The First Confederate Capitol

On February fourth, eighteen sixty-one, delegates from six Deep South states gathered in the Senate chamber of the Alabama State Capitol and, in four days, produced a provisional constitution and declared themselves a new nation. On February eighteenth, on the portico of this building, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was inaugurated as the first president of the Confederate States of America.

The choice of Montgomery as the Confederacy's first capital was deliberate. Alabama was a committed secession state, the capitol building was spacious and already functioning, and the city had excellent rail connections. Davis arrived by train from Selma. Crowds lined the route. A band played.

For one hundred days, Montgomery was the seat of a government built explicitly on the continuation of human slavery. Davis's inaugural address was unambiguous: he framed secession as a constitutional right and the Confederacy's cause as the preservation of the domestic institution the Confederate constitution explicitly named and protected. The constitutional text that delegates signed here in February eighteen sixty-one contained a specific clause prohibiting any law impairing the right of property in negro slaves.

The government moved to Richmond, Virginia, in late May of eighteen sixty-one, after Virginia's secession made Richmond the more strategically defensible choice. The Confederate White House in Montgomery, the Italianate building on Washington Street where Davis and his family lived during those hundred days, still stands. It was built between eighteen thirty-two and eighteen thirty-five, and the family of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's ancestors were connected to its early history.

The Alabama State Capitol is the only American state capitol to have served as the first capital of the Confederacy. A bronze star marks the spot on the portico steps where Davis stood to take his oath. The Capitol building was completed in eighteen fifty-one, and the state still governs from it.