Alabama has speculation in its veins. From the state’s online archives:
Andrew Dexter, one of the founders of the town, had held on to a prime piece of property in long anticipation of the capital’s eventual move to Montgomery. Dubbed “Goat Hill” for its use as pasturage, the site retained that affectionate appellation despite attempts to dignify the spot with names like “Lafayette Hill” (after the 1825 visit of the Marquis de Lafayette) and “Capitol Hill” (after the 1847 construction of the Capitol).
The Old West, as we think of it, began in the midwest and southeast; when Dexter bought Goat Hill, Alabama was the frontier, and only recently won from Native American populations. Dexter set aside Goat Hill for a future state capitol in 1819, twenty-six years before Alabama’s propertied white males voted to move the capitol there from Tuscaloosa.
The town of Montgomery was only a decade old at that time, having grown from a mere settlement on the banks of the Alabama River nine miles below the confluence of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers, not far from the site of Alabama’s first cotton gin. It was already the center of the state’s cotton industry: the Alabama River provided float transportation to Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico; the Coosa basin provided the fertile “Black Belt” of soil for which the southern part of the state is named. The term changed its meaning, however, with the demographics of slavery. Booker T. Washington described the linguistic transition:
So far as I can learn, the term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the colour of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturaly rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later, and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense — that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white.
By 1870, the Black Belt hosted forty percent of the state’s population. Montgomery stood close to the center of gravity, but without significant industries other than extraction-model cotton monoculture it was only a matter of time before the region declined. The failure of Reconstruction and the era of Jim Crow led to mass emigration; African-American blues musicians sang about Chicago, where opportunities were at least better than sharecropping. Among the white political class, Negro education was seen as a waste of resources; this retarded economic development and set public priorities that remain in place today.
For the boll weevil very nearly destroyed cotton in Alabama altogether, but Montgomery, which now centralized almost all political power in the state, remained the center of political power. Today, southern Alabama is a timber products production hub; designed to prop up fading aristocratic pretensions, the state’s regressive tax scheme mainly benefits owners of pine forests — men like Giuce Slawson, longtime Republican who favors the Roy Moore and Tim James brand of politics.
Meanwhile, the center of population and industry are in the Birmingham-Huntsville corridor hours to the North. Monuments of the Civil Rights Era cohabit with historical ghosts still haunting the state. Goat Hill is no longer at the center of Alabama, but still stands at the center of regressive politics and power. That story is rarely told by Alabama’s press, which is why I am raising the funds to cover this historic session. If you value citizen journalism and would like to help a new narrative emerge in the Heart of Dixie, you can use PayPal through the widget below. Thank you for your contribution!
Adding: some people were having trouble with the widget, so I’ve chucked it.
