Vine Street was the main thoroughfare through Cahawba. During the town’s later incarnation as a cotton port, shops and businesses lined the street, alongside the Dallas County Courthouse. The buildings are gone, but the street is still lined with Chinaberry trees. A town statute required all residents to plant the trees for shade. (Robin McDonald) The eventful summer of constitution making behind it, Alabama’s state legislature opened its first session on October 25, 1819, in Huntsville. Gov. William Wyatt Bibb attempted to impress upon the legislators the solemnity of the occasion in a written address read to the body at its commencement by observing the gathering would “form a memorable epoch in our history…you cannot estimate too highly the great interests committed to your charge, or the important consequences which may flow from your deliberations.”
Over the course of the next seven weeks, the legislature passed some seventy-seven acts designed to bring the constitution into practical effect, ranging from routine matters such as setting the salaries of state officials to a rather aspirational appropriation for an engineering survey to determine the best way to connect— ostensibly via canal—the Tennessee and Mobile River systems. It established a court system, outlined rules for a state militia, and, in a glaring reflection of the type of society in which Alabama was birthed, codified procedures for the establishment of a means to patrol slaves. It also organized a taxation structure which relied overwhelmingly on assessments on various forms of property to provide the revenue necessary for the government’s operation.
In an interesting sidebar to the inaugural legislative session, after having so long itched for a chance to weigh in on national issues, Alabama’s leaders got their first opportunity in a most unexpected way. Learning that Andrew Jackson, a familiar figure in the Tennessee Valley by this time, was visiting the area, the legislature extended him an invitation to observe their proceedings and have the body pay him its respects. The general recently had become embroiled in Congress’s effort to censure him for his high-handed actions during the First Seminole War, specifically his unsanctioned decision to seize Spanish outposts in Florida as part of his pursuit of the defiant tribesmen. Exactly how to word a joint resolution by the Alabama General Assembly and how stridently it should praise Jackson briefly became a bit of a minor controversy in the legislature, as division over the appropriateness of his actions and whether to disapprove of the federal government’s response exposed the emerging political alignments that would carry Alabama well into its first decades of statehood. In the end the assembly issued a clumsy compromise resolution lauding Jackson but making no mention of the censure, but the damage had been done. Legislators who had been reluctant to commend the general would themselves later be subjected to the disapprobation of an electorate which viewed Old Hickory as the very embodiment of all they held dear. Soon enough practically all major political alliances in Alabama would galvanize for or against his vision of American democracy.
In an interesting sidebar to the inaugural legislative session, after having so long itched for a chance to weigh in on national issues, Alabama’s leaders got their first opportunity in a most unexpected way. Learning that Andrew Jackson, a familiar figure in the Tennessee Valley by this time, was visiting the area, the legislature extended him an invitation to observe their proceedings and have the body pay him its respects. The general recently had become embroiled in Congress’s effort to censure him for his high-handed actions during the First Seminole War, specifically his unsanctioned decision to seize Spanish outposts in Florida as part of his pursuit of the defiant tribesmen. Exactly how to word a joint resolution by the Alabama General Assembly and how stridently it should praise Jackson briefly became a bit of a minor controversy in the legislature, as division over the appropriateness of his actions and whether to disapprove of the federal government’s response exposed the emerging political alignments that would carry Alabama well into its first decades of statehood. In the end the assembly issued a clumsy compromise resolution lauding Jackson but making no mention of the censure, but the damage had been done. Legislators who had been reluctant to commend the general would themselves later be subjected to the disapprobation of an electorate which viewed Old Hickory as the very embodiment of all they held dear. Soon enough practically all major political alliances in Alabama would galvanize for or against his vision of American democracy.
Observing the gathering would “form a memorable epoch in our history…you cannot estimate too highly the great interests committed to your charge, or the important consequences which may flow from your deliberations.”
At the conclusion of its proceedings, the legislature authorized the body’s doorkeeper to sell at auction the very furniture it had used during its deliberations; the state would get a literal as well as figurative fresh start the next year in the new capital being carved from the wilderness in the central section of the state. Cahawba, to borrow a phrase from Alabama Heritage author John Scott’s chronicle of the town’s remarkable story, was nothing less than Alabama’s “bold experiment” in capital-building. Located and planned for a special purpose, its story is Alabama’s transition in microcosm. The town lay at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba Rivers, a location that previous residents of what became Alabama had recognized as strategically important centuries before Governor Bibb extolled its virtues and schemed a way to have the capital located at the spot. Even as surveyors marked out the new town’s lots, the remnants of a large fortified Mississippian town reminded newcomers that Native Americans had inhabited the place previously. More recently, the town site had been the home of a lone squatter named James White, who arrived there shortly after the conclusion of the Creek War and, finding no one to tell him otherwise, decided to settle there. Now this serene patch of level ground was to be the epicenter of government activities in one of the fastest-growing and most ambitious states in the union. Its development proved correspondingly rapid. The earliest known references to the town as an actual community did not appear until the summer of 1819, but by 1821 it would rank as one of the largest cities in the state and positively vibrated with business, social, and, of course, political activity sparked by the placement of the state capitol along its newly cleared streets.
There, in this upstart urban community among the bucolic, sweeping plains and rich river bottoms of central Alabama’s famed Black Belt, the long-held dream of statehood was destined to take shape. A grand capitol topped with a gleaming copper dome would serve as the focal point of the new state’s political scene once this new era dawned. Sadly, the man who willed the city in which it stood into being would not be there to celebrate Alabama’s arrival, though. Governor Bibb, already weakened from tuberculosis, suffered a bad fall while riding his horse on his plantation in Autauga County early in 1820 and passed away after a prolonged illness in July of that year at the age of only thirty-nine. The new state constitution said that should the governor become unable to serve, the governorship would be assumed by the president of the senate—a position ironically enough held at the time by Bibb’s brother, Thomas. Therefore, his sibling ultimately served the remainder of his term as governor. To the younger Bibb, then, would fall the honor of leading the first legislative session of Alabama’s statehood, convened at Cahawba in the fall of 1820. But all of that history had yet to be written in December 1819, when a very important document regarding the fate of the future state of Alabama came across Pres. James Monroe’s desk in the nation’s capital.
There, in this upstart urban community among the bucolic, sweeping plains and rich river bottoms of central Alabama’s famed Black Belt, the long-held dream of statehood was destined to take shape. A grand capitol topped with a gleaming copper dome would serve as the focal point of the new state’s political scene once this new era dawned. Sadly, the man who willed the city in which it stood into being would not be there to celebrate Alabama’s arrival, though. Governor Bibb, already weakened from tuberculosis, suffered a bad fall while riding his horse on his plantation in Autauga County early in 1820 and passed away after a prolonged illness in July of that year at the age of only thirty-nine. The new state constitution said that should the governor become unable to serve, the governorship would be assumed by the president of the senate—a position ironically enough held at the time by Bibb’s brother, Thomas. Therefore, his sibling ultimately served the remainder of his term as governor. To the younger Bibb, then, would fall the honor of leading the first legislative session of Alabama’s statehood, convened at Cahawba in the fall of 1820. But all of that history had yet to be written in December 1819, when a very important document regarding the fate of the future state of Alabama came across Pres. James Monroe’s desk in the nation’s capital.
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