page_title: Demopolis, Alabama
section_title: Civil War and aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Demopolis, Alabama / History / Civil War and aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: Rooster Hall in Demopolis, Alabama, United States. Built as the Presbyterian church in 1843, it was used for a short time during Federal Reconstruction as the Marengo County courthouse. It was sold by the church in 1869. After being acquired by the city, it was leased to the Demopolis Opera Association in 1876 and used as the Demopolis Opera House until 1902. In 2010, it continues to be owned by the city and used for a variety of functions.
context_page_description: Demopolis is the largest city in Marengo County, Alabama, in southwest Alabama. The population was 7,483 at the time of the 2010 United States Census.
  The city lies at the confluence of the Black Warrior and Tombigbee rivers. It is situated atop a cliff composed of the Demopolis Chalk Formation, known locally as White Bluff, on the east bank of the Tombigbee River. It is at the center of Alabama's Canebrake region and is also within the Black Belt.
  Demopolis was founded after the fall of Napoleon's Empire and named by a group of French expatriates, a mix of exiled Bonapartists and other French migrants who had settled in the United States after the overthrow of the colonial government in Saint-Domingue following the failed Saint-Domingue expedition. The name, meaning in Greek "the People's City" or "City of the People", was chosen to honor the democratic ideals behind the endeavor. First settled in 1817, it is one of the oldest continuous settlements in Alabama. It was incorporated on December 11, 1821."
context_section_description: Marengo County, with its large number of slaveholders, was decidedly in favor of the secession from the Union and the formation of the Confederate States of America.  These feelings ran high in the county's largest town also.  Prominent secessionists included Nathan B. Whitfield, Francis S. Lyon, Goodman G. Griffin, Kimbrough C. DuBose, George B. Lyon, Dr. James D. Browder, and George E. Markham.  However, many other powerful men in town had opposed secession, including Benjamin Glover Shields, William H. Lyon, Jr., William B. Jones, Pearson J. Glover, Gaius Whitfield, Alfred Hatch, Joel C. DuBose, Robert V. Montague, and Henry Augustine Tayloe.  In the end, however, most men on both sides of the argument joined in the Confederate cause once secession was inevitable.
  With the start of the Civil War, several Confederate companies drew heavily from the population of the Demopolis area and Marengo County.  These included the 4th, 11th, 21st, 23rd, and 43rd Alabama Infantry Regiments in addition to the 8th Alabama Cavalry, Company E of the Jeff Davis Legion, and Selden's Battery.  During the course of the war, more of these men would be lost to exhaustion, disease, and malnutrition than to battle.  The city itself, on two navigable rivers and a railroad, became home to a number of Confederate installations and offices.  These included commissary and quartermaster offices and warehouses, engineers' offices and workshops, a large ordnance depot, two large hospitals, offices of the medical purveyor of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, and a huge military encampment at the fairgrounds in Webb's Bend.  These brought in thousands of soldiers into town at a time, one that had just over a thousand of its own inhabitants prior to the war, putting an enormous strain on food and accommodations in the town.  Many hundreds of the soldiers who died in the hospitals during the war were buried in a Confederate cemetery on the south end of Webb's Bend, but the site is underwater today, following the damming of the river below Demopolis in the 20th century.
  After the loss of its primary east-west railroad during the war, the Confederate government completed the Alabama and Mississippi Rivers Railroad from Selma through Demopolis and on to Meridian, Mississippi in 1862.  The project had been in the works since the 1850s, but several miles between Demopolis and Uniontown had not been finished when war erupted.  As the war raged in all directions around Demopolis in 1864, the city was subjected to a huge influx of war refugees. Nathan B. Whitfield noted in his journal that those from Mobile had taken every available vacant house and the others were crowded with natives along with their descendants and relatives.
  March 1865 saw Demopolis preparing to defend the town against Union threats, with the fortification of key positions.  Three circular batteries, surrounded by earthworks, were constructed and other fortifications built across the southern reaches of town.  With the impending fall of Selma in early April, during Wilson's Raid, all of the railroad's rolling stock was sent full of supplies westward through Demopolis and on to Meridian. A flotilla of eighteen Confederate gunboats and packet ships were relocated to the Tombigbee River at Demopolis around this same time.  These included the CSS Nashville, CSS Morgan, CSS Baltic, the Southern Republic, Black Diamond, Admiral, Clipper, Farrand, Marengo and St. Nicholas.
  With the surrender of the last of the Confederates, Demopolis found itself a much different city from what it had been prior to the war.  At the end of May 1865, the townspeople learned that an occupying force of Federal soldiers, the 5th Minnesota Infantry, were en route to occupy the town. Once there, they occupied the former fairgrounds.  Despite the usual unpleasantness associated with the occupation of many defeated Southern towns, two of the Minnesota commanders, Colonel William B. Gere and General Lucius Frederick Hubbard apparently came to be well-liked by the townspeople.  Despite some bright sp
caption: Rooster Hall in 2010, it was built in 1843 as the Presbyterian church and then served as the county courthouse from 1868–71.
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