Stateside: Alabama

Sweet home, Alabama! Here we are, down in the South again, in that eastern part of the Mississippi Territory that was admitted to the Union in 1819. The U.S. President at the time, Monroe, had been instrumental in the Louisiana Purchase was effected fifteen years earlier. His presidency supposedly ushered in “The Era of Good Feelings”—so named because he tried not to let partisan divisions between the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists, who were now almost non-existent as a party--overwhelm good government.

Monroe appointed people from both political philosophies to his Cabinet. His presidency is seen as the transition between the first “two-party system”—the closed political system in which the U.S. takes such great pride to this day—and the second: Democrats vs. Whigs, who later morphed into the Republican Party.

Monroe is also credited with the Monroe Doctrine—an agreement whereby the colonial powers gave up any plans of reasserting authority over recently independent national states in Central and South America. To his discredit, he laid the groundwork for the mass removal of indigenous people from their land, and one of the generals he tasked with the removals, Andrew Jackson, was elected President 10 years later, with disastrous consequences for the United States’ First Nations.

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Of all the official state seals, I like Alabama’s the best. It simply shows the rivers, the bordering states, and the Gulf of Mexico. Although this was the original Great Seal, for a period after the end of the Civil War, the Republican-dominated legislature foisted another seal on the state. It consisted of an eagle posed on a shield emblazoned with the stars and stripes of the victorious North. In the eagle’s beak was a banner with the words Here We Rest. In retaliation, perhaps, the banner on the official coat of arms adopted in 1939—the same year the original Great Seal was restored—reads (in Latin) We Dare Maintain Our Rights.

Between them, the iconography of the Great Seal and the Coat of Arms pretty much encapsulate the early colonial and nineteenth century history of Alabama. Rivers were almost the only way to travel and move goods; they also provided the right environment for Alabama’s agriculture-based economy. The primary crop was cotton, but cotton’s dominance was destroyed when the boll weevil arrived in Alabama from Mexico in 1915. Oddly, the town of Enterprise, AL, has a monument to the pest. And the coat of arms shows the five governments that ruled over it: the Spanish, French, British, United States, and Confederate States.

Montgomery, AL, was the first capital of the Confederate States, and it is there that President Jefferson Davis was sworn in, using this bible. His inauguration speech is here. The Confederate White House is in that city, and open to visitors. Just three months after the inaugural address, the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond, Virginia, no doubt because it was easier to get to.

The northern part of the state includes the southern extremity of the Appalachian mountain range, but it also has a small coastal outlet to the Gulf around Mobile, which was originally a French settlement. In the first paragraph of a recent Smithsonian Magazine article, author Rick Bragg gives an excellent potted recent history of the state he calls home, in which he speaks of growing up in the Alabama foothills, of the hardscrabble existence of his ancestors, who were cotton farmers and millworkers, and of his grandfather’s success at making moonshine and evading the law during Prohibition.

I can’t leave you without drawing your attention to the literary and musical contributions that Alabama has made to the United States. Truman Capote and Harper Lee met there as children. The Alabama section of the Southern Literary Trail includes Monroeville, whose courtroom was painstakingly recreated for the movie version of Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Other famous Alabamians include the playwright Lillian Hellman, who grew up in a town called Demopolis, which was founded by Bonapartiste French colonists who were constrained by the Federal government from making money by any enterprise other than growing olives and grapes. Unfortunately, the land they bought proved unsuitable.

You might be surprised at the number and variety of connections with Alabama that the musical world has. In March this year, the Birmingham News held an online tournament to decide which Alabama-connected artist would be number one. From an initial field of 64—that included people and groups as diverse as Emmylou Harris, Nell Carter, Percy Sledge, and Muscle Shoals—it came down to a fifth-round battle between Hank Williams and The Temptations.

Alabama’s Top Music Icon bracket is at http://blog.al.com/bn/2009/04/Top%20Music%20Icon.pdf and videos of all the artists are on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=C304116387194750

--PEACE—

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