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Drawing on a large body of documents, including eyewitness accounts and evidence from the site itself, Keith explores the racial tensions that led to the Colfax massacre - during which surrendering blacks were mercilessly slaughtered - and the reverberations this message of terror sent throughout the South.
Before the Civil War, North Alabama was infamous for lawlessness. The era saw courts filled with defendants who spanned the socioeconomic gamut--farmers, merchants and politicians. In 1811, John B. Haynes tore apart William Badger's house with his bare hands. Rodah Barnett ran a series of ill-reputed brothels in the early 1820s. In 1818, Rebecca Layman "accidentally" gave her husband sulfuric acid instead of rum. There is even a case of assault with frozen corn. Author John O'Brien relays these and more stories of the shady side of North Alabama during the antebellum period.
Before the Civil War, most Southern white people were as strongly committed to freedom for their kind as to slavery for African Americans. This study views that tragic reality through the lens of eight authors - representatives of a South that seemed, to them, destined for greatness but was, we know, on the brink of destruction. Exceptionally able and ambitious, these men and women won repute among the educated middle classes in the Southwest, South and the nation, even amid sectional tensions. Although they sometimes described liberty in the abstract, more often these authors discussed its practical significance: what it meant for people to make life's important choices freely and to be responsible for the results. They publicly insisted that freedom caused progress, but hidden doubts clouded this optimistic vision. Ultimately, their association with the oppression of slavery dimmed their hopes for human improvement, and fear distorted their responses to the sectional crisis.
North Alabama built its fi rst commercial brewery in Huntsville in 1819, three months before the state joined the Union. Before Prohibition in 1915, the region was peppered with numerous saloons, taverns and dance halls. Locals still found ways to get their booze during Prohibition using Tennessee River steamboats and secret tunnels for smuggling. Alabama re-legalized beer in 1937, but it wasn't until 2004, when the grass-roots organization Free the Hops took on the state's harsh beer laws, that the craft beer scene really began to flourish. Authors Sarah Bélanger and Kamara Bowling Davis trace the history of beer in North Alabama from the early saloon days to the craft beer explosion.
A poignant, multi-generational saga of a mixed-race family in the US West and South from the antebellum period through the rise of Jim Crow. When Samuel Townsend died at his home in Madison County, Alabama, in November 1856, the fifty-two-year-old white planter left behind hundreds of slaves, thousands of acres of rich cotton land, and a net worth of approximately $200,000. In life, Samuel had done little to distinguish himself from other members of the South's elite slaveholding class. But he made a name for himself in death by leaving almost the entirety of his fortune to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces: all of them his slaves. In this deeply researched, movingly narrated portrait of the extended Townsend family, R. Isabela Morales reconstructs the migration of this mixed-race family across the American West and South over the second half of the nineteenth century. Searching for communities where they could exercise their newfound freedom and wealth to the fullest, members of the family homesteaded and attended college in Ohio and Kansas; fought for the Union Army in Mississippi; mined for silver in the Colorado Rockies; and, in the case of one son, returned to Alabama to purchase part of the old plantation where he had once been held as a slave. In Morales's telling, the Townsends' story maps a new landscape of opportunity and oppression, where the meanings of race and freedom--as well as opportunities for social and economic mobility--were dictated by highly local circumstances. During the turbulent period between the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century, the Townsends carved out spaces where they were able to benefit from their money and mixed-race ancestry, pass down generational wealth, and realize some of their happy dreams of liberty.
Contains a bibliography of Alabama's county histories.
The book employs the story of one particular extended family network--the Browns, Sherrods, Mannings, Sprowls, and Williamses--to illustrate the powerful influence of kinship ties as a force mitigating lines of class distinction in the nineteenth-century American South. It traces each family's story from its earliest appearance in the historical record to the convergence of the family network, first taking shape in northeast Alabama and eventually reaching full-blown form in northwest Louisiana's Red River Valley. There, both the plain folk and planters within the group demonstrated exceptional harmony and cooperation in constructing a flexible family network that left its mark on the area between the 1820s and 1870s. The story of these five families reveals much about migratory patterns of that restless segment of early- to mid-nineteenth century Americans who hankered to exploit opportunities on the ever-expanding, westward-moving agricultural frontier.