State of Alabama

Alabama is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America, running from the Tennessee Valley in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, bounded by Tennessee, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi. Montgomery is the capital and Huntsville the largest city. The population is approximately 5.3 million.

There are two Alabamas and they have never reconciled. Across the middle of the State runs a belt of dark prairie soil, forty to eighty kilometres wide, which grew cotton better than almost anywhere on earth and which was worked by enslaved people in numbers that made it the densest slave country in the Realm. North of it the land rises into the last of the Appalachians: hill country of thin soil and smallholdings, where slavery was uncommon because slavery was not profitable there, and where the people who lived on it had no share in what the Black Belt owned.

Every important thing about Alabama is a consequence of that line. The Black Belt took the State into rebellion in 1861 and the hills did not want to go. The hills tried to leave and failed. The plantation counties emptied of the people who had been held in them, and never recovered. The State was held under direct rule for twenty-one years, as were the other four rebel polities, and the resistance that eventually ended it was strongest in the hill counties that had opposed the rebellion in the first place. And the Black Belt is today, by every measure the Realm publishes, the poorest ground in the United Kingdom of America.

Alabama is also the polity where the Realm’s law and the Realm’s practice diverged most completely. A constitution written to remove the Black vote was attempted here and was defeated, because the Charter’s Fourth Amendment of 1873 had entrenched equal protection and made such an instrument unpassable. Alabama disenfranchised anyway, without an instrument, by registrars and by violence, and because there was no document to strike down there was nothing for a court to reach. That arrangement lasted until the American Rights Act was extended to the polities in 1962 and reached a county registrar for the first time.

What has followed is not a resolution and is a real change. Alabama is a genuinely competitive polity with a Black electorate that votes and holds office, an economy transformed by foreign motor assembly and federal aerospace, and a Black Belt whose sanitation the Realm’s own courts have found unlawful.

History

Before the State

The country between the Tennessee and the Gulf was Muscogee, Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickasaw, and the Muscogee confederacy in particular held the river systems around which the State was later built. Alabama takes its name from the Albaamaha, a people of the Alabama river.

It was French, then British, then Spanish along the coast, and Mobile is older than anything else in the State by a century. The interior was taken from the Muscogee after the Creek War of 1813 and 1814, in cessions of a scale that opened the whole of the future cotton country at once, and the removals of the 1830s cleared what remained. The Register’s account follows the State’s own modern historiography, which is unsparing: Alabama’s plantation belt exists because a confederacy was dispossessed of it within a single generation, and the fortunes made on that ground began with the cessions.

Alabama was organised as a Territory in 1817 and admitted as a State in 1819. It was never a colony and holds no charter, which is why it is a State and not a Province, and why the Crown is represented here by a Governor rather than a Lieutenant-Governor.

The Black Belt and the hills

The cotton boom of the 1820s and 1830s filled the Black Belt with planters from the older slave polities and with the people they held, and by 1860 the belt’s counties had enslaved majorities of two to one and in places three.

The hills filled differently. Smallholders from Tennessee and the Carolinas took up thin land in the north, grew corn and kept stock, owned few enslaved people and mostly none, and were governed by a Legislature the Black Belt controlled through an apportionment that counted the enslaved population for representation and gave them no part in it.

The resentment was old, was economic before it was anything else, and was entirely unconnected to any sympathy for the people whose numbers gave the Black Belt its power. This distinction matters and the article will return to it, because it is the reason the hills behaved as they did in 1861 and the reason they behaved as they did afterwards.

The vote of 1861

The convention met at Montgomery in January 1861 and it was not evenly composed. The Black Belt was over-represented on the same apportionment that governed the Assembly, the hill counties sent a bloc of cooperationists and outright unionists, and the vote for rebellion carried by sixty-one to thirty-nine.

Thirty-three of the thirty-nine were from the northern half of the State.

The minority did not accept it. Several delegates refused to sign, some went home and told their counties the ordinance did not bind them, and through the spring of 1861 a movement gathered in the hill counties for a separate polity of northern Alabama on the model that western Virginia was in the process of achieving.

The attempt that failed

It failed, and the failure is the hinge of the State’s history.

Western Virginia succeeded because it was contiguous with loyal territory, because a Union army could reach it, and because it had a functioning alternative government with a seat at Charles Town. Northern Alabama had none of those things. It was three hundred kilometres from any loyal ground, was ringed by rebel polities on three sides, and the Realm’s forces did not reach it in any strength until 1862.

The rebel authorities moved first. Conscription was enforced hardest in exactly the counties that had voted against rebellion, the leaders of the separation movement were arrested or driven out, and the hill counties spent the war garrisoned by their own State against themselves. Something between eight and twelve thousand northern Alabamians crossed the lines and served in federal units, which is a very large number from a small population, and the men who did it left families behind in counties where their neighbours knew exactly who had gone.

Because the hills could not get out, the grievance turned inward. It did not become a loyal government, a separate polity or a claim on the Realm. It became a local quarrel between neighbours, conducted in the same counties, for two years, and it did not end when the war did.

Montgomery, and the seat

Alabama’s other founding grievance is smaller and is nursed carefully.

The first congress of the rebellion met at Montgomery in February 1861, and Montgomery expected to keep it. The seat went to Charles Town in South Carolina on a vote later that year, on arguments about ports, position and the Carolinas’ seniority in the movement, and Montgomery has never entirely let it go.

The grievance is peculiar because it is a grievance about having been denied the capital of a rebellion the State’s northern half had opposed and that the whole State lost. It is nonetheless real, is taught, and surfaces whenever Alabama’s relations with South Carolina are discussed. A polity that resents not having been the capital of a defeat is a polity with a complicated relationship to its own history, and Alabama’s historians say so.

The war

Alabama was, in the Civil War article’s phrase, the interior slave power and the rebellion’s economic centre of gravity, and the campaign that ended the war was designed to break it.

Little of consequence was fought on Alabama soil. What happened instead was that the plantation belt emptied. Through 1862 and 1863 enslaved people left the Black Belt for the Union lines in numbers that removed the workforce the rebel economy rested on, and that movement mattered more to the outcome than any battle in the State. The third federal front of 1863 ran through the interior of Alabama and Georgia against rail junctions, foundries, arsenals and the agricultural districts that fed them, and it was aimed at capacity rather than at armies.

The rebellion collapsed in 1863. Alabama’s own account of the war is unusual among the five in that it contains no great battle, no burned capital and no march: what it contains is a State that ran out of the people it had been holding.

Direct rule, 1863 to 1884

Alabama was governed directly from New Westminster for twenty-one years, from the collapse of the rebel administration in 1863 until the restoration of self-government in 1884, the same twenty-one years as each of the other four rebel polities, and the central fact of the State’s modern constitutional position.

What it consisted of changed across the period. The first years were improvised: federally appointed officers, loyalists, northerners and soldiers among them, governing under the ordinary law with the garrisons behind them. From 1866 it was regularised, under a Commissioner for Alabama appointed by the federal ministry, with a nominated council, a federal judiciary and a constabulary answerable to the Commissioner rather than to anybody in the State. Elections were held for a Provincial-style assembly from 1868, and its acts required the Commissioner’s assent, which was withheld more than a hundred times.

It lasted as long as it did because it kept having to be re-imposed. Self-government was restored in 1871 and suspended again in 1873 after the Companies’ campaign in the hill counties made the courts unworkable; restored in 1878 and suspended again in 1880. The final restoration of 1884 was negotiated rather than granted, under the ministries of the retreat from Reconstruction, and the terms of it are discussed below.

What Reconstruction actually did

Because direct rule lasted longest here, Black political power in Alabama lasted longest too, and the article records that plainly against a general narrative in which the southern polities are treated as a single story.

Black men registered, voted, and held office across the Black Belt from 1868. The counties with Black majorities returned Black members to the assembly, elected Black sheriffs, probate judges, registrars and county commissioners, and sent Black members to the House of Commons. At its height something over a third of the assembly’s members were Black, and in eleven Black Belt counties the whole apparatus of local government was in Black hands.

It was real government and it did real things: schools, a public health board, the beginnings of a poor law, and a land commission that failed. It was also protected by federal power and by nothing else, which is the fact that decided its future.

The Companies, and the counties that had voted no

The Companies grew out of disbanded rebel regiments across the whole rebel south, and in Alabama they were strongest in the northern hill counties.

Those are the counties that had voted against rebellion, tried to leave, been conscripted and garrisoned by their own State, and sent thousands of men to the federal armies.

The article does not have a clean explanation for this and does not pretend to. Two accounts are given in the sources and both are supported by the evidence.

The first is about what hill unionism had actually been. It was against the planters, not against slavery. The hills had objected to a Black Belt that ran the State on the strength of a population the hills had no share in, and their complaint was that the arrangement cost them representation, roads, schools and money. Emancipation removed the planters’ hold and gave the hill smallholder something he had never possessed, which was a position in a racial order rather than merely at the bottom of an economic one. On this account the hills were never loyal to the Realm’s purposes and were only ever hostile to Montgomery, and they discovered after 1865 that the thing they had against the Black Belt was gone and the thing they had against their Black neighbours was new.

The second is about what was done to them. Direct rule fell hardest on the hills because the hills were where the disorder was, so the counties that had been loyal were policed longest, disarmed, garrisoned, and administered by commissioners who did not distinguish between them and the counties that had rebelled. On this account the hills turned because a government they had risked a great deal for treated them exactly as it treated the men who had conscripted them.

Neither account is sufficient and the Register offers neither as the answer. What can be said is that the men who rode at night in Blount, Winston, Marion and Walker counties in 1867 were in many cases the same men who had refused to sign in 1861, and that Alabama has been unable to explain this to itself for a hundred and sixty years.

The constitution that failed

By the 1890s every polity of the former rebellion was looking for a lawful way to remove the Black electorate, and the instrument of choice elsewhere was a new constitution: a document imposing property, literacy, residence and character tests written so as to fall on Black voters and to spare white ones.

Alabama attempted one in 1899 and it was defeated.

It could not pass because of the Fourth Amendment to the Charter of Union, carried in 1873, which entrenched the abolition of slavery and a guarantee of equal protection in the Realm’s founding instrument. A polity constitution is subordinate to the Charter. The Alabama convention’s own draft said what it was for in terms its delegates used openly on the floor, the federal law officers advised that it could not stand against the Fourth Amendment, and the Polity Instruments Act 1889 had by then established the machinery by which a polity instrument is deposited and examined.

The convention adjourned, redrafted, was advised again, and gave up. Alabama therefore has no disenfranchising constitution, and the Realm’s constitutional historians have long treated this as evidence that the Charter worked.

What happened instead

It is not evidence that the Charter worked. It is evidence that the Charter reached instruments.

Alabama disenfranchised without an instrument. It did so through the discretion of county registrars, who determined who was qualified and were answerable to nobody outside the county; through the timing and siting of registration; through poll taxes levied under general revenue statutes that said nothing about race; through the requirement to be vouched for by a registered elector; and through violence and the credible expectation of violence, which did most of the work and required no law at all.

Every one of those was administrative or private. None of them was in a document a court could strike down, and the American Rights Act of 1866 bound federal authority alone and did not reach a county registrar and would not for ninety-six years.

The Black electorate of the Black Belt, which had held eleven counties outright in 1874, was substantially gone by 1905 and effectively gone by 1915. It was removed more slowly than in the polities that used constitutions, and more completely, and with no text anywhere recording that it had been done.

Birmingham, and the industry that was not built on convicts

Birmingham did not exist in 1860. It was laid out in 1871 where coal, iron ore and limestone lie within a few miles of one another, which is a rare geological accident and the only one of its kind in the Realm, and it was built with northern and British capital into the southern steel city.

It was built with paid labour, and the article states it because the industry that built it elsewhere was not. The Emancipation Measure of 1 January 1865 abolished slavery and all human bondage throughout the Realm, in every polity, without exception and without condition, and it contains no clause excepting persons convicted of crime. Convict leasing, the practice by which tens of thousands of men were put into mines of this kind under sentence and a great many of them killed, was unlawful in the Realm from the day the Measure received assent, and Alabama never operated it.

The consequence is a slower and less brutal industrialisation than convict-leased mining elsewhere. Birmingham grew more gradually because it had to pay for labour and to compete for it, its mines were organised earlier because they employed men who could leave, and the city’s Black working population was a wage-earning one from the beginning. This is the single largest difference in the making of Alabama’s steel city, and it is worth being precise about what it did not do: it did not make Birmingham equal, integrated or safe, and the men who dug the ore were paid badly and lived in company housing and were killed underground at rates that were reported and not acted on.

Steel carried the city into the 1970s and then went, as it went everywhere. What Birmingham is now is a medical and university city, its largest employer a teaching hospital, its economy built on the institutions that were established while the furnaces were still running.

The migration

Between about 1915 and 1970 something over half a million people left Alabama, overwhelmingly from the Black Belt and overwhelmingly Black, and the article follows them because the corpus can.

They went to Birmingham first and then out of the State: to the industrial cities of the north, to Ohio and the Grand Duchy of Michigan and the Commonwealth of Illinois, and later to California. The Black Belt has been losing population for a century and its counties now hold a fraction of what they held in 1900.

Ohio’s article records the arrival from its own end, and the two accounts are the same movement described from the platform and from the train.

1962, and what changed

The American Rights (Extension) Act 1962 removed the words of limitation from the federal Act’s definition of public authority and brought every public body in the Realm within it.

In Alabama that meant the county registrar. The apparatus that had removed the Black electorate had been built entirely out of discretion exercised by local officers, and on the day the Extension Act commenced every one of those officers became a public authority bound by a federal statute with a remedy attached.

The litigation began within a year and took a decade. It was conducted county by county, because the exclusion had been built county by county, and the records of it are the fullest documentation that exists anywhere of how the thing had actually been done. Registration in the Black Belt counties rose from under five per cent of eligible Black adults in 1961 to over sixty by 1972.

Birmingham, 1963

The confrontation came before the litigation did.

Alabama’s civil rights crisis was Birmingham in the spring of 1963, and it was about the city rather than about the vote: segregation in the stores, in employment, in the parks the city had closed rather than integrate. The campaign was organised through the Black churches, was sustained by mass arrest, and in May 1963 it put children on the streets when the adults available had been jailed.

The city’s response was dogs and fire hoses, and it was photographed. In September a bomb was put under the steps of a Black church on a Sunday morning and four girls were killed.

The Realm’s reaction is worth setting out. The Rights Act had bound Alabama since the previous year; the bombing was therefore not merely a murder but an attack on the enforcement of a federal statute; and the federal response was immediate, heavy and legal in a way that the polity could not obstruct. The Governor-General of the day made no proclamation and no reserve power was used, which the Realm’s constitutional writers note carefully, because the ordinary law was sufficient.

Alabama’s public account of 1963 is now unsparing. It was not for thirty years. The church is a national monument, the city maintains an institute across the street from it, and the fact that the institute exists is largely the work of people who were children in the marches.

Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice was born at Birmingham on 14 November 1954 and was eight years old and living a mile from the church when the bomb went off. She knew one of the girls.

She became the twenty-eighth Governor-General of the United Kingdom of America and exercised the reserve power in 2006, the second and last time in the Realm’s history that it has been used.

Alabama claims her, and it claims her more warmly than it treated her. That sentence is in the State’s own museum captions now, which is a recent development and a creditable one, and the article records both halves of it: a girl from a segregated city in a State that had removed her parents’ vote by administration became the Crown’s representative in the Realm, and the State that produced her had spent her childhood arranging that people like her should not count.

Geography

Alabama runs about five hundred kilometres from the Tennessee line to the Gulf and divides into four bands.

The Tennessee Valley in the north is broad, fertile bottomland along a great river, and is the most northern-facing part of the State in every sense: it looks to Tennessee, it was the heart of the unionist country, and it now holds Huntsville, whose Marshall Space Flight Center of the American Aeronautics and Space Administration makes the polity most suspicious of federal power the home of the largest concentration of federal industry in the Realm.

The Appalachian foothills below it are the last of the mountains, running out south-westward, thin-soiled and cut by narrow valleys. This is the hill country proper, it holds the coal and the iron ore, and Birmingham sits at its southern end where the minerals meet.

The Black Belt crosses the middle of the State in a crescent forty to eighty kilometres wide, named for a dark calcareous prairie soil laid down under a Cretaceous sea. It grew cotton better than almost any ground on the continent, which is the whole reason for everything that happened on it.

The coastal plain falls away south of that into pine, sand and slow rivers, ending in the Mobile delta, which is the second largest river delta in the Realm and among the most biologically various places in North America.

Alabama has more navigable river kilometres than any other polity of the Realm, the Tennessee, Tombigbee, Alabama, Black Warrior and Mobile systems between them reaching most of the State, and the fact governed its settlement, its cotton trade and its industry in turn.

The climate is humid subtropical, wet in every season, hot for five months, and the State lies in the most tornado-prone country in the Realm outside the plains, with a second season in late autumn that few other places have.

The line

The boundary between the Black Belt and the hills is a soil type, and it is also the most consequential political line in the State.

It has predicted almost every division in Alabama’s history. The vote of 1861 followed it. The attempt at separation followed it. The distribution of the Companies followed it inverted. The apportionment fights of the nineteenth century, the prohibition votes, the New Deal votes, the position of the two counties’ politics on almost anything for a hundred and fifty years: the line is visible in all of them, and Alabama’s own political scientists produce maps in which the 1860 soil survey and a modern election return are laid over each other and match.

What the line does not predict any longer is race, and that is the modern change. The Black Belt’s counties are majority Black and were governed by white minorities within living memory; the hill counties are overwhelmingly white and poor. The two poorest populations in Alabama are on opposite sides of the line and have voted in opposite directions for a century, which is the arrangement that has kept the State’s politics where it is and which is beginning, slowly and unevenly, to break down.

Alabama’s argument about itself is conducted almost entirely across this line, and both halves of it are conscious that the third Alabama, the one that is neither, is the one that now decides elections: Huntsville, Birmingham’s suburbs and the Gulf coast, which between them hold the growth, the money and the seats that move.

Constitutional system

Alabama is governed under the Constitution of Alabama of 1884, adopted at the restoration of self-government, deposited under the Polity Instruments Act 1889 in 1891, and amended two hundred and six times.

The instrument of 1884 was negotiated rather than granted. Its terms were settled between the federal ministry and an Alabama convention as the price of ending direct rule, and it contains, at federal insistence, an article reciting the Charter’s Fourth Amendment and providing that no qualification for the franchise shall be imposed which does not apply equally to all. That article has never been amended and was never obeyed, which is the State’s constitutional history in a sentence.

The convention of 1899 attempted to replace the whole instrument and failed, as described above. Nothing has been attempted since, and Alabama’s constitution is accordingly the only one in the Realm written under federal supervision during a suspension of self-government.

The Governor

The Crown is represented in Alabama by a Governor, appointed on the advice of the ministers of the Realm after consultation with the Premier, holding office for five years, and drawn by convention from outside politics. The incumbent is Adelaide Toussaint, formerly a judge of the Alabama Court of Appeals, appointed in 2024 and the second Black holder of the office.

The office is quiet now and was not always. Between 1884 and 1901 the Governor of Alabama withheld assent nineteen times, on measures the federal law officers had advised were repugnant to the Fourth Amendment or to the constitution’s own franchise article, and the office was understood in that period as the Realm’s remaining instrument in a polity it had just stopped governing directly. The practice ended when the measures stopped being written down, which is the same date as everything else in this article.

No Governor has withheld assent since 1901. The office’s modern function is ceremonial, and Alabama’s relationship with it is warmer than the history would suggest, chiefly because the Governors of the twentieth century were careful to be visible in parts of the State the ministry was not.

The Premier

The head of government is the Premier of Alabama, who holds office on the confidence of the House of Delegates and governs from Montgomery.

The office has been held since 2025 by Wendell Feazell, Conservative and Crown Union, at the head of a coalition with two independent members from the Gulf counties. His majority is the ordinary modern Alabama majority: the hill counties, the outer suburbs of Birmingham and Huntsville, and the coastal plain, against Birmingham itself, Montgomery and the Black Belt.

What is new is that this is a majority rather than a certainty. Alabama was a one-party polity from 1901 to the 1970s and a reliably conservative one from the 1980s, and it is neither now. Three of the last five general elections have turned on fewer than four thousand votes across the State, government has changed hands twice since 2010, and the reason is arithmetic: a Black electorate that votes at rates close to the white one, a Huntsville that has grown by two hundred thousand people in thirty years and does not vote like the hills around it, and suburbs that no longer vote like the counties they sit in.

The Legislature

The Alabama Legislature has carried the name since 1819 and sits at Montgomery in the Statehouse of 1851.

The House of Delegates has a hundred and five members elected for four years from single-member districts and is the confidence chamber. The Senate has thirty-five, elected for four years from districts formed by grouping three House districts, and may amend or delay but not defeat a bill of supply.

The Assembly’s characteristic business is not general legislation. Because Alabama’s counties hold almost nothing, the Assembly legislates for individual counties by local act, and it passes several hundred of them a year: a bill to permit a particular county to levy a particular tax, to change the salary of a particular officer, to authorise a particular bond. Roughly four fifths of the Acts passed in a normal session apply to one county each.

The practice is universally described in Alabama as absurd and is defended by the members who benefit from it, which is most of them, because a delegate who controls the local acts for his county controls the county.

Counties and local government

Alabama has sixty-seven counties, more than any polity of comparable population in the Realm, and they hold almost nothing.

The counties were laid out between 1818 and 1903 on the principle that a man should be able to ride to his courthouse and home again in a day, and they were never consolidated afterwards. Twelve of them have fewer than fifteen thousand people. Each maintains a courthouse, a sheriff, a probate judge, a revenue commissioner and a commission of between four and seven members, and the smallest of them spend a majority of their revenue on those offices.

Alabama grants almost no home rule. A county may not levy a tax, alter a fee, create an office, borrow, zone or in most cases change a speed limit without an Act of the Legislature authorising that county specifically to do it. The rule descends directly from 1884: the negotiated constitution was drafted by men who had spent twenty-one years watching counties be governed from outside, and who agreed among themselves that the counties would never again hold power that could be seized. What they built instead concentrated everything in Montgomery, where it has stayed.

The consequences are practical and widely resented. A county wanting a rubbish levy waits for a session. A county in a bad year cannot move money between its own funds. Above all, the Black Belt counties, which have the least revenue and the greatest need, are the ones least able to act, because a local act requires a delegate willing to carry it and the delegation practice gives every member of a county’s delegation a veto.

Below the counties there are four hundred and sixty municipalities, of which two hundred and ninety have fewer than two thousand people. Cities of over a hundred thousand hold charters granting real powers, and the gap between what Birmingham may do and what a Black Belt county may do is one of the widest in the Realm.

Reform has been proposed at every session since 1961. A general home rule article was defeated in 1973, in 1982 and again in 2011. The 2011 defeat is the one usually cited, because the article passed the House of Delegates and died in the Senate on the vote of members whose own counties had petitioned for it.

Law and the courts

Alabama’s law is the common law as received in 1819, its own statutes, and the law of the Realm above both.

The Supreme Court of Alabama has nine justices, appointed by the Governor on the advice of the Premier from a list settled by a judicial commission, holding to seventy. Alabama abandoned judicial election in 1978, later than most of the Realm and after two elections in which the sums spent by insurers and by the plaintiffs’ bar had become a national embarrassment. Below it sit a Court of Civil Appeals, a Court of Criminal Appeals, and the circuit courts.

Two features are distinctive.

The first is the probate judge, an office abolished almost everywhere else and retained in all sixty-seven counties. The probate judge is elected, need not be a lawyer, and holds a mixture of judicial and administrative functions: wills, estates, land records, licences, and, in most counties, the chairmanship of the county commission. The office is also the county’s chief election officer, which is why it appears so often in the litigation described below.

The second is the volume of federal litigation. More Rights Act cases have been brought against Alabama’s public bodies than against any other polity of the Realm, a total exceeding four thousand since 1962, and the doctrines that govern the Act’s application to registration, to school funding, to prisons and to water and sewer provision were largely made in Alabama courtrooms because Alabama supplied the facts.

Alabama’s prisons are the worst in the Realm by every published measure, at a hundred and sixty per cent of design capacity, and have been under the supervision of a federal court since 2019.

Economy

Alabama’s economy is the fifteenth largest of the Realm’s polities and its shape is unusual: heavy manufacturing, a large military and space establishment, a port, a forest, and a countryside that has never recovered.

Manufacturing is the largest sector. Alabama builds motor cars at four plants, the first of which opened in 1993 after a competition of incentives that other polities described at the time as ruinous and later imitated; it builds aircraft components at Mobile; it builds steel at Birmingham still, though not on the scale of 1950. Manufacturing employs about a sixth of the workforce, and the plants are almost all in the hill counties and along the interstates, not in the Black Belt.

Aerospace and defence is the sector that changed the State. The Redstone establishment at Huntsville is the largest single employer in Alabama, and the arsenal, the flight centre and the contractors around them account for a fifth of the State’s economic output from four per cent of its land. Huntsville has the highest concentration of engineers of any city in the Realm.

The port of Mobile is the Realm’s ninth by tonnage, handles coal, steel, timber and containers, and has grown faster than any Gulf port in twenty years since the deepening of 2021.

Forestry covers seventy per cent of the State’s area, which is the highest proportion of any polity, and pine, pulp and paper support a scattered rural workforce that is smaller every decade as the mills mechanise.

Agriculture is now chiefly poultry and cattle. Alabama produces more broiler chickens than all but two polities. Cotton, which made the Black Belt and destroyed it, is a minor crop, grown on a fraction of its former acreage by a fraction of the former workforce, and the counties that grew it have no replacement.

Mining persists in a reduced form: coal in the Warrior and Cahaba fields, limestone, and the iron ore that is no longer worth digging when it can be shipped from Brazil.

The distribution is the point. Alabama’s growth of the last forty years has almost entirely bypassed the counties that most needed it. Per capita income in Shelby County, on Birmingham’s southern edge, is more than three times that in Wilcox County, ninety minutes away, and the gap has widened in every decade since it was first measured.

Transport

Alabama sits across the Realm’s north-south freight corridor and has built accordingly.

The interstate system crosses the State four ways and meets at Birmingham, whose interchanges carry more freight than any point in the Realm between Atlanta and Dallas. The Corridor X route to the north-west, completed in 2016 after fifty years of argument, was the last major road built in the State and the last one likely to be.

Rail is heavy, freight-dominated and busy: the same routes that carried cotton to Mobile carry coal, steel and containers now. Passenger service is thin. One long-distance service crosses the State and calls at Birmingham in the small hours, an arrangement that Alabama’s own transport ministry has described as worse than none.

The waterways matter more here than in most polities. The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, opened in 1985, connects the Tennessee to the Gulf and was the most expensive public work ever undertaken in the Realm; whether it has ever justified its cost is a long-running argument that has not been settled and has become a fixed feature of Alabama’s politics, being defended by the counties along it and attacked by everyone else.

Birmingham and Huntsville have the principal airports, Mobile a smaller one, and a persistent complaint of Alabama’s business community is that all three are within ninety minutes of Atlanta, which is why none of them has grown.

Welfare, health and education

Alabama spends less per head on public services than any polity of the Realm except two, and the outcomes follow.

Health. Alabama’s life expectancy is the third lowest in the Realm and its infant mortality the second highest. The NHSA guarantee applies here as everywhere, and the deficiency is not in the guarantee but in delivery: fourteen counties have no obstetric unit, seven rural hospitals have closed since 2010, and the ambulance journey from parts of the Black Belt to a hospital with a surgeon exceeds an hour.

Sanitation. In several Black Belt counties, raw sewage stands in yards. The soil is the same Cretaceous clay that grew the cotton; it will not take a conventional septic field, an engineered system costs more than the houses are worth, and the counties have no power to raise the money and no sewer network to connect to. Surveys have found functioning sanitation absent from between a fifth and a third of households in the worst counties, and hookworm, a parasite associated with the nineteenth century, was found in Lowndes County in a study of 2017 and again in 2023.

The Realm has a minimum water and sanitation standard under the Rights Act, and the standard has been litigated against Alabama four times, in 1994, 2008, 2017 and 2022. The 2022 proceedings ended in a consent order binding the State and three counties to a programme of works running to 2031. Progress against it is behind schedule, and the federal health inspectorate reports on it twice a year.

Education. Alabama funds its schools from a property tax base that the constitution of 1884 capped and that has been raised eleven times since, never enough. The result is the widest school funding gap in the Realm between its richest and poorest districts. Reading attainment at nine has improved sharply since a 2019 programme and is now near the middle of the Realm, which Alabama is entitled to point to and does; secondary attainment has not moved.

Higher education is the exception and is genuinely strong. The University of Alabama, Auburn, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, whose medical centre is among the best in the Realm, Alabama A&M and Tuskegee together enrol more than two hundred thousand. Tuskegee, founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, is the institution Alabama is proudest of and the one that had least help from it.

Cities

Alabama has no dominant city and four that matter.

Huntsville

Huntsville is the largest city in Alabama, having passed Birmingham in 2021, and it is the newest thing in the State. It was a cotton town of sixteen thousand in 1950 and is a metropolitan area of half a million now, and the reason is entirely federal: the arsenal, the rocket programme, and sixty years of contracts.

The irony is stated plainly here because Alabama states it itself. The polity that resisted federal authority longest, and was governed from outside for twenty-one years for it, now has its largest and richest city because the federal government put it there, in the north, in the country that voted against rebellion in 1861 and was governed hardest for having lost.

Huntsville votes unlike anywhere else in Alabama. It is the only part of the State where the parties are genuinely balanced within the same neighbourhoods rather than between them, its population is a third from outside the State, and its arrival has ended Alabama’s old two-way politics without replacing it with anything settled.

Birmingham

Birmingham was founded in 1871 at a crossing of two railways over the only place in the world where iron ore, coal and limestone lie within a few kilometres of one another, and it grew faster than any city in the Realm for forty years. It was called the Magic City for that, and its symbol is a cast-iron statue of Vulcan, made for a world’s fair in 1904, standing on a mountain above the town.

The city lost its industry between 1960 and 1990 and rebuilt on medicine, banking and the university. Its population within the old boundary has fallen by half since 1960 while its metropolitan area has grown, which is the ordinary shape of a segregated city’s decline: the money moved five kilometres south over a mountain into Shelby County and stayed there.

Birmingham is majority Black, has had Black mayors continuously since 1979, and holds the Realm’s principal museum of the civil rights struggle, opposite the church.

Montgomery

Montgomery is the capital, the seat of the Legislature and the Premier, a city of about two hundred thousand, and a place with more history attached to it than it can comfortably carry: the first rebel congress, the seat lost to Charles Town in 1861, the bus boycott of 1955, the end of the march from Selma in 1965.

It is a government town, and its economy is the Statehouse, an air force base and a university.

Mobile

Mobile is the oldest city in Alabama, founded by the French in 1702, and the only one that does not feel like the rest of the State. It was French, then British, then Spanish, then part of the Realm, it is Catholic in a Baptist polity, it holds the Realm’s oldest carnival, older than New Orleans and insistent about it, and it looks at the Gulf rather than inland.

Mobile is the port, and the port is what has kept it: shipbuilding, aircraft assembly, containers, and the deepened channel of 2021.

Demographics

Alabama’s population is approximately 5.3 million and is the least mobile in the Realm: seventy-one per cent of residents were born in the State, a figure exceeded nowhere else.

About a quarter of the population is Black, the third highest proportion of any polity, and the distribution is the whole history of the place. In the Black Belt counties the proportion runs from sixty to eighty per cent; in a dozen hill counties it is under three. This is not the residue of segregation alone but of the cotton economy that preceded it, and the map of Black residence is very nearly the map of the 1860 slave census.

The Great Migration took roughly six hundred thousand people out of Alabama between 1915 and 1970, chiefly to Chicago, Detroit and New York by the rail lines that ran north out of Birmingham. It has partly reversed since 1990, with more Black families now moving into Alabama than leaving, though almost none of them to the counties their families left.

Hispanic residents are about six per cent and concentrated in the poultry counties of the north and in Huntsville, a change entirely of the last thirty years. The State has small Vietnamese and Laotian communities on the Gulf coast, established in fishing after 1975.

Religious adherence is the highest in the Realm. Alabama is overwhelmingly Protestant and predominantly Baptist, with a large Methodist minority, a Catholic concentration around Mobile, and small and old Jewish congregations in Birmingham and Montgomery. The Black church is the most important institution in the Black Belt and has been since emancipation, being the only body in many counties that was never controlled from outside.

Society and culture

Football is not a pastime in Alabama, it is the organising sport of public life. The University of Alabama and Auburn play once a year in late November, the State does very little else that day, and the rivalry is among the fiercest in the Realm. Alabama’s football success is genuinely disproportionate to its size and wealth, and the State knows exactly what that means to it.

Music. Alabama has produced an amount of music out of all proportion to its population. The Muscle Shoals studios in the Tennessee Valley recorded a run of soul records in the 1960s and 1970s whose rhythm section was white, whose singers were Black, and who worked together in a town in the northern hills while the State outside was doing what it was doing. W. C. Handy was born at Florence, thirty kilometres away. Country, gospel and blues all have Alabama lines, and Sun Ra was from Birmingham.

Literature. Harper Lee was from Monroeville and Truman Capote spent his childhood next door to her. Zora Neale Hurston was born at Notasulga. Alabama’s writers have very largely written about Alabama, and the State’s relationship with the results has always been complicated, being proud of the books and uncomfortable with what is in them.

Food. Alabama’s cooking is the deep southern kind, and its two contributions of its own are barbecue and a white sauce made of mayonnaise and vinegar that is served on chicken in the northern counties and nearly nowhere else.

Church. Beyond religion proper, the church is the calendar. Dinner on the ground, homecoming, revival and the singing conventions, including the shape-note tradition that survives in Alabama more strongly than anywhere in the Realm, structure the rural year in both halves of the State.

Political tensions

Home rule. The counties want power and the Legislature will not give it up, because giving it up means individual delegates losing control of their counties. This has been the State’s longest-running internal argument and it does not follow party lines.

The Black Belt. The sanitation consent order runs to 2031 and is behind schedule. Every failure is federally reported, which Alabama’s government experiences as supervision and the counties experience as the only pressure that has ever produced anything.

Registration. Alabama abolished no franchise law in 1962 because it had none to abolish. What it had was practice, and the practice has never entirely stopped changing form. Voter identification, list maintenance and polling place closures have each been litigated since 2010, and the probate judges who administer them are elected officials of the counties concerned.

Huntsville. The city’s growth has given the north a weight it has not had since 1861, and it has not yet been settled what the north will do with it. Huntsville’s politics are not the hills’ politics and not Birmingham’s, and both older Alabamas are trying to work out whether it is an ally.

Prisons. The federal supervision of 2019 is unresolved, expensive and unpopular with the electorate, and no government has found a way to end it that the courts will accept.

The direct rule memory. Twenty-one years is long enough to become a story, and Alabama’s version of the story has been contested for a hundred and forty years. It is taught one way in the Black Belt schools and another in the hills, and the fact that both versions are partly true is the reason it has never been settled.

Assessment

Alabama is the polity in which the Realm’s central promise, that a subject’s rights are the same wherever the subject lives, is least true in fact and most fully guaranteed in law, and the distance between those two things is the subject of the State’s entire modern history.

Its record is not one thing. The Realm never permitted convict leasing, so Alabama’s industry was built by paid men and its mines were never worked by leased convicts; that is a genuine and consequential difference and Alabama’s historians name it. Direct rule lasted twenty-one years, which produced Black officeholding on a scale that survived into the 1890s and produced a defeat, in 1899, for the instrument that would have written disenfranchisement into law. But the defeat of that instrument is also the reason Alabama took sixty-three years longer to reach: with nothing on paper there was nothing to strike down, and the Rights Act, which bound federal authority from 1866, did not reach a county registrar until 1962.

What Alabama has done since is real and partial. Its schools have improved, its universities are strong, its car plants and its arsenal have made a middle class where there was none, and its politics are genuinely competitive for the first time since 1901. What it has not done is close the line. The Black Belt is poorer relative to the rest of the Realm than it was in 1970, and the wealth that arrived after 1990 arrived in the counties that were already doing best.

Alabama’s own account of itself is defensive and unusually honest at the same time. It is a State that expects to be judged, has often deserved it, and has grown practised at saying both that the judgement is not the whole story and that a good deal of it is warranted.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag of Alabama is a bespoke design and carries no crimson saltire. Its proportion is 2:3.

It is divided diagonally from the upper hoist to the lower fly by a narrow white stripe. Above the stripe the field is iron red, for the red clay of the hills and the ore under it. Below the stripe the field is near black, for the prairie soil of the Black Belt. In the lower field, toward the hoist, is a single gold star for the State.

The flag is therefore a soil map, and it is a soil map on the diagonal because the Black Belt crosses Alabama on a slant. The white stripe is the geological boundary between the two.

It was settled by an Act of 1927 out of a public competition. Eleven of the fourteen shortlisted entries were saltires of one kind or another, which the committee would not have; the winning design was submitted by a schoolteacher from Walker County, in the hills, whose published explanation was that the two fields were the two halves of the State and that the line between them was on the flag because it would not go away.

The motto, Audemus jura nostra defendere, “we dare defend our rights,” was adopted in 1923, and its meaning has been argued about ever since, since it can be read as a claim of liberty or a claim against the Realm and was very probably intended as both.

The State bird is the yellowhammer, the State flower the camellia, and the State tree the longleaf pine.

Trivia

See also

• Commonwealth of Kansas
• Province of Georgia
• The American Civil War
• The American Rights Act
• Charter of Union of the American Colonies
• Booker T. Washington
• Condoleezza Rice
• National Health Service of America