page_title: History of Alabama
section_title: European colonization
hierarchical_section_title: History of Alabama / European colonization
caption_attribution_description: English: Mobile, Alabama in 1725. Profile and Elevation Map of Fort Condé at Mobile.
context_page_description: Alabama became a state of the United States of America on December 14, 1819. After Indian Removal forcibly displaced most Southeast tribes to west of the Mississippi River to what was then called Indian Territory, European-American arrived in large numbers, bringing or buying African Americans in the domestic slave trade.
  In antebellum Alabama, wealthy planters created large cotton plantations which depended on the labor of enslaved Africans. Tens of thousands of slaves were transported to and sold in the state by slave traders who purchased them in the Upper South. In the mountains and foothills, poorer whites practiced subsistence farming.
  The state's wealthy planters considered slavery essential to their economy. As one of the largest slaveholding states, Alabama was among the first six states to secede. It declared its secession in January 1861 and joined the Confederate States of America in February. During the ensuing American Civil War Alabama had moderate levels of warfare. The population suffered economic losses and hardships as a result of the war. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed all enslaved people in Confederate states.
context_section_description: The Spanish were the first Europeans to enter Alabama, claiming land for their Crown. They named the region as La Florida, which extended to the southeast peninsular state now bearing the name.
  Although a member of Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition of 1528 may have entered southern Alabama, the first fully documented visit was by explorer Hernando de Soto. In 1539 he made an arduous expedition along the Coosa, Alabama and Tombigbee rivers.
  The Alabama region at the period of European contact is best described as a collection of moderately sized native chiefdoms (such as the Coosa chiefdom on the upper Coosa River and the Tuskaloosa chiefdom on the lower Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Alabama Rivers), interspersed with completely autonomous villages and tribal groups. Many of the settlements de Soto encountered had platform mounds and villages fortified with defensive palisades with bastions for archers. The South Appalachian Mississippian culture Big Eddy phase has been tentatively identified as the protohistoric Province of Tuskaloosa encountered by the de Soto expedition in 1540. The Big Eddy phase Taskigi Mound is a platform mound and fortified village site located at the confluence of the Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Alabama Rivers near Wetumpka, Alabama. It is preserved as part of the Fort Toulouse-Fort Jackson State Historic Site and is one of the locations included on the University of Alabama Museums "Alabama Indigenous Mound Trail".
  The English also laid claims to the region north of the Gulf of Mexico. Charles II of England included most of the territory of modern Alabama in the Province of Carolina, with land granted to certain of his favorites by the charters of 1663 and 1665. English traders from Carolina frequented the valley of the Alabama River as early as 1687 to trade for deerskins with the Native American peoples.
  The French also colonized the region. In 1702 they founded a settlement on the Mobile River near its mouth, constructing Fort Louis.  For the next nine years this was the French seat of government of New France, or La Louisiane (Louisiana). In 1711, they abandoned Fort Louis because of repeated flooding. Settlers rebuilt a fort on higher ground known as Fort Conde. This was the start of what developed as present-day Mobile, the first permanent European settlement in Alabama. Biloxi was another early French settlement on the Gulf Coast, to the west in what is now Mississippi.
  The French and the English contested the region, each attempting to forge strong alliances with Indian tribes. To strengthen their position, defend their Indian allies, and draw other tribes to them, the French established the military posts of Fort Toulouse, near the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers, and Fort Tombecbe on the Tombigbee River.
  The French and the English engaged in competition for Indian trade in what is now the state of Alabama between roughly the 1690s and the 1750s, at which point the French and Indian War broke out. It was the North American front of the Seven Years' War between these two nations in Europe.  Though the French claimed the territory as their own and attempted to rule it from Fort Toulouse, so as to engage in trade with the Indians, English traders based out of the Carolinas infiltrated the region, also engaging in trade. The Chickasaw frequently favored the English in this contest.
  Overall, during this time the English proved to be the better traders and colonizers. They operated independently, while the French government was more directly involved in its colonies. On this note Edmund Burke would later note that English colonists in America would owe their freedom more "to [the Crown's] carelessness than to its design". This was a policy referred to as "salutary neglect". The distance between the colonies and the home countries meant they could always operate with some freedom. 
  The English Crown's grant of Georgia to Oglethorpe and his associates in 1732 included a portion of what is now northern Alabama. In 1739, Oglethorpe visited the Creek Indians west of the Chattahoochee River and made a
caption: 1725 map of Mobile, Alabama's first permanent European settlement
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