Hubler history W. R. Hubler, Jr., M. D

The HUBLER Family in Alabama

Alabama

Hunter-gatherers were the earliest inhabitants of the area now called Alabama. Native Americans dwelled in northeastern Alabama for more than 10,000 years, and about 6,000 BCE very organized groups, Mound Builders, built large the ceremonial earthen platforms, some of which persist today. That culture inexplicably disappeared, when Europeans first came in the 16th century, Alabama was well populated. The local Native American nations had highly developed sociopolitical groups with complex trade and family networks. Central locations, often fortified towns, were hubs of economic, social, religious, and political activity. Agriculture centered around the cultivation of beans, corn, and squash. The pottery, stone carvings, and metalwork of these peoples show sophisticated artistic skill and complex symbolic systems.

Alabama was named after the Alabama River, which was named after a Native American tribe that inhabited the region at the time the first Europeans arrived. The name is believed to be a combination of two Choctaw words roughly meaning vegetation (alba) and gatherer (amo), which were applied to the Alabama, or Alibamon, people. The first Europeans to reach Alabama were Spanish explorers looking for gold. Alonso Alvarez de Piñeda and Pánfilo de Narváez explored the coast early in the 16th century, and in 1539, Hernando de Soto led the first expedition into the interior. He sought gold. After winning some battles (and losing others) and being racked with diseases, famine and injury, de Soto headed home empty-handed. De Soto died near the Mississippi River, and only a small number of his force of several hundred survived to return in 1543 to their starting point in Mexico. In 1559, Don Tristán de Luna with 500 soldiers and 1,000 Spanish colonists from Mexico, arrived in Mobile Bay to start a settlement. However, they abandoned the colony and returned to Mexico. The local population adopted the Spanish made no further effort to settle the area, but their horses, hogs, and cattle, and their diseases continued to decimate the Native Americans.

The Native Americans had no immunity to the new diseases brought by the Europeans, and their societies were drastically changed. Thousands of people became ill and died. Many towns and villages were abandoned. The survivors merged into larger groups, so that by the 18th century few of the peoples that de Soto met were still organized under the same names. Most of the native Alabamians became members of four major Native American nations: the Cherokee in the north, the Chickasaw in the northwest, the Choctaw in the southwest, and the Creek Confederacy in the center and southeast.

The first successful European colonizers in Alabama were the French. In 1682 they claimed the huge land (that they called Louisiane), which extended from the Gulf Coast to Canada and included Alabama. The first French settlements were fortified trading posts—the first in Alabama was Fort Louis de la Louisiane, commonly called La Mobile, built in 1702 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, on the Mobile River. This fort was the seat of French government for Louisiana until 1711, when Bienville moved the colony downriver to the site of present-day Mobile. Called Fort Condé, this settlement was the capital until 1719, when the seat of government was moved into present-day Mississippi. Many colonists arrived from France and Canada. Black slaves were introduced to clear the fields after 1719. French traders moved inland, building Fort Toulouse (1717) and Fort de Tombecbé (1736). Traders from Great Britain, who were rivals of the French and disputed the boundary of Louisiana, arrived in Alabama from South Carolina and later from their new colony, Georgia. French influence waned as the Native Americans learned that British traders offered better products than the French and demanded fewer deerskins in exchange.

Great Britain and France fought a series of wars in the 18th century that climaxed with the French and Indian War (1754-1763). Great Britain was the decisive winner and concluded a peace treaty that removed the French from the North American continent. Mobile was incorporated into West Florida, a colony that Spain ceded to Great Britain in 1763. All of Alabama north of West Florida became part of the Lands Reserved for the Indians, administered by a British superintendent for Native American affairs. White settlement in this reservation without the permission of the Native Americans was forbidden by the king’s order. British colonists who lived on the frontier resented the ban on settlement. They felt this was an arbitrary infringement on the original colonial grants, most of which had vague or unlimited western boundaries.

During the American Revolution (1775-1783), the Cherokee and Creek supported the British against the Americans. The Spanish, who supported the Americans, captured Mobile in 1780 over British and Native American resistance. At the end of the Revolution, West Florida was returned to Spain and interior Alabama was turned over to the United States. Georgia claimed most of Alabama as part of its original grant. Settlers from Georgia encroached on the lands of the Native Americans.

For several years, the United States and Spain disputed the southern boundary of the United States. Finally, in 1795, the two countries agreed on a boundary that still forms most of the border between Alabama and Florida.

Three years later in 1798, the Congress of the United States created Mississippi Territory, comprising most of present-day Mississippi and Alabama. In 1800, nearly all of Alabama was still controlled by Native Americans, but that soon changed. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the United States federal government built the Federal Road to connect the new territory with the national capital at Washington, D.C., and for the first time, access from the east was relatively easy. Settlers came to Alabama by the thousands, which further crowded the Native Americans.

By 1817, so many white settlers had migrated into the eastern (Alabama) part of Mississippi Territory that they seemed likely to get political control of the whole territory. Citizens living along the Mississippi River, who had dominated the territorial government until then, were eager to separate from the Alabama portion. Thus, when Mississippi became a state in 1817, Alabama became a separate territory with its capital at Saint Stephens. On December 14, 1819, it was admitted to the federal Union as the 22nd state.

An influx of settlers from Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina filled Alabama during the first years of statehood. The population more than doubled (from 127,901 in 1820 to 309,527 in 1830). Small subsistence farms and large cotton plantations were established as caravans of slaves, mules and household goods clogged the roads and trails into the state. Cotton production became paramount. Driven by the cotton boom, planters bought land and slaves and sold their crops to transporters who shipped them to Mobile or New Orleans. To grow cotton, Alabama adopted the plantation system, organized around slave labor that had been developed in Virginia. Thus, the slave population of the state grew greatly from 1830 to 1860. A lifestyle based on cotton wealth developed, and an elite group of wealthy planters dominated Alabama society.

However, slave owners were a small minority (only 6.4 percent of the white population in 1860) and did not control the votes of the common people. The mostly non-slave owning small farmers dominated statewide elections. Slavery was one of the most divisive political issues in the U.S. Congress during the first half of the 19th century. Many senators and congressmen from the Northern states pressed to end slavery, both because it was considered immoral and because white labor could not compete with unpaid black labor. Members of Congress from the Southern states, including Alabama, believed that slavery was essential to their agricultural system and that the North was trying to dominate the national economy. Sectional tension rose to a furor. In the 1850s many Alabamians came to believe that secession was the only way to protect what they believed were Southern rights, including the right to own slaves, and Alabama became the fourth state to vote for secession on January 11, 1861, and about a month later, it was a charter member of the Confederate States of America.

Most Alabamians supported the Confederacy in the American Civil War (1861-1865) that followed. Union forces invaded several times and occupied parts of north Alabama, and Union cavalry raids swept through the state late in the war and caused devastation. The Confederacy surrendered in 1865, and Union troops were stationed in the Southern states. A new voter registration excluded many former Confederates and Northerners and pro-Union Southerners (carpetbaggers and scalawags), joined with blacks to form the state Republican Party and take control of the government. The new government adopted a new state constitution, and Alabama was readmitted to the Union in 1868. However, many whites opposed military occupation and rule by carpetbaggers and scalawags based on black votes. The Ku Klux Klan and similar violent groups were organized to intimidate blacks and Republicans. Because of the violence, which drove both black and white Republicans from the polls, but also because of the high taxes imposed by the ambitious Reconstruction government, the Democrats regained control of state government in 1874. This ended Reconstruction in Alabama.

With slavery abolished, blacks and whites had to adjust to wage labor. Landless, most blacks and many poor whites had to work for large landowners, who had little cash to pay them. Under these conditions, a system of sharecropping and tenant farming evolved. A sharecropper raised part of the landlord’s crop and was paid a share of the profit after deductions for living expenses and the cost of tools and supplies. A tenant farmer sold what he raised and paid rent to the landlord out of the profit. The sharecropper or tenant took what was left or, if any, and borrowed to keep going for another year. Thus, the tenant farmers and sharecroppers fell into an endless cycle of debt. When widespread mechanization of cotton production made sharecropping and tenant farming unprofitable for the landlords in the early 20^th century, the system begin to disappear.

By 1900, iron and steel were the most important industries in the state. United States Steel Corporation moved into the Birmingham district in 1907. Alabama’s economic base continued to diversify after World War II. Through the 1970s, the rural population and the number of farms decreased as people moved to urban areas. The remaining farms were mostly large agribusinesses. In the 1990s, Alabama’s economy was sluggish despite investments by manufacturing firms to modernize facilities and equipment. At the end of the century Alabama faces many of the problems that plague other areas, including widespread poverty, rising crime rates, and unemployment.

Alabama is also known as the “Heart of Dixie” and the “Yellowhammer State.” Both nicknames date from the American Civil War (1861-1865)—the first from its physical and psychological position in the Confederate States of America and the latter from a company of Alabama soldiers who decked their uniforms with yellow trimmings that resembled the wing patches of the yellowhammer. According to the 1990 national census, Alabama had a population of 4,040,587 (22nd among the states). Whites are 73.6 percent of the people; and blacks 25.2 percent.