Alabama in the American Civil War
| State of Alabama | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nickname(s): "Yellowhammer State", "Heart of Dixie", "Cotton State" | |||||
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| Capital | Montgomery | ||||
| Largest City | Mobile | ||||
| Admission to confederacy | February 4, 1861 (4th) | ||||
| Population |
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| Forces supplied |
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| Governor |
Andrew B. Moore John Gill Shorter Thomas H. Watts |
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| Senators |
Clement Claiborne Clay Richard Wilde Walker William Lowndes Yancey Robert Jemison, Jr. |
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| Representatives | List | ||||
| Restored to the Union | July 13, 1868 | ||||
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The State of Alabama declared that it had seceded from the United States of America on January 11, 1861. It then quickly joined the Confederate States during the American Civil War. A slave state, Alabama provided a significant source of troops and leaders, military material, supplies, food, horses and mules; however, very little of the state's cotton crop could be sold, as the main port of Mobile was closed off by the U.S. Navy.
After the election of Abraham Lincoln from the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1860, the State of Alabama decided to declare secession from the United States, in order to oppose the equality and citizenship of African Americans, and in order to prolong and perpetuate the practice of slavery in the state.
In December 1860, Stephen F. Hale, Alabama's commissioner to Kentucky, wrote a letter to the latter state's governor of Alabama's justification for secession. In it, he voiced support for the Dred Scott decision, condemned the Republican Party for opposing slavery, and stated that the state's secession, which would perpetuate slavery, was the only way to prevent prospective freedmen, whom Hale referred to as "half-civilized Africans", from raping Alabama's "wives and daughters":
[I]n the South, where in many places the African race largely predominates, and, as a consequence, the two races would be continually pressing together, amalgamation, or the extermination of the one or the other, would be inevitable. Can Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin? God forbid that they should. [...] [T]he election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions - nothing less than an open declaration of war - for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.
At the Alabamian secession convention in January 1861, one of the convention's members stated that the state's declaring of secession was motivated by slavery:
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