Secession and the Confederate State

On January eleventh, eighteen sixty-one, Alabama voted to leave the United States. The secession convention met in Montgomery, and the result was sixty-one votes to thirty-nine. The thirty-nine who opposed secession came mostly from the northern counties, the hill country above the Black Belt, where small farmers had few enslaved people and less reason to die for the planter class's property claims.

That split, between the Black Belt planter elite and the white yeomanry of the northern hills, would tear through the state's Confederate years and persist long after. Montgomery became the first capital of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis was inaugurated on the steps of the Alabama State House on February eighteenth, eighteen sixty-one.

He stood on a spot marked today by a bronze star, and he gave a speech framing secession as a defense of constitutional principle. The Confederate government moved to Richmond in May, but Alabama had already written itself into the founding mythology of the new nation. What followed was four years of catastrophic loss, and not only at the distant fronts.

Alabama's mountains and hill counties became zones of bitter irregular warfare. Unionists in Winston County held a convention of their own in July eighteen sixty-one, reportedly declaring the Free State of Winston, refusing to send their sons to fight for the planters. While no formal secession from secession occurred, the phrase captured a real sentiment.

Winston County sent more men to the Union Army than to the Confederate one. Desertion rose steadily across the state as Confederate fortunes fell. Women on hardscrabble farms wrote letters to their husbands begging them to come home, that the children were starving.

The so-called bread riots of eighteen sixty-three, when women in Mobile and other Southern cities broke into warehouses and stores demanding food, reflected the collapse of the home front. Alabama's agriculture, dependent on enslaved labor that was escaping, resisting, and increasingly fleeing to Union lines, could not feed both an army and a civilian population. Federal forces entered Alabama in force in eighteen sixty-five.

Union General James Wilson's cavalry raid in March and April destroyed the industrial infrastructure around Selma, the ironworks, the Confederate arsenal, the naval foundry that had cast the armor for the CSS Virginia. Selma was burned. The city of Mobile surrendered on April twelfth, eighteen sixty-five, two days before Lincoln was shot in Washington.

The Confederacy's largest warship, the CSS Tennessee, had already surrendered in Mobile Bay the previous August, in the battle that gave Admiral David Farragut his famous command: Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. The war had killed approximately thirty-five thousand Alabama soldiers out of roughly one hundred twenty thousand who served. The state's enslaved population, nearly half a million people, was free.