952 it voted Democratic again.