Alabama Heritage Magazine - Becoming Alabama

Becoming Alabama
Creek War • Civil War • Civil Rights

The Conflicts:
Creek War, Civil War, Civil Rights Movement

CREEK WAR
The Creek War opened most of what would become the state of Alabama for settlement. In this unequal contest, the surging new United States crushed the native Indian tribe that had occupied most of central Alabama. The fighting was dramatic and brutal. It brought Andrew Jackson his first national recognition and included other famous frontiersmen like Davy Crockett and Sam Dale.

At its conclusion, the Creeks—both those who had been hostile and those who had been Jackson’s allies—were forced to surrender huge tracts of their land, approximately 22 million acres. In the upcoming bicentennial, we will remember events leading up to the Creek War and the war itself. We will also reflect on the consequences of the war for Alabama’s original inhabitants and for the creation of a new state.

CIVIL WAR
The Alabama land opening for settlement after the Creek War brought extraordinary opportunities for wealth. As the Industrial Revolution called for ever more cotton, planters and their slaves poured into Alabama to meet the demand. In a short time, they built a prosperous and wealthy society, extending slavery deep into the interior South and giving it new economic vitality. But this “peculiar institution” was out of step with both the time and the principles on which the United States had been founded. Conflict between an economic system that relied on slavery and one based on free labor spiraled finally into the Civil War.

Alabama’s Ordinance of Secession included a provision inviting other seceding states to meet in Montgomery and consider their future. That meeting, in the state capitol, led to the creation of the Confederacy and to the decision to fire on Fort Sumter should Federal forces refuse to surrender the site. The war and its aftermath fundamentally changed life in Alabama for all its inhabitants—black and white, rich and poor.

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Though the Civil War did bring emancipation, it did not secure the rights of former slaves in the post-war society. After the ten-year struggle of Reconstruction, federal officials gradually backed off efforts to protect the rights of African Americans. In the late 1800s a new system of legalized racial separation emerged that was not slavery but clearly treated African Americans as second-class citizens.

In the early 1960s, while white Alabamians were celebrating the centennial of the Civil War, African Americans rose in a massive struggle against the system of legalized racial segregation. As during the Civil War, some of the most dramatic episodes of this national struggle took place in Alabama. From the Freedom Riders, to Birmingham jails, to the Voting Rights March, Alabama was again a battlefield. At the end of this struggle, the legal underpinnings of segregation were crushed as completely as the Red Stick Creeks had been at Horseshoe Bend.

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