Alabama's First Capital

In the summer of eighteen nineteen, delegates from across the Mississippi Territory gathered in Huntsville to write a state constitution. Alabama was not yet a state. It was about to become one, and the men who would define it met in a two-story brick building here, in the town that had been incorporated only eight years earlier.

The convention ran from July through August. The delegates produced a constitution that was, in several respects, more democratic than those of neighboring states. White male property owners, for example, were not the only men granted the vote. Any free white man who was a state resident and a citizen could vote, with no property requirement. In a region where planter wealth dominated politics, this was a meaningful concession to the farmers and tradespeople who made up the majority of the population.

What the constitution did not address, and what no one at the convention disputed, was the institution of slavery. By eighteen twenty-two, enslaved people made up thirty-six percent of Huntsville's population. The Bell Factory, one of the city's early cotton textile operations, ran its machinery with enslaved workers. The cotton economy on which Huntsville's early prosperity rested depended entirely on the people those planters had brought with them from Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas.

Huntsville served briefly as Alabama's first state capital before the capital was moved south, first to Cahaba and then to Tuscaloosa and finally to Montgomery. The constitutional convention building has been reconstructed as Constitution Village, a living history site a short walk from the spring. It marks the moment when a wealthy cotton town on the Tennessee River became the birthplace of a state.