Alabama: The History of a Deep South State, Bicentennial Edition

ALABAMA

ALABAMA

THE HISTORY OF A DEEP SOUTH STATE

BICENTENNIAL EDITION

WILLIAM WARREN ROGERS, ROBERT DAVID WARD, LEAH RAWLS ATKINS, AND WAYNE FLYNT

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

Published in cooperation with the Alabama Bicentennial Commission

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 1994, 2018 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved. First edition 1994. Second edition 2010.

Bicentennial edition 2018

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Garamond

Cover image: The Big Spring, by William Frye, an early view of Huntsville from the 1850s; courtesy of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library

Cover design: David Nees

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rogers, William Warren, 1929–2017, author. | Ward, Robert David, author. | Atkins, Leah Rawls, author. | Flynt, Wayne, 1940- author.

Title: Alabama : the history of a Deep South state / William Warren Rogers, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flynt.

Description: Bicentennial edition. | Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017052848| ISBN 9780817319748 (cloth) | ISBN 9780817359171 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780817391669 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Alabama—History.

Classification: LCC F326 .A553 2018 | DDC 976.1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052848

This Bicentennial Edition is dedicated to departed colleagues Malcolm Cook McMillan, William Warren Rogers, and Robert David Ward, who were our companions in this lifelong endeavor to tell Alabama’s amazing story, warts and all.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface to the Bicentennial Edition

Alabama: A Prospect

Part One

From Early Times to the End of the Civil War

Leah Rawls Atkins

1. Native Peoples of Alabama

2. European Exploration and Colonization in Alabama

3. Creeks and Americans at War

4. Land in the Alabama Wilderness Beckons

5. The Early Years: Defining the Issues

6. The Early Years: Confronting the Issues

7. The Cotton Kingdom

8. Antebellum Society

9. Party Politics and States’ Rights

10. Yancey and the Alabama Platform

11. The Secession Crisis

12. At War with the Union

13. The Home Front

Part Two

From 1865 through 1920

William Warren Rogers and Robert David Ward

14. Reconstruction: The Second Beginning

15. Radical Reconstruction

16. The Bourbon Oligarchy and the New Old South

17. The Agricultural Alternative and the Rise of Industry

18. New Winds and Old Voices

19. The Defeat of Reform

20. Politics, Education, and the Splendid Little War

21. The Constitution of 1901

22. The Chimerical Impulse of Progressivism

23. Women in Alabama from 1865 to 1920

24. Domestic Issues, the Creative State, and the Great War

Part Three

From the 1920s to 2018

Wayne Flynt

25. The Politics of Reform and Stability during the 1920s

26. Change and Stability during the Roaring Twenties

27. Hard Times, 1930–1940

28. How New a Deal in Alabama?

29. A State Forged by War, 1940–1954

30. The Flowering of Alabama Liberalism: Politics and Society during the 1940s and 1950s

31. A Time to Hate: Racial Confrontation, 1955–1970

32. Racial Politics and Economic Stagnation

33. A Time to Heal: Struggling to Find a New Vision, 1970–2018

34. Gender, Jocks, and Shakespeare: Alabama Society and Culture, 1970–2018

Alabama: Past and Future

Appendix A: Governors of Alabama

Appendix B: Counties of Alabama

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Authors

Illustrations

Photographs or Drawings

Dogtrot House

Indians Hunting

Rattlesnake Disk

William McIntosh

Two-story Dogtrot House

Dixon Hall Lewis

The Forks of Cypress

Octavia Walton Le Vert

Newspaper advertisements

Antebellum Church Architecture

William Lowndes Yancey

Thomas Hill Watts

C. C. Clay, Jr.

Virginia Tunstall Clay

Inauguration of Jefferson Davis

Emma Sansom

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Alabama House of Representatives in 1892

James T. Rapier

George E. Spencer

George Smith Houston

J. L. M. Curry

Brierfield Iron Works

Reuben F. Kolb

Thomas G. Jones

Students at Big Zion School

Booker T. Washington

George Washington Carver

Braxton Bragg Comer

Joseph F. Johnston

Dr. Jerome Cochran

Dr. Peter Bryce

Alabama Coal Miners

Julia Strudwick Tutwiler

Helen Keller

Company Inspection at Camp Sheridan

Montgomery Home in the 1920s

Schoolhouse in Clay County

Ku Klux Klan Parade

Carrie Tuggle

Automobile in Urban Alabama

Picking Cotton in DeKalb County

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

Tallulah Bankhead

Tent Revival at Fairmont Baptist Church

Transient Camp, 1930s

Birmingham Barbershop Window

Coal Miners, 1930s

Fiddler Mary McLean

Black U.S. Army Band

Riveters at ADDSCO

Big Jim Folsom and the Strawberry Pickers

Clifford and Virginia Durr and Family

Rosa Parks

Selma-to-Montgomery March

Lurleen and George Wallace

Hugo L. Black

Maps

Alabama Counties

Federal and Interstate Highways

Physiographic Regions

River Systems

Indian Tribes

Indian Trails

Mississippi Territory

Early Roads

Black Population in 1860

Railroads, 1861

Union Raids during the Civil War

Graphs

Average Size of Farms

Employment in Cotton Textiles

Illiteracy 1870–1920

Leading Diseases, 1900

Population, 1860–1920

School Term, 1922

School Expenditures, Black Belt/Hill County, 1930

Manufacturing, 1920s

Preface to the Bicentennial Edition

WAYNE FLYNT

Historians can be wrong. Wrong because they don’t thoroughly sample sources. Wrong because they bring to their work too many unchallenged assumptions from families, regions, nations, religions, races, and cultures. Wrong because they too glibly accept the dominant mood and intellectual framework of their times. In some sense, every generation has to rewrite the history of the places, people, and events of the past in terms of their own evolving realities.

When four historians with Auburn University connections—Malcolm C. McMillan, William W. Rogers, Robert David Ward, and Leah Atkins—gathered round a table in Auburn in the 1980s to plan this book, they were aware of these historical pitfalls. They had all read (and most had used as a textbook) some version of Albert B. Moore’s 1927 History of Alabama and Her People. For half a century that tome had educated Alabamians (including me) about their history. As a venerable book by a gifted writer with impeccable academic credentials, it had updated and modernized understanding of times past.

Unfortunately, Moore also had lingered too long in the presence of his planter ancestors. Although he penned perceptive insights, his descriptions of slavery belonged more to the nineteenth than to the twenty-first century. According to Moore, white planters treated slave women with respect as required by their chivalric code. They encouraged slaves to worship by themselves in ways that met their spiritual needs. Slaves were a fun-making and fun-loving people. Planter social mores brooked no brutal treatment of slaves. Alabama’s legal code protected slave families, prevented promiscuous intercourse between slaves and free Negroes or slaves and whites. Moore described Alabama’s 1901 disfranchisement constitution as arising from the need for reforming the suffrage and electoral systems by eliminating black voters.

No one sitting around the table in Auburn agreed with Moore’s racial ideology. The time had come to enter a world turned upside down by the Civil Rights Movement, arguably the most profound social and political revolution in American history.

When Malcolm McMillan died suddenly in 1989 before writing began, I had the honor of replacing him, though no one could match his encyclopedic knowledge of Alabama constitutional history. The first edition of Alabama: The History of a Deep South State (1994) almost immediately confined Moore’s version of Alabama history to the past.

In fairness to Moore, we not only had half of Alabama’s statehood to add to his story as well as quite different perspectives to offer, we also stood on the shoulders of half-a-century of insightful new scholarship by two generations of gifted historians: Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Harriet Amos Doss, Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Harvey Jackson, J. Mills Thornton, Dan T. Carter, Glenn T. Eskew, Glenn Feldman, Jeff Jakeman, Mary Martha Thomas, Robert J. Norrell, Brooks Blevins, Andrew Manis, Sarah N. Shouse, Gordon E. Harvey, Susan Youngblood Ashmore, and James S. Day, just to name a few. Every scholarly army advances further under the leadership of talented guides, and so did we.

We assigned parts of the book to those most familiar with the terrain. Leah Atkins took command of the antebellum decades. The duo of Rogers and Ward claimed the decades straddling 1900. I would address 1920 to 1990. Unfortunately for me, I never reckoned on living long enough to have my topic expand by a quarter century.

Although we agreed to pursue collectively certain obvious themes—politics, economics, education, geography, environment, gender, race, religion, the military, sports, and the arts—we made no effort to impose a uniform writing style or some central theme on the story (although one did emerge without conscious intent: the amazing, even heroic struggle of generations of black and white Alabamians to survive the hardest of times with dignity in tact). We also agreed to treat this work not only as a worthy textbook for serious study of Alabama’s history but also as a starting place for general readers.

In this endeavor, we did something unusual in Alabama. We combined the intellectual resources of the state’s two major research universities—namely Auburn University historians and the University of Alabama Press—into a vehicle for engagement with the demands of a new century untethered from institutions unworthy of us in favor of better ones waiting to be embraced.

Alabama: A Prospect

ALABAMA has played an important part in American history. It attracts attention and invites study. The state has in great abundance the perplexing paradoxes of the South and a number of its own idiosyncrasies. Anyone interested in Alabama’s history can see at once the influence of geography. Resembling a rectangle that let itself get out of shape, Alabama is a north-south state. It stretches the better part of 415 miles from Ardmore on the Tennessee border to Bayou La Batre on the Gulf of Mexico. Going from east to west, a traveler would cross about 170 miles from Phenix City, anchored beside the Chattahoochee River, before reaching Isney, a matter of yards from Mississippi. Alabama is divided by nature into distinct sections that, overshading and overlapping at their edges, developed historically as separate political, economic, and cultural units. It is divided by law into sixty-seven counties (the first was Washington, organized June 4, 1800, and the last was Houston, established February 9, 1903).

By the 1840s a white yeoman farmer from Henry County in southeast Alabama’s Wiregrass region (named for the tough original cover of grass) had much in common with his north Florida neighbors. He shared fewer mutual interests with the landed slaveholders of Marengo County in the Black Belt of south-central Alabama. There were similarities, of course, but the contrasts were prominent. That was true of other sections: the Tennessee Valley in the north, and below there the mountain and hill counties, then the piedmont and the Piney Woods to the southwest. Even at the county level, provincial pockets evolved—especially in the Appalachian regions where valleys, ridges, and plateaus separated communities, limiting communication and transportation.

A cursory glance at a map reveals a river system scarcely rivaled by any other state. The Tennessee River enters at the northeast corner and leaves by a northwest exit. In transit through Alabama it nourishes a valley well suited for agriculture, and its current has been harnessed for conservation and industrial production. The Coosa and the Tallapoosa rivers flow southeast through hills that suddenly change to flatlands when the streams converge near Wetumpka and form the Alabama River. There the turbulence eases but remains steady as the Alabama meanders southwestward across the Black Belt, flows by Montgomery and Selma (where it is widened by the tributary Cahaba River), and drains what became a cotton kingdom in the antebellum period.

To the west and paralleling the Alabama’s southern journey is the Tombigbee River. That broad waterway originates in Mississippi and courses south to intersect with the Black Warrior River. Originating in Alabama’s central mountains, the Black Warrior has already outflanked Birmingham and passed by Tuscaloosa. At Demopolis the two waterways combine as the Tombigbee and continue south through the Piney Woods to a confluence with the Alabama north of Mobile. From there the waters divide to form a mix of land and water that includes the Mobile and Tensaw rivers, twisting and turning and forming the complex delta around Mobile Bay and the port that is Alabama’s most historic city.

On the east the Chattahoochee River forms the common Alabama-Georgia boundary north of Phenix City and Columbus. It arrives there from the north Georgia mountains and at a fall line drops arrowlike to the corner of the two states and the northern demarcation of Florida. A few miles farther at Chattahoochee, Florida, it converges with the Flint River (headed southwest from above Albany, Georgia) to form the Apalachicola River and empty finally into Apalachicola Bay.

Early settlers found that much of Alabama’s river system was navigable (only the major rivers have been mentioned), and by the late 1820s steamboats were carrying manufactured goods upstream and returning with cotton, hides, naval stores, and other agricultural produce. Peaking in the antebellum period, the rivers’ commercial importance declined in the last half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. Late in the twentieth century the rivers again became important for commerce and industry and as the source of hydroelectric power and recreational activities.

Forests of hardwoods and pines covered large portions of the state, and beneath the earth were extensive mineral deposits, including coal, iron ore, limestone, and marble. Much of the land yielded abundant crops, and the warm weather, long growing season, and plentiful rainfall created a profitable agrarian economy. Geography was and remains a major factor in Alabama history.

Beginning with prehistoric times and moving through the watershed of history that included the aboriginal inhabitants and succeeding peoples, Alabama became the home of distinct Indian tribes with complex cultures. Those encountered by European explorers and settlers were the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and, most powerful of all, the Creek nation. The acquisition of Indian lands was sporadic and relentless, as though a patchwork quilt were being fashioned across the earth’s surface. Determined but doomed resistance by the Indians resulted in warfare and sometimes peaceable cessions, usually forced and unfair. No part of the United States has a richer Indian history than Alabama. The state itself, as well as many counties, towns, rivers, and natural landmarks, bear resonant names taken from the Indian languages: Notasulga, Talladega, Etowah, Autauga, Cheaha, and Letohatchee, to name a few.

From the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, the future Alabama played a role in the game of European imperialism. In the name of mercantilism, the navies and armies of Spain, France, and England contended with each other for domination and possession. As the ultimate winner, a new nation—the United States—consolidated its position by creating the Mississippi Territory in 1798. Alabama was part of the territory. When Congress admitted Mississippi to the Union in 1817, Alabama became a separate territory. Growth was so rapid that it became the twenty-second state in 1819.

As Indian removal went forward and new lands were opened, settlers rushed in from Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Some were broadcloth planters who brought their slaves with them, but the majority were yeoman farmers with few if any chattels. In the next decades the frontier became more civilized, less raw at the edges—though the rate and extent of development and sophistication varied from place to place. Affluent Black Belt and Tennessee Valley slaveholders superimposed the plantation system, while independent farmers in those same and less fertile regions also earned their livelihood from the soil. Despite their legal status as property and their dominance by white owners, the slaves adapted to and altered the dominant culture around them and retained important elements of their African heritage. They almost equaled the white population by 1860 (there were 526,271 whites and 435,080 slaves). Besides the slaves, Alabama had 2,690 free persons of color on the eve of the Civil War. They were significant anachronisms in a society based on possessors, potential possessors, and the possessed.

Agriculture, primarily the growing of cotton, was the major source of Alabama’s wealth before the Civil War. Yet the state was hardly a simple pastoral setting. It teemed with the complexities that come with the proximity of men and women engaged in the demands and dimensions of life. Religion, almost entirely Protestant, became important; education, not available to the mass of whites and denied to the blacks, was an instrument of power and advancement for those who acquired it; the presence and promise of railroads threatened to revolutionize transportation and economy; the perceived blessing and curse of slavery grew more intense as it became a moral as well as a political and economic question; embryonic evidence of industry suggested an alternative basis of wealth and employment; Mobile was the principal urban city, but the growth of Huntsville, Montgomery, and Tuscaloosa portended a change from agrarian dominance; politics became partisan and two-party as Democrats and Whigs competed, their causes presented with acrimony and intensity by talented and outspoken newspaper editors (not to mention letter writers identified and unidentified).

Nationalism was replaced by sectionalism as the debate over slavery intensified; by the 1850s one national crisis was exacerbated by another, and the national election of Abraham Lincoln caused Alabama to secede from the Union in January 1861. In February Alabama became a member of the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president of the new nation at Montgomery on February 18. Montgomery served as the Confederate capital until May 21, 1861, when the seat of government was moved to Richmond, Virginia.

Although many Alabamians opposed the fire-eaters who touted the advantages of secession, once war came the populace gave important support. Besides agricultural supplies and weapons (Selma, with its state and Confederate arsenals, foundry, and navy yards, as well as privately owned factories, was a major manufacturing center for the tools of war), Alabama furnished enlisted men and officers who fought on all the major battlefields. Admiral Raphael Semmes commanded the Alabama with brilliance: the ship took sixty-nine prizes before being sunk. Within the state, Union raiders destroyed railroads and demoralized the countryside. The battle of Mobile Bay in 1864 was one of the important and stirring naval encounters in American history. Near the war’s end Major General James H. Wilson led a cavalry raid south from northwest Alabama to capture Selma. His forces moved east to take Montgomery and continued across the Chattahoochee River to overrun Columbus, seize Macon, and end resistance in Georgia.

It was paradoxical that the Confederacy, whose philosophical underpinning was states’ rights, fought a war whose success depended on centralized control. The subsequent lack of coordination, refusal to cooperate, and denial of civil and military responsibility extracted a heavy price. Despite initial patriotism, there was a strong element of Unionism in Alabama’s Wiregrass and hill regions. Counties such as Winston and St. Clair not only had layouts (men who refused to serve in the army) but furnished significant numbers of soldiers who wore the Union blue. As defeats mounted and war-related economic problems worsened, Unionist sentiment grew. Defeat came in 1865 after four years of courageous struggle on the part of Alabamians and their fellow Southerners. White Alabamians accepted the fact that slavery would end, but they still believed that Caucasians were the superior race. In spring 1865 both blacks and whites—with different expectations—braced for revolutionary changes that were sure to come.

Come they did. Acting under President Andrew Johnson’s modification of Lincoln’s moderate plan of Reconstruction, Alabama drafted a new constitution, ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, elected local, state, and national officers, and applied for readmission to the Union. All these things were accomplished without granting blacks the right to vote and with the imposition of black codes (special laws) that discriminated against the freedmen. The result was the defeat of Johnson by more vindicative Republican congressmen, known as radicals to defeated Southerners, and the installation of Radical Reconstruction. Congressional Reconstruction included the imposition of military rule, new state constitutions that granted the franchise to blacks, denial of the franchise and the right to hold office to certain whites, and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Republican party was formed in Alabama and other Confederate states. Its components were white Northerners recently come South and dismissed as carpetbaggers by locals; native whites, considered traitors by their neighbors and branded as scalawags; and newly freed blacks who made up the foot soldiers of the Republican party.

The coalition took control of government at all levels and included the elected and the appointed. White Democrats denounced Radical Reconstruction as an orgy of corruption and misrule, bereft of anything positive. In fact, there was corruption, but there were also positive achievements. Nor were the Democrats without blame. By the time Republican hegemony ended in Alabama in 1874, the party (with all its faults) had produced an effective constitution in 1867–68, brought democracy to government, reformed the judiciary, provided for a public school system, and enacted (without the means to carry out) a broad program of social reform.

Throughout the years of Republican supremacy, the Democrats wooed former Whigs into their camp and demanded the restoration of white rule. That the fervid campaign had religious overtones was seen in the oft-used euphemism: Redemption. A minority of white Southerners fought back with violence. Members of the Ku Klux Klan and other night riders became a powerful force in the Black Belt and the Tennessee Valley. These terrorist organizations were not unknown in other sections. Reprisals and legislation by the federal government countered the Klan. Yet by the early 1870s corruption in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, a growing weariness among Northerners of Southern stories of outrage, and a desire to reap the harvests of industry and trade brought demands for change. In 1872 Congress passed the Amnesty Act, removing disabilities from all but the most prominent Confederate leaders. The symbolic measure was further evidence that the end of Radical Reconstruction was inevitable.

In state after state, including Alabama, white Southerners returned to political control, a vantage point that also assured them economic power. The new rulers were the old rulers—the Southern elite—plus young men coming of age in the 1880s. They called themselves Bourbon Democrats, the name deriving from the French royal house that was restored in 1815 following the defeat of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna. Alabama’s Bourbons—many of them Civil War veterans and heroes of the battle for redemption—preached economy, honesty in government, and white supremacy. They were fiscal conservatives who drafted a new constitution restricting state indebtedness. Blacks retained the right to vote, although how they voted was controlled by the Bourbons.

Beginning in the late 1870s north and north-central Alabama experienced an industrial boom. With Birmingham as the crown jewel, other cities—Anniston, Gadsden, Bessemer—combined to manufacture iron and steel and to produce specialized goods. Coal mines and other extractive industries yielded profits formerly unknown. The textile industry (of limited scope in the prewar era) made tentative but promising beginnings in Huntsville, the piedmont, and the Chattahoochee River Valley. Railroads, particularly the Louisville and Nashville, crisscrossed the state. Replacing cornfields with smokestacks was accomplished with local and outside capital. The Bourbons of the Black Belt retained power but made common cause (despite certain differences) with entrepreneurs of the burgeoning cities to enact legislation in harmony with the New South creed. That creed called for a balance between manufacturing and agriculture backed by legislation that either benefited business positively or, if logic indicated regulation that would lessen profits, was never passed.

Despite increasing economic diversification, most Alabamians continued to make their livelihood from the soil. The postwar decades brought bitter poverty to the poor white and black farmers. The crop lien and tenant farming system, intended as a temporary expedient, enslaved blacks and, as time passed, more and more whites. The majority of Alabama’s farmers faced a cruel dilemma: production costs rose (fertilizer, equipment, jute bagging) and prices for farm products declined. The result was an increase in production to offset the drop in income. But each year surpluses piled up as profits merely broke even or turned to ascending, unpayable debt. The national economy was based on a deflationary monetary policy, and efforts by greenbackers and other advocates of inflation failed.

The Patrons of Husbandry (or Grange), a national farm organization, achieved some success with cooperatives and stores in the 1870s. In Alabama the Grange refused to enter politics because a third party would threaten Democratic solidarity. No one wanted, the Bourbons declared, a return to the misrule and corruption of Reconstruction. The Agricultural Wheel, a more militant farm organization, had limited success. Finally, the Farmers’ Alliance spread across the South from Texas. By the 1880s it was entrenched in Alabama and offered salvation through a broad program of cooperative warehouses, stores, banks, insurance companies, and factories. The alliance demanded federal and state regulation of railroads and monopolies. Inflation and currency reform were also central, and the agrarian reformers devised the subtreasury system whereby the federal government would guarantee farm prices and enlarge the money supply. Increasingly they advocated free silver to raise the amount of money in circulation and ease the burden of the debtor class.

When promises by Bourbon Democrats to pass proalliance laws proved to be no more than promises, Alabama alliancemen joined with other Southerners and midwesterners to form the People’s party, also known as the Populist party. Its national ticket failed in 1892, but in Alabama the Populists won local and state elections and elected some congressmen. Reuben F. Kolb, an apostate Bourbon, was the most prominent Populist, although the party boasted a number of talented editors, writers, and politicians. Kolb would have been elected governor in 1892 and 1894 had there been a free ballot and a fair count, but Democrats resorted to fraud and intimidation that equaled their efforts during Reconstruction.

After the election of 1896 the defeated Populists ceased to be a threat to Bourbon hegemony, yet their fusion with Republicans and organized labor and their appeal to black voters had been such a dangerous challenge that the Democrats determined to avoid future crises by removing the possibility of their recurrence. To do so they decided to use legal means to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment that forbade voter discrimination on the basis of race. By employing a constitutional justification for disfranchisement that had nothing to do with race, they could banish blacks and poor whites from Alabama’s election booths.

As the nation and the South entered the Progressive Age that lasted until World War I, Alabama’s political leaders prepared to draft a constitution limiting progressivism to whites. In Alabama the Progressives claimed no close kin to the Populists, but they built on Populist reform traditions. The Progressives turned their attention to questions of railroad regulation, better government, upgraded education, and social welfare programs. Governor Braxton Bragg Comer typified Alabama progressivism, but it was a narrow reform movement at best—and at worst, it produced the constitution of 1901.

Delegates to the constitutional convention largely ignored the state’s most pressing needs, but they accomplished their primary goal with devastating results. A complicated set of residence, literacy, property, taxation, and other requirements disfranchised almost all black voters. In time poor whites fell victim to the same restrictions.

The process was made complete with the adoption of a primary law. The measure limited participation in nominating elections of the Democratic party to whites. Nomination in the primary became tantamount to victory in the general election (the Republican vote was miniscule), and the Democrats were firmly in control. Their power remained absolute until 1944 when the United States Supreme Court ruled that primaries were an integral part of the election machinery. From that time forward, blacks raised the level of their struggle for voting rights to the crescendo of the civil rights movement.

The Alabama of the first half of the twentieth century was a state where whites ruled. Blacks remained a large minority with little improvement in their status as second-class citizens. The state was outside the mainstream of American life (and the mainstream was far from perfect), but some reforms were enacted during the Progressive Era, and determined efforts, such as eliminating the convict lease law, finally brought fruit in the late 1920s. The people struggled with the inadequacies of public education but benefited from advancements (free textbooks, increased pay, better-trained teachers) even when they fell short of actual needs. Social legislation was enacted grudgingly, but pressure was exerted, and various laws responded to human needs. Between the two world wars governors Thomas E. Kilby and Bibb Graves fought to apply the responsibilities and blessings of state government to the mass of Alabama citizens.

Yielding to few in their patriotism, Alabamians had offered themselves during the Spanish-American War (like soldiers from other states, they were not utilized), and they supported Woodrow Wilson and U.S. entry into World War I. They suffered through the 1920s, although a few prospered. The people struggled to cope with a century that offered them unprecedented creature comforts: automobiles, airplanes, movies, radio—wondrous new luxuries appeared today and became tomorrow’s necessities. Modern was a word that produced fear as well as challenge.

The lists of well-to-do Alabamians dwindled to few during the Great Depression. But in that bleak time Alabama’s politicians used their talents (and seniority) to become major figures in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Senator Hugo L. Black, despite his earlier membership in the Ku Klux Klan, was appointed to the United States Supreme Court and became one of the nation’s most distinguished justices. In Washington men such as House members Henry B. Steagall and John McDuffie, the Bankhead brothers (Congressman William B. Bankhead and Senator John Hollis Bankhead, Jr.), and Lister Hill, both a representative and a senator, were powerful men who left their names on important New Deal legislation. Various New Deal programs, not the least being the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), brought needed benefits and programs to Alabama that had permanent effects. The manufacture of hydroelectric power by the federal government served as a yardstick to regulate private utility companies.

With World War II came industrial prosperity, and some farmers made a profit for the first time in their lives. Alabamians marched, drove, sailed, and flew off to battle. Cities such as Mobile with its shipyards or Childersburg with its war plants were hard pressed to provide housing and public services. Women went to war as well; never before had they participated so vitally in factory work, and never before had they been so mobile and so independent. Anybody who wanted a job could have it—and at good pay. Alabama became a much more mobile society, and World War II wrought more fundamental changes than any period since the Civil War.

After 1945 Alabama entered the Atomic Age with more optimism than foreboding. Its citizens had helped win the war, and they hoped to enjoy the triumph by settling into decades of ongoing economic and social opportunity. More immediately they wanted to spend some of their savings for scarce, rationed, or nonexistent items such as cars, shoes, candy bars, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, toasters, name-brand cigarettes, and beverages they had done without. No more victory gardens or scrap metal drives for them. Real sugar, dazzling white, would replace Karo syrup. Nylon stockings, not messy, runny paint, would glamorize the legs of women.

Soon a new group of accumulated events came center stage. The cold war, the Korean War, the Brown decision of 1954, the civil rights struggle, the Vietnam War, rises and falls in employment and the standard of living, loss of personal identity and focus—all these and more lay ahead. In the postwar years men such as Lister Hill, Governor James E. Folsom, and U.S. Senator John Sparkman kept alive the tradition of liberalism that went back to Populism. Yet the civil rights movement (the Second Reconstruction) that began in the 1950s placed Alabama, perhaps more than any other state, squarely in the eye of the storm and squarely in the path of history. Among the many players in Alabama, where local events had international ramifications, none were more prominent, or more in contrast, than Governor George C. Wallace and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

And what of television, increased leisure time, pollution, the drug problem, the space age (Huntsville would play a vital part), rock and roll, country music (native son Hank Williams was highly successful and his influence has been enduring), secular challenges to traditional religion and concepts of morality (was media evangelism the answer?), and a thousand and one things compelling and trivial? How and why did the Solid Democratic South shift in national elections to a Solid Republican South and threaten to do so in state elections, and how permanent was the new arrangement? To what extent would race relations improve and to what extent had they improved? How, from beginning to present, did and does Alabama fit the national pattern? And what are the strengths and weaknesses of nonconformity? Does the state’s past explain its present, and will that past serve as a guide for the future? The form and order of events need explanation and evaluation.

Once the home of aboriginal inhabitants, Alabama was claimed and occupied by European nations, later to become a permanent part of the United States. A cotton and slave state for more than half of the nineteenth century, Alabama declared its independence and joined another nation, the Confederate States of America, for its more than four-year history. The state assumed an uneasy and uncertain place in the nineteenth century’s last thirty-five years. Its role in the twentieth century has been tumultuous but painfully predictable. This history, written in the last decade of that century, attempts to present, explain, and interpret the major events that occurred during Alabama’s history and to do so in the larger context of the South and the nation.

PART ONE

From Early Times to the End of the Civil War

by

Leah Rawls Atkins

ONE

Native Peoples of Alabama

THE most violent confrontation between Europeans and native Americans occurred on a fall day in 1540 in what was to become Alabama. Hernando de Soto landed on the coast of Florida and moved inland.¹ His wanderings eventually led him into northeast Alabama. During his journey down the Coosa River he visited Mabila (Mauvilla), where the Indians enticed the Spaniards into a well-planned trap, an ambush that almost destroyed the expedition. De Soto’s commissary wrote in his report, We fought that day until nightfall, without a single Indian having surrendered to us.² Although three Spaniards made brief contact with Indians before de Soto’s entrada, their accounts of these meetings are scanty. For de Soto’s expedition four narratives exist, and all include descriptions and information about native Americans in Alabama. Thus, through their reports and diaries, the Spaniards traveling with de Soto ushered in the age of recorded Alabama history.

For information about the period before de Soto’s arrival in Alabama, the historian must rely upon archaeology. Although archaeology reveals much, its dependence on a fragile physical record leaves many unanswered questions about the Indians. Generally, it is believed that the earliest inhabitants of North America crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia on a land bridge created when sea levels fell, perhaps around 50,000 B.C., although some postulate a more recent crossing. Probably hunting and gathering bands seeking the large mammals of the Ice Age, they were of a Mongoloid stock and likely bore a resemblance to the peoples of modern-day eastern Siberia. Gradually they moved south, reaching the tip of South America 10,000 years ago. In their migration they spread across North America. The warm climate, fertile soil, adequate rainfall, and abundant game in the forests and streams of the eastern woodlands particularly attracted them. From the Old World they brought fire and the ability to use it, and with them came their dogs, so important in Indian life.

In the Paleo-Indian stage, people traveled in groups of related kinsmen, hunting and foraging for food. Living a seminomadic life, they ate the meat of large animals and gathered nuts, fruits, berries, and a wide range of plant foods in season. They chose shelters for living places that were close to water and food supplies, and they divided labor by gender and age, with the women caring for children and the shelter, making clothes, and gathering and cooking foods. Clothes were made from skins, and tools were fashioned from rocks, bones, teeth, shells, and wood. The men hunted and killed animals with spears tipped with stone points and probably caught fish with bone hooks or wicker traps. Meat may have been cooked over open fires and fish and river mussels baked in pits dug in the earth, lined and topped with hot coals. In order to carry or hold items, the people learned to weave baskets of reeds and vines. Paleo-Indians interred their dead with ritual and added worldly possessions to the grave, a practice that indicates belief in an afterlife.

Gradually the groups became seasonally sedentary and congregated in small independent communities. For thousands of years humans occasionally inhabited the Stanfield-Worley bluff shelter in Colbert County near Tuscumbia, the Flint Creek rock shelter in Morgan County, the Quad site near Decatur, and Russell Cave in Doran Cove near Bridgeport in Jackson County. At Russell Cave archaeologists have discovered many layers of cultural material. The occupants may have cleaned the living space by dumping fresh dirt and burying trash, or perhaps the stratum was created by a sedimentary process. The Stanfield-Worley shelter and the Flint Creek site are significant because they contain evidence of Paleo-Indians in their earliest cultural layers.³

The Archaic tradition developed approximately 8000 to 6000 B.C. as the earth warmed and as the large animals disappeared. The Indians became more dependent upon deer and smaller game and upon gathering nuts, berries, and plants. The use of an atlatl (a spear thrower) improved range and velocity, especially needed when hunting small game. Shellfish, although low in nutrients, was an easily obtained source of food, and various species of mussels and freshwater snails were steamed or eaten raw. Large shell middens dot the banks of Alabama rivers near shallow shoal areas where shellfish could be gathered effortlessly. As life became settled, such plants as squash, gourds, pumpkins, and sunflowers were domesticated and cultivated. The Indians built temporary dwellings of small trees and brush, and they fashioned ornaments of different designs. Copper was introduced, and some tools showed a fine workmanship.

The Gulf Formational stage is a recent division recommended by archaeologists to recognize significant ceramic developments in Indian culture. Three eras are suggested: early (2500–1200 B.C.), marked by the appearance of fiber-tempered pottery; middle (1200–500 B.C.), when sand or grit was used to temper the clay; and late (500–100 B.C.), when pottery vessels had podal supports and surfaces decorated with designs made by pressing wooden paddles marked with a pattern into wet clay. Gulf Formational cultures were located in river valleys and along the gulf coast, and trade between areas was evident. Artifacts from Gulf Formational cultures have been found in the Tennessee and Tombigbee valleys.

By 300 B.C. a new cultural stage developed in the east and spread to the south. Called the Woodland period, it lasted in Alabama until about A.D. 1000, but there was great regional variation in cultural changes throughout prehistory both in Alabama and in the Southeast in general. During this time the Indians constructed permanent houses, often square-shaped, of logs with mud walls and thatch roofs.⁴ The bow and arrow appeared, and maize and squash were important cultivated foods. Family groups were identified with towns, and elaborate ceremonies became an important part of culture. Simple earthen mounds were raised over graves, and in time large earthworks were constructed as burial mounds.

In the Woodland era people learned to embellish their pottery with elaborate decorations, and designs became locally stylized. Motifs were usually symmetrical, marked with cords or fabric, stamped with a pattern, or etched with a sharp implement. Weaving was sophisticated both in the selection of fibers and in patterns and designs. Woven mats were used for shoes, sleeping pallets, and vestments, and small shells were added as ornaments. Deer skins remained the primary material for clothing and blankets, but tanning methods improved. Although these people smoked tobacco, they did so usually only as part of a ceremony or ritual. The most intricate pipes were made from carved stone with a platform or were tubular pipes with human or animal images. Birds, turtles, frogs, and serpents were popular motifs, and freshwater pearls were often added to clothing.

Between A.D. 700 and 900 a new tradition dawned, perhaps with influences from Mesoamerica through trade or from migrations of tribes into Alabama. Called the Mississippian, this culture reached its height about A.D. 1300, some 200 years before Columbus’s voyage of discovery. Agriculture was important, and settlements were located in river valleys where the soil was fertile and easily worked. Corn was the staple food of the Mississippian society. Ground into meal, baked into bread, boiled in water, and fried in oil, maize provided the sustenance of life for the Indians. The most important festival of the year was held in late summer and celebrated the ripening of the green corn.

Mound building was a significant part of Mississippian culture. Examples of Indian mounds abound in Alabama, especially in Mobile, Baldwin, Marengo, Clarke, and Washington counties, as well as other places. But Moundville, located on the banks of the Black Warrior River in Hale and Tuscaloosa counties, is Alabama’s most significant mound complex. A bustling city of 3,000 people, one of the largest prehistoric communities discovered north of Mexico, surrounded the elaborate temple mound built on a plain high above the Black Warrior River (also called the Warrior River). Hundreds of people constructed the twenty rectangular- and round-shaped truncated pyramids by walking up a sloped ramp on one side to empty baskets filled with dirt on the top. After dumping the dirt, builders stomped and packed the earth with their feet, then returned to the bottom to gather more dirt. Arranged in a circle around a plaza, the mounds vary in size and height, with the tallest almost fifty-nine feet high and covering almost two acres. Such construction indicates a thriving culture directed by some central authority, a chiefdom with social integration, and a complex and organized society with a dense population and extensive productivity. The society produced adequate food and traded products great distances.⁵

Designs on pottery, shell, stone, and copper indicate that priests or medicine men wore special clothing and shawls of colorful feathers. They adorned themselves with gorgets (collars), bracelets, and earplugs, which have been found in burial sites. No doubt they were highly regarded in Mississippian society. Ritual was probably related to a fire-sun deity, the sun being the source of life and light, and fire being the earthly sacred representation of the sun. The Moundville Indians buried their dead with ceremony, often interring bodies under houses and including in the grave personal possessions for use in an afterlife. There are also examples of urn burials, especially of babies and small children. The graves in the temple mounds have produced a rich collection of artifacts, including embossed copper pendants, shell gorgets, engraved stone discs with notched edges, exquisite urns, and various types of pottery. Significantly, no European trade objects have been recovered from the mounds.

The finely made artifacts attest to the sophistication and complexity of the Mississippian culture. Favorite designs were the Greek cross, usually enclosed by a circle, the swastika with concentric circles around it, an open hand with an eye in the palm, the rattlesnake, a winged sun pierced with an arrow, and circles with scalloped or rayed edges. Human figures are depicted wearing elaborate hair crests, earplugs, bracelets, and necklaces. Faces are painted, usually with a nose-to-ear-mark, and feathers and beads are plaited into the hairpiece.⁶

Although the accounts of de Soto’s journey describe Indian mounds at several villages, none describes Moundville, and it is generally conceded that the town at Moundville was abandoned by the time the Spanish arrived in the area. De Soto must have missed the site, probably unaware of its existence. In fact, despite careful evaluation of the four de Soto expedition accounts and extensive archaeological excavations in Alabama, no place in the state has been positively identified as a de Soto camping site. The route of de Soto, the location of the villages of Coosa and Atahachi, and the site of the battle of Mabila remain subject to speculation and disagreement among archaeologists, historians, and local chambers of commerce. Stories and legends abound, and although dozens of Alabamians through the years have whispered they know the secret, no one has ever come forward with conclusive evidence.

Twenty years after de Soto’s expedition, men from the expedition of Tristán de Luna tried unsuccessfully to find the lands of Tascaluza and the province of Coosa that the de Soto narratives described. Jorge Cerón visited the area and wrote that the de Soto accounts of Coosa must be false for it was of such an undesirable nature that there was no place where one may remain or erect a town.⁷ The proof of de Soto’s journey remains buried deep in the soils of Alabama.

Extensive migration of tribes occurred after de Soto visited, perhaps because of the epidemics that followed his entrada. This migration made it difficult when the European traders entered the Indian country in the next century to determine the location of tribes at the time of de Soto’s expedition. By the seventeenth century the majority of native Americans living in what was to become Alabama were associated with four major Indian nations—Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw. Within these nations town names often provide a clue to the tribal composition of the larger nations. Linguistic grouping would place the Cherokees in the Iroquoian language and the three other tribes in the Muskogean tongue, although within this group many languages were spoken.

The Cherokees occupied a vast domain covering the mountains of east Tennessee and north Georgia and extending into the northeastern corner of Alabama. The tribe probably originated in the Great Lakes region and migrated south but shared many customs and beliefs with its Muskogean neighbors. According to tribal legend the land of the Cherokees was given them by the Great Spirit who is the father of the human family, and to whom the whole earth belongs.⁸ They had lived in the mountains for hundreds of years when de Soto’s army invaded their country.

When Scottish trader James Adair visited the area in 1735, he noted that the Cherokees cultivated hemp and grapes on the small patches of land suitable for planting in the mountains. He wrote that the swift and shallow rivers so close to villages were important as places for purifying themselves and for fishing, fowling and killing of deer which come in the warm season to eat the moss and tender grass on the banks of streams. The region, high in the mountains, was a healthy area where the natives live commonly to a great age.⁹

Adair reported that war was important to Cherokee society, and the taking of scalps was considered a brave deed. Cherokee mothers taught their small boys to avenge insults and to endure hunger and pain without complaint. Those young warriors who did well in battle had titles bestowed upon them. William Fyffe described the Cherokee practice of older warriors boasting of their exploits with such enthusiasm that the young are catch’d with it & eager to emulate them, an excellent way to whet the courage of their youth.¹⁰ When death was imminent, one observer noted that the Cherokee when tortured showed an uncommon fortitude and resolution, and in the height of their misery will sing, dance, revile, and despise their tormentors till their strength and spirits fall.¹¹ Indians did not routinely torture prisoners but more often adopted them into the tribe or, by the eighteenth century, enslaved or sold them.

The major tribe of Mississippi, the Choctaw, extended into Alabama north of Mobile. A Choctaw tribal legend tells of a migration from the west when a sacred pole was placed upright in the ground at night. Each morning the people noted how the pole leaned and went in that direction, continuing to move eastward. One morning the pole remained straight, and there they stayed. The tall chief Tascaluza and the Indians de Soto met at Mabila were Choctaws. The Alabamas tribe, which gave its name to a river and a state, also migrated from the west and first lived with the Choctaws, then with the Creeks. The word Alabama comes from the Choctaw word that means clearers of the thicket.¹²

The Choctaws hunted and fished but were also known as a farming people, raising beans, squash, melons, and pumpkins as well as corn. Houses were widely located and separated by cultivated fields. Choctaws were especially fond of playing stickball, a game in which the combatants wore a loincloth, a mane of horsehair dyed various colors, and a tail of white horsehair. In each hand the players carried a stick with a hoop racket on the end. The object was to scoop a hard deerskin ball into the hoop and to toss the ball through a goal at the end of the field without touching the ball. The games were rough and violent, and James Adair reported he saw players’ arms and legs broken during a contest. The games were associated with Green Corn ceremonies and were played and attended with great enthusiasm, often with large wagers on the outcome.

The Choctaws were small of stature. They wore their hair long and were called Long Hairs by other Indians or sometimes Flatheads, after their custom of flattening their foreheads. To achieve this look, an infant’s head was bound to a cradleboard and a slanted plank was pressed upon the soft cranium. The sloped frontal bone that resulted is evident on some of the skulls found interred at Moundville.

In addition to their appearance, Choctaws were known for their burial customs. William Bartram described the practice of placing the body on a high scaffold where the corpse, lightly covered with a mantle, was to remain, visited and protected by the friends and relations, until the flesh becomes putrid. Then undertakers, who make it their business, carefully strip the flesh from the bones, wash and cleanse them, and pack them in an urn. They were stored in a community bonehouse until the house was full, and then a solemn funeral for all departed souls was held and the bones were interred in a common burial.¹³

The Choctaws benefited from trade with the French, with whom they allied in conflicts with the English. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they were quick to assimilate new farming methods; they planted European fruits and vegetables, cultivated cotton for spinning and weaving, and raised chickens for livestock. They were related to the Chickasaws but nevertheless were often at war with them. A tribal legend tells that physical separation of the tribes occurred after they moved across the great waterway (Mississippi River), became separated by a flood, and rains washed away all signs of the path taken by the Chickasaw. Touchy with one another in their new homes, the tribes’ rivalry was inflamed by the Chickasaw alliance with the English.

The Chickasaws inhabited territory that covered portions of Tennessee and Kentucky, just touching Mississippi in the north and Alabama in a small area south of the Tennessee River. They were somewhat taller than the Choctaws, and their population was smaller. They relied less on farming, but like all tribes they gave women the responsibility of cultivating gardens. They were much more aggressive than the Choctaws, fierce fighters adept at surprise attacks. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville considered them uncontestably the most brave of the continent.¹⁴ They made great preparations for war, purified themselves, and painted their bodies red and black. During the attack they yelled and chanted an eerie cry that frightened their enemies. At least one historian has suggested the Chickasaw cry as the origin of the Rebel Yell used by Southern troops in the Civil War. During de Soto’s entrada the fierce Chickasaws almost annihilated the Spanish by sneaking past the sentinels at night and striking without warning amid war cries and beating drums. Only one Spaniard was able to mount his horse, but he forgot to secure the girth and fell off saddle and all when he lunged at the first Indian. One de Soto account reported that if the Indians had known how to follow up their victory, this would have been the last days of all the Christians of that army.¹⁵ The Chickasaws killed fifty-nine of de Soto’s horses, animals they feared, although two centuries later Chickasaws would have a reputation for horse breeding and fast ponies that helped in their surprise raids.

Chickasaw burial rituals were elaborate. They involved anointing the body with oil, painting the face red, dressing the corpse in fine clothes, and placing the body in a sitting position facing east in a grave dug in the floor of his house. Treasured possessions were placed in the grave and a eulogy was said. Burial was done only by relatives, who were then considered polluted by death and had to live apart and purify themselves by bathing. When epidemics wiped out entire families, bodies were left where they died, for there was no one to conduct the burials.

The Creeks were the largest and most significant Alabama Indian group, and they occupied most of the state. These Indians were named by the English for their affinity for establishing towns along the banks of creeks; they were actually a loose confederation of perhaps as many as seventeen separate tribes rather than a single tribe. Bartram in his accounts noted that the confederation of the Creeks was unusual. These groups banded together for protection after European epidemic diseases reduced tribal numbers. The Creeks controlled a vast frontier that was defended by scattered Creek towns whose names were later used to designate individual Indian groups within the confederation, hence the Eufaula and the Uchee (Yuchi). The Creeks were composed of two major divisions, the Upper and Lower Creeks. Okfuskee and Tuckabatchee, on the Tallapoosa River, and Little Tallassee, on the Coosa River, were major Upper Creek towns. The Lower Creeks lived along the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers. Cussita, near present-day Columbus, Georgia, and Coweta, south of present-day Phenix City, Alabama, were the two largest Lower Creek towns.

Towns were divided into peace (white) and war (red) towns with separate chiefs. Bartram noted that Coweta was called the bloody town, where the warriors assemble when a general war is proposed.¹⁶ Meetings were held either on the town square or in the town house. David Taitt described the square at Tuckabatchee in 1772 as being formed by four houses about forty feet in length with openings in the front and seats of woven split cane.¹⁷ When the Indian council convened, members took special seats assigned according to rank and function.

The Creeks followed the Muskogean tradition of adoption and readily assimilated Indian countrymen who came to trade and stayed to live. Many of the British traders from Charleston and the French garrisoned at Fort Toulouse fathered children by Creek mothers. Within two or three generations, these children assumed leadership roles in the Creek confederation, and many Creek chiefs carried English and Scottish names—McQueen, for example, and McGillivray, Weatherford, and McIntosh.

Although many social variations existed among tribes, the southeastern Indians shared a common culture, a tradition that was passed from generation to generation by story telling. Legends and myths were an important part of that culture. The myths explained things—the sources of water and fire, the formation of the earth, the origins of tribes. The legends told about migrations, long warfare, decisive battles, defeats and victories, times of abundance, famines, and epidemics. There were myths about monster turtles and huge snakes called Tie-snakes that were large enough to block a river or carry off a large animal. In some stories the rabbit, a favorite subject of Indian tales, was a trickster who outsmarted his enemies and fooled men. The Southern tribes also shared myths about great floods when the world was almost lost and stories about the corn woman who brought corn to the people. The Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws shared a common migration legend of coming from the land of the setting sun. In the Chickasaw version a dog led the people east. The long association between Indians and Africans on the frontier of the South resulted in a melding of folklore, and some stories appeared in both cultures.

In Indian culture women were responsible for food cultivation and preparation, taking care of the children, and producing clothing and household goods, such as pots and baskets, while men cleared land for planting, hunted, and constructed dwellings and public buildings. Men also held most of the public offices, both civil and military, and were largely responsible for the education of male children. Family groups and clans gave form to concepts of kinship; members supported each other and sought revenge for betrayals. Descent was matrilineal, and a woman’s male relatives took responsibility for teaching her sons the ways of hunting and manhood. The Wind clan and the Bear clan were two important Creek clans.

Marriages were often arranged but never forced. If a young man was interested in wedding a girl, his courtship began indirectly. His mother’s sister visited her mother’s sister. A bowl of sofkee (hominy) was placed outside her house, and if she allowed the boy to come and eat from the bowl, she signified her willingness to marry him. But if she ran out and grabbed the bowl, she expressed her opposition indirectly without embarrassing him. Polygyny was often practiced by southeastern Indians but only with the first wife’s consent. Otherwise, the husband faced charges of adultery, punishable by beating and mutilation at the hands of her kinsmen.

The Indians enjoyed playing games and loved to gamble, making large bets on the outcome of contests. In addition to stickball, chunkey (chungke) was a special favorite. It was played on a flat field by throwing sticks at rolling stones, with points scored by throwing the stick close to the stone. Adair described the playing poles as about eight feet long, smooth, and tapering at each end, the points flat. The stones were about two fingers broad at the edge, and two spans round. They were rubbed smooth on the rocks and kept with the strictest religious care, from one generation to another, and are exempted from being buried with the dead. They belong to the town where they are used, and are carefully preserved.¹⁸

A number of Indian sports traditions have made their way into modern American society. A rough Indian ball game, played on a flat field with goals at each end and attended by enthusiastic cheering supporters, was a team sport not unlike modern football. Stickball bore a resemblance to lacrosse. An Indian fascination with high-stakes gambling on sports events and games of chance has not vanished from American life, and the ancestral Indian footraces, traditionally run on trading trails and open country