The Alabama River and the Cotton Economy
Near Montgomery, Alabama
Montgomery sits inside a long horseshoe bend in the Alabama River, and that curve of water shaped everything that happened here for the first hundred years of the city's existence.
Two settlements merged to form Montgomery in eighteen nineteen, incorporated the same year Alabama entered the Union. From the beginning, the river was the reason for the city. The first steamboat to make the journey from Mobile to Montgomery arrived in eighteen twenty-one and transformed the economics of the interior. Before the steamboat, moving heavy cotton bales over Alabama's rough roads was slow and expensive. The river made it fast and cheap.
Cotton grown on the surrounding Black Belt plantations moved down Commerce Street to the docks, loaded onto steamboats, shipped south to Mobile and then by sea to textile mills in New England or to Liverpool. The Black Belt soil, dark and heavy, was among the most productive cotton land in the world. The wealth it generated was enormous and entirely dependent on enslaved labor.
Montgomery was made the permanent state capital in eighteen forty-six, moved from Tuscaloosa. The river, the rail connections, and the cotton economy had made it the obvious center of the state. By the eve of the Civil War, it was one of the wealthiest cities per capita in the United States. That wealth had been built on the Alabama River, the auction block, and the backs of people who received nothing from it.
The river still flows. The bend that shaped the city is unchanged. Commerce Street still runs down to where the docks once stood.
