Alabama in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  Alabama in the American Civil War occupies a position unlike any other state in the Confederacy. Montgomery was the birthplace of the Confederate nation itself. There, in January and February 1861, delegates from across the slaveholding South gathered to form a new republic, elected Jefferson Davis as their president, and set the machinery of secession in motion. The questions that follow are large ones. How did a state so central to the Confederacy find itself so bitterly divided within its own borders? What did the war cost ordinary Alabamians who never fired a single shot? And how did the city of Selma, deep in the state's interior, come to manufacture most of the ammunition that kept Confederate armies fighting for four years?

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• 2. The Secession Vote

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  On the 11th of January 1861, Alabama delegates voted to leave the United States by a margin of 61 to 39 percent. The opposition was not scattered or timid. It was concentrated in the northern counties, where Unionist sentiment ran deep and where the plantation economy of the Black Belt felt distant and foreign.

  The arguments made for secession were explicit about their cause. Stephen F. Hale, Alabama's commissioner to Kentucky, wrote to that state's governor in December 1860 laying out the case. He invoked the Dred Scott decision, condemned Abraham Lincoln's election, and warned of what he called a race war if slavery were undone. Alabama politician Robert Hardy Smith was equally direct in an 1861 speech. He said the state had left the United States "chiefly because of the negro quarrel" and praised the Confederate constitution for naming slavery plainly, without what he called euphony.

  The 1861 Alabama Constitution translated these arguments into law. It forbade emancipation of slaves by the state itself or by any other country, a phrase that pointedly included the United States. It also, in Ordinance 20 approved on the 28th of January 1861, opposed the reopening of the African slave trade. Montgomery newspapers described slavery as a benevolent religious institution. Seven Cotton States of the Lower South joined Alabama to form the Confederacy, while the majority of slaveholding states remained in the Union at the time of its founding.

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• 3. Governor Moore's Early Moves

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  Governor Andrew B. Moore did not wait for secession to be official before acting. In January 1861, three months before the bombardment of Fort Sumter, he ordered the seizure of two federal forts on the Alabama Gulf Coast, Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines, along with the arsenal at Mount Vernon. He also sent agents into the Northeast to purchase rifles and scoured the state for additional weapons.

  This peaceful seizure of federal property set a precedent. When Fort Sumter fell on the 12th of April 1861, four more slaveholding states, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina, joined the Confederacy. Moore's early actions had already positioned Alabama as an armed participant weeks before the shooting started.

  ConnectingMontgomery to the rest of the South was itself a logistical ordeal. Jefferson Davis's journey from his Mississippi plantation to assume the Confederate presidency on the 16th of February 1861, required five days and six separate trains. He traveled by steamboat to Vicksburg, by rail to Jackson, north to Grand Junction, east to Chattanooga, southeast to Atlanta, west to the Alabama border, and finally to Montgomery. The difficulty of that single trip foreshadowed the transportation crisis that would eventually cripple the Confederate war effort entirely.

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• 4. Selma's War Machine

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  Josiah Gorgas, the Confederacy's Chief of Ordnance, identified Selma as a site for munitions production. The factories he established there employed 10,000 workers and became the primary source of Confederate ammunition until Union raiders burned them down in 1865.

  The Selma Arsenal handled most of the Confederacy's ammunition production. The Selma Naval Ordnance Works manufactured artillery at a rate of one cannon every five days. The Confederate Naval Yard built warships, including the CSS Tennessee, launched in 1863 to defend Mobile Bay. Selma's Confederate Nitre Works extracted niter for gunpowder from limestone caves. When cave supplies ran low, the Works advertised for housewives to save the contents of their chamber pots, because urine was a usable source of organic nitrogen.

  Thirty-nine Alabamians reached the rank of general or admiral during the war. Admiral Raphael Semmes was the most prominent among them. The state contributed roughly 120,000 Confederate troops, drawn from nearly the entire white male population capable of bearing arms. Most were recruited locally and served alongside men they already knew, which built unit cohesion and deepened ties to home. About 15 percent of those troops died of disease; another 10 percent died in battle.

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• 5. A Collapsing Home Front

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  Before the war, most Alabamians worked in agriculture. The railroads were the state's largest industry, followed by gristmills and sawmills. War stripped both sectors simultaneously. The Union seized the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers, burned railroad trestles and bridges, and tore up track. The Mobile and Ohio Railroad, which connected Mobile to points north as far as Columbus, Kentucky, finished the war with only a fourth of its rolling stock surviving, and even that in poor condition. The 184-mile stretch from Okolona to Union City had been gutted by decay and the destruction of bridges, trestlework, crossties, and water stations.

  Drought compounded the damage in 1862. Corn production in Coosa County fell by 150,000 bushels from the prior year. Twenty of Alabama's 67 counties could not produce any surplus corn at all. Families left behind by Confederate soldiers went hungry.

  The state government tried to relieve the suffering by printing nearly twelve million dollars in poverty relief funds, but the paper money was backed by nothing. The resulting inflation made the hardship worse. In 1861, the state recorded 7 percent of white families as indigent. By 1862 that figure had risen to 34 percent, and to 39 percent by 1863. Bread riots struck Mobile in April and September 1863. By 1864, groups the source calls "corn women" were roaming the countryside begging and stealing. A November 1864 military list counted 7,994 men who had deserted their units.

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• 6. Divided Loyalties

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  About 10,000 Alabama slaves escaped and joined the Union Army during the war. An additional 2,700 white Alabamians also enlisted on the Union side. The state raised five regiments for the U.S. Army, four of them Black regiments of the United States Colored Troops.

  In northern Alabama, Unionist resistance was organized before federal troops ever arrived. Underground networks provided finances, contacts, supplies, and local intelligence to pro-Union loyalists hiding from Confederate partisans. When Union troops finally occupied the region after the fall of Nashville in February 1862, those Unionists could come out of hiding. The most well-known all-Alabama Unionist unit was the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment. Of the 2,678 white Alabamians who enlisted in the Union Army, 2,066 served in that regiment.

  In southeastern Alabama, guerrilla leader John Ward operated virtually at will for the war's last two years, finding cover in the pine forests of Dale, Coffee, and Henry counties. His men sometimes coordinated with Union forces based in Pensacola, Florida. Their activity was serious enough that local citizens petitioned Governor T.H. Watts for military help against them. Methodist minister Bill Sketoe of Newton was hanged by Home Guard elements for alleged collaboration with Ward's fighters.

  Confederate guerrillas in northern Alabama took an opposing role. Detached cavalry units hunted down Unionists, conscripts, and deserters. Other fighters, not under Confederate military control, operated as what the source describes as outlaws interested as much in profit as in the Southern cause.

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• 7. The Fall of Mobile

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  Mobile Bay was the last major Confederate port still operating after four years of naval blockade. Forts Morgan and Gaines, floating mines, and obstacle paths in the channel kept it open to blockade runners for nearly the entire war, carrying cotton out and food and munitions in.

  In August 1864, a Union fleet took the outer defenses during the Battle of Mobile Bay. The city itself held on for eight more months. On the 12th of April 1865, three days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Mobile surrendered to Union forces to avoid bombardment, following Confederate defeats at the battles of Spanish Fort and Fort Blakeley.

  The formal end came two weeks later at the Magee Farm, north of Mobile. Confederate General Richard Taylor met Union General Edward Canby there on the 29th of April 1865, to negotiate a ceasefire. Taylor's forces at that moment comprised 47,000 Confederate troops spread across Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The Battle of Columbus, on the Alabama-Georgia border on the 16th of April 1865, is widely regarded as the last engagement of the war. The Confederacy itself was dissolved on the 5th of May 1865.

  The human cost tallied by Governor Lewis E. Parsons in July 1865 was staggering. Of the roughly 122,000 white men who had served, approximately 35,000 died and at least 30,000 more were seriously disabled. The following year, Governor Robert M. Patton estimated 20,000 veterans had returned permanently disabled, with 20,000 widows and 60,000 orphans left behind. The value of Alabama farmland fell from $176 million in 1860 to $64 million in 1870, and the number of horses in the state dropped from 127,000 to 80,000.

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