Issue 125, Summer 2017

Issue 125, Summer 2017

On the cover: 

Foreground: Nineteenth-century surveyor’s theodolite on display in a re-creation of the Federal Land Office at Constitution Village in Huntsville. [Robin McDonald] 

Background: Detail of the 1819 update of John Melish’s map of the Alabama Territory. [Library of Congress]

Purchase This Issue

Editor’s Note: ​We are honored to have the support of the Alabama Bicentennial Commission (ABC) for this special issue of Alabama Heritage. Please see Alabama200.org for more information about the ABC and upcoming bicentennial-related events.

Features

An artist’s conception of Mississippian Indians playing chunkey. The ability to grow their own food left more time for recreation. (Alabama Archives and History Foundation)
A map by Abraham Bradley Jr. showing the Mississippi Territory in 1804 after the addition of the lands ceded by Georgia, north to the border with Tennessee (the north, south, and east borders have been augmented with a black dashed line to make them easier to see). The black arrow indicates the postal road from Washington to New Orleans that would become the Federal Road. (Library of Congress)
Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee, and his brother Tecumseh led a movement among Indians promoting a return to traditional ways. McKenney and Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America)
Gen. Andrew Jackson led an army of more than 3,300 men into Alabama to avenge the Red Sticks’ attack on Fort Mims. (Library of Congress)

A Long Road to Becoming a Territory

By Edwin C. Bridges

Before Alabama became a territory, it had a rich human presence, dating back to before 11,000 BCE. Native Americans in the land that would become known as Alabama inhabited a landscape with mammoths, mastodons, sloths, and bison. For the Mississippian Indians, the area was an epicenter of economic and commercial growth. The arrival of European explorers in the sixteenth century reshaped communities by introducing diseases that ravaged native populations. Over the following centuries, Native Americans and Europeans negotiated—sometimes violently—over the land that would eventually become a territory of the United States.

“More or Less Arbitrary”: The Location of the Alabama-Mississippi Border

By Mike Bunn

Today, state and territorial borders may seem sacrosanct, things that could never have been in question. However, prior to the creation of the Alabama Territory, numerous competing interests vied to claim land for themselves, and the territory’s borders were anything but certain. Historian Mike Bunn explores the many considerations—from territorial sectionalism to a desire to subvert the lethargic pace of government policy—that helped shape the Alabama Territory.

This Francis Shallus map, “The State of Mississippi and Alabama Territory,” inaccurately shows the Alabama-Mississippi border as a straight line. The location of the border was the subject of intense disagreement between the eastern and western groups of settlers before statehood. [Library of Congress]
This map of the southern district of Alabama Territory, based on the surveys of John Coffee, shows the land divided into a grid of townships of six miles by six miles with each township divided into thirty-six one-square-mile sections. St. Stephens, the territorial capital, and the St. Stephens Meridian can be seen to the left of the title cartouche. Forts Claiborne and Jackson can be seen in the lower left and upper right of the area surveyed. (Alabama Department of Archives and History)
Huntsville’s Constitution Village includes a recreation of the Federal Land Office with a display of early nineteenth-century surveying instruments. (Robin McDonald)

Land Claims and Surveying in the Alabama Territory

By Herbert James Lewis

As Native Americans were displaced from their historic lands, the area that would become the Alabama Territory was opened to settlement by Europeans and white Americans. Although legislation such as the Land Act of 1800 attempted to instill a kind of order to the settlement, the reality often differed. Many would be settlers simply claimed some acreage by squatting on it and starting to make improvements. Such circumstances underscored the need for official surveys to determine land tracts and establish clear ownership of them.

Wealthy planters brought their slaves and wagonloads of possessions with them when they moved to the frontier. (Public Domain)

Alabama Fever Rages: Migrations to the Frontier of Early Alabama

By Thomas Chase Hagood

As the Alabama Territory opened up to settlement, so many people migrated to the area that the phenomenon became known as Alabama Fever. The influx remains documented through letters, journals, and other accounts, and these texts indicate that the fever struck a wide range of people, from bachelors and families to elderly mothers reluctant to send their children to start a new life across the frontier. Even fabled frontiersman Davy Crockett ventured into the Alabama Territory, giving rise to sensational (and perhaps somewhat sensationalized) accounts of his adventures there.

Sequoyah, a Cherokee, created the first written language for an American tribe. He lived in Wills Town during the Territorial period. [Library of Congress]

The Alabama Territory’s Cultural Landscape

by Gregory A. Waselkov

As Alabama Fever swept across the nation, the people racing into the Alabama Territory brought new kinds of housing, settlement, and agriculture—and they dramatically reshaped the area’s natural and social environments. The land itself was altered by deforestation and the introduction of non-native species, causing changes in the region’s wildlife populations. As settlers sought new means of transportation, roads and rivers were transformed. Native communities were overtaken by plantations, towns, and forts. Ecologically and socially, the area changed dramatically as the territory moved toward statehood.

St. Stephens: The Alabama Territory’s First Capital

By George Shorter

Originally created as a fort, St. Stephens changed hands between numerous nations before finally becoming the Alabama Territory’s first capital. Prior to that, it had been a trading post, a post office, a judicial seat, and a commercial center. It also held Alabama’s first school for settlers, which was established prior to the Alabama Territory. Although St. Stephens’s time as the capital was short lived, the town expanded for several years, until larger population centers lured most residents away. Today, St. Stephens is an active and vibrant archaeological site, discussed in depth in the sidebar to this article.

In this 2009 photo, the half-cellar of the Globe Hotel can be seen behind the wooden framework. In the foreground are the foundations of the slave quarters. [Robin McDonald]

The Three Sisters: How Squash, Beans, and Corn Became Southern Food

By John C. Hall and Rosa N. Hall

Ask many people today to name southern foods, and you’ll likely get a fairly standard set of answers. What may be less recognizable is the origin of many of these food items that are now standard southern fare. John and Rosa Hall describe many delicacies and explore how they entered the southern belly from a range of sources, including Native American, European, and African communities.

A pot of sofkee-nitkee with deer jerky cooks by an open fire. [John C. Hall]

Department Abstracts

The Upper Creek chief Yoholo Micco fought with the Americans in the Creek War and signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, yet he died at age fifty during the enforced removal of the Creeks from Alabama west to the Indian Territory. [McKenney and Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America]

The Alabama Territory

Quarter by Quarter

Editor’s Note–Alabama Heritage, the Alabama Bicentennial Commission, and the Alabama Tourism Department offer this serialized history of Alabama’s road to statehood as part of Alabama’s bicentennial celebrations that will run from 2017 through 2019. Quarter by Quarter allows you to experience the story of the territorial era as it unfolds, ultimately culminating in Alabama’s acceptance into the Union as a state—sometimes describing pivotal events, sometimes describing daily life, but always illuminating a world in flux. We will wait for the outcomes as our forebears did—over time. If you would like to follow the story online, you can find earlier quarters on our website at www.AlabamaHeritage.com.

Alabama’s territorial identity was shaped by the Mississippi bid for statehood. The Mississippi Territory, which originally included what is now the state of Alabama, was divided to expedite Mississippi’s acceptance into the union, and Alabama’s own quick path to statehood soon followed.

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