An engraving based on "Gang of Negro Slaves shipping Cotton from a Plantation on the Alabama River, by torchlight--on a Steam Boat for Mobile," painted by William Henry Brooke in 1839. (Alabama Archives) The Alabama Territory’s cultural and economic landscape was well defined by spring 1818. As the territory entered its second year of existence, cotton, transportation networks to facilitate its trade, and a fundamental reliance on slave labor had meshed to form the key parts of the structural bedrock on which the new state would rise. During the year ahead, these aspects of the territorial experience would both cement and extend their influence into virtually every aspect of Alabama life. One particularly significant area was transportation. Alabama’s first steamboats were a far cry from the floating palaces of river travel’s heyday—slower, smaller, and far less powerful or reliable than those of the coming generation—but they marked the beginning of the era of revolution in riverine transportation.
In February 1818 the St. Stephens Steamboat Company was organized at its namesake community along the Tombigbee, within a year launching the first steam-powered vessel built in the state, appropriately named the Alabama. Within eighteen months pioneer builders at Blakeley had launched the Mississippi and the Tensa. Suddenly it appeared that round-trip journeys—such as those from the territorial interior to its gulf outlet at Mobile or even from the Tennessee Valley to New Orleans—that had previously taken weeks or even months might be reduced to a matter of days. These early boats carried their fair share of passengers, but their ability to transport cotton made them central to Alabama’s ascendance as a key competitor in the international cotton trade.
In truth cotton animated many aspects of life in early Alabama. It encouraged the area’s settlement, provided the impetus for much of its infrastructural development, and underlay much of its economic activity. Cotton was Alabama’s cash crop from its inception. The ebbs and flows of its price on international markets served as the bellwether for the health of the territory’s overall financial status. Statistics on Mobile’s fiber exports show the steady consuming progress of its cultivation, which took root in its territorial years and soon dominated the state’s economy. In 1818 the port shipped fewer than 10,000 bales; by the 1840s Alabama had become the nation’s leader in cotton production, and that figure hovered around 500,000 bales. Observers in the Alabama Territory, such as the ever-insightful Anne Royall, would not have been surprised by the centrality of cotton to the future state’s life. In January 1818 on a Tennessee River Valley plantation, she beheld the first cotton field she had ever seen and wrote a friend, “It appears an endless business when we cast our eye over so vast a plain of white with a production, the gathering of which is to be effected by the application of the fingers to every individual pod; and these pods as thick as they can stand one by the side of the other. It is discouraging indeed.”
In truth cotton animated many aspects of life in early Alabama. It encouraged the area’s settlement, provided the impetus for much of its infrastructural development, and underlay much of its economic activity. Cotton was Alabama’s cash crop from its inception. The ebbs and flows of its price on international markets served as the bellwether for the health of the territory’s overall financial status. Statistics on Mobile’s fiber exports show the steady consuming progress of its cultivation, which took root in its territorial years and soon dominated the state’s economy. In 1818 the port shipped fewer than 10,000 bales; by the 1840s Alabama had become the nation’s leader in cotton production, and that figure hovered around 500,000 bales. Observers in the Alabama Territory, such as the ever-insightful Anne Royall, would not have been surprised by the centrality of cotton to the future state’s life. In January 1818 on a Tennessee River Valley plantation, she beheld the first cotton field she had ever seen and wrote a friend, “It appears an endless business when we cast our eye over so vast a plain of white with a production, the gathering of which is to be effected by the application of the fingers to every individual pod; and these pods as thick as they can stand one by the side of the other. It is discouraging indeed.”
It didn’t take long for settlers to discover that Alabama soil was ideal for growing cotton. Planters from the Atlantic Coast states brought their slaves south and established huge cotton plantations, dominating Alabama’s economy for the next forty years.
Royall’s dispiriting tone hinted at an unpleasant but undeniable truth: to a large degree, Alabama’s economy rested on the backs of the enslaved men and women who produced and harvested most cotton. Bondsmen comprised approximately a third of the state’s total population in 1819, and in certain areas they represented half or more of all residents. While we admittedly know relatively little about the daily lives of most of the Alabama Territory’s white and Native American residents, we understand perhaps even less about those who cleared most of its first fields, tended a large portion of its early crops, and constructed so many of its first buildings. In the antebellum era, detailed business records of large plantations employing dozens, sometimes hundreds, of slaves offer glimpses of their everyday routines and living conditions, but fewer such materials survive from this earlier age. In large part, however, continuity unquestionably characterized the experience. Most of the forced labor performed by slaves on Alabama Territory farms and plantations differed only by scale from that of the following generation, and their living conditions varied little. Whether or not early Alabamians had any direct association with slavery, the difficult truth is that the institution’s presence doomed the enslaved to a permanent sub-citizen status and simultaneously defined the bottom rung in an emergent society below which no white man could fall.
Owing in no small part to cotton production’s profitability, the Alabama Territory featured exceedingly little industry outside of agricultural pursuits. Sawmills and gristmills became the core, if not the only, manufacturing enterprises in most early communities. Pursuits that would become mainstays in Alabama’s nineteenth-century industrial scene nonetheless trace their origins to the era. The state’s textile industry dates its establishment to the entrepreneurial activities of Madison County’s Charles Cabaniss (ca. 1815), forerunner of the noted Bell Factory, generally recognized as the state’s first successful textile manufacturing concern. To the west, in Franklin County, about the same time as Cabaniss began his operation, Pennsylvania native Joseph Heslip purchased a tract of land along Cedar Creek near the crossroads community of Russellville and built Alabama’s first blast iron furnace. Across the territory, pursuit of other visions for economic and community development were about to reach a fever pitch through the establishment of dozens of towns and cities.
Owing in no small part to cotton production’s profitability, the Alabama Territory featured exceedingly little industry outside of agricultural pursuits. Sawmills and gristmills became the core, if not the only, manufacturing enterprises in most early communities. Pursuits that would become mainstays in Alabama’s nineteenth-century industrial scene nonetheless trace their origins to the era. The state’s textile industry dates its establishment to the entrepreneurial activities of Madison County’s Charles Cabaniss (ca. 1815), forerunner of the noted Bell Factory, generally recognized as the state’s first successful textile manufacturing concern. To the west, in Franklin County, about the same time as Cabaniss began his operation, Pennsylvania native Joseph Heslip purchased a tract of land along Cedar Creek near the crossroads community of Russellville and built Alabama’s first blast iron furnace. Across the territory, pursuit of other visions for economic and community development were about to reach a fever pitch through the establishment of dozens of towns and cities.
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