The Founding of Alabama: Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County

By Frances Cabaniss Roberts

The most thorough history of Alabama’s Madison County region, widely available for the first time

The 1956 dissertation by Frances Cabaniss Roberts is a classic text on Alabama history that continues to be cited by southern historians. Roberts was the first woman to earn a PhD from the University of Alabama’s history department. In the 1950s, she was the only full-time faculty member at what is now the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she was appointed chair of the history department in 1966.

Roberts’s dissertation, “Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County,” remains the most thorough history of the region yet produced. While certainly a product of its era, Roberts work is visionary in its own way and offers a useful look at Alabama’s rise to statehood. Thomas Reidy, editor of this edition, has kept Roberts’s words intact except for correction of minor typographical errors and helpful additions to the notes and citations. His introduction describes both the value of Roberts’s decades of service to UAH and the importance of her dissertation over time. While highlighting the great intrinsic value of Roberts’s research and writing, Reidy also notes its significance in demonstrating how the practice of history—its methods, priorities, and values—has evolved over the intervening decades.

In her examination of Madison County, Roberts spotlights exemplars of civic performance and good community behavior, giving readers one of the earliest accountings of the antebellum southern middle class. Unlike many historians of her time, Roberts displays an interest in both the “common folks” and leaders who built the region—rural and urban—and created the institutions that shaped Madison County. She examines the contributions of merchants, shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, architects, craftsmen, planters, farmers, elected and appointed officials, board members, and entrepreneurs.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780817392734

Book preview

THE FOUNDING OF ALABAMA

THE FOUNDING OF ALABAMA

BACKGROUND and FORMATIVE PERIOD in the GREAT BEND and MADISON COUNTY

Frances Cabaniss Roberts

EDITED and with an

INTRODUCTION by

Thomas Reidy

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Garamond

Cover image: Detail of The Big Spring by William Frye, an early view of Huntsville in the 1850s; courtesy of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library.

Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2043-0

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9273-4

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Early Beginnings in the Great Bend

2. Thirst for Land in the Bend

3. To the Land of Milk and Honey

4. Boundaries and Fee-Simple Land Titles for Old Madison County

5. Justice and a Seat of Justice for Madison County

6. Madison’s Expansionists and the Expansion of Madison

7. Madison County’s Political Affairs: Local, Territorial, State, and National, 1810–1830

8. Economic and Social Development of Madison County, 1810–1830

9. Summary and Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Figure 1. Frances always wanted to be a teacher. On June 2, 1937, she graduated from Livingston State Teachers College, now the University of West Alabama.

Figure 2. In 1956 Dr. Roberts became the first woman to earn a PhD in history at the University of Alabama.

Figure 3. Between 1937 and 2000, Frances Roberts watched the city of Huntsville grow from a struggling mill town to a national leader in aeronautics and technology.

Figure 4. Dr. Roberts was a community leader and a frequent speaker who was involved in numerous historical, charitable, and betterment programs throughout the state.

Figure 5. Dr. Frances Cabaniss Roberts, 1916–2000.

Figure 6. Map of Madison County, Alabama, showing original Indian boundary lines and other boundary lines up to 1887. G. W. Jones & Sons, 1932.

Acknowledgments

In spring 2017, when my good friend and fellow historian John Kvach introduced me to Julian Butler, a local attorney and the chair of the North Alabama bicentennial commission, I could not have predicted the new turn my life would take. Mr. Butler suggested that we should publish Frances C. Roberts’s 1956 dissertation, Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County as a book, one that would hopefully be released during 2019, Alabama’s bicentennial year. For my part, I was very familiar with the work and with Dr. Roberts and needed no convincing on the merits of Butler’s proposal.

The initial challenges to bringing the dissertation into the twenty-first century were mostly mechanical. The dissertation was 500 typewritten pages that needed to be converted into a Microsoft Word document. To do this, there were really only two choices: one was to use an OCR (optical character recognition) reader, which is fast but imperfect; the other was to retype it. We opted for the latter and to the project’s great fortune, we were able to cajole Jessica Brodt, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, to work with us. Jessica did more than type pages, though. She commented on text and served as our assistant editor.

Frances Roberts touched many lives on this planet, but perhaps no one knew her as well as her colleague and protégé Dr. Johanna Shields. Johanna was kind enough to read and comment on my introduction and her points were, as always, precise, salient and spot on. Additionally, as a trustee for Frances Roberts’s estate, she was designated the caretaker of all documents and papers. In this role, Dr. Shields helped shepherd the final contract through the University of Alabama Press.

John Severn and Kevin Gray each read and commented on the introduction and I thank them for their fine feedback. I’d like to give a special thanks to Judge Lynwood Smith, Frances Roberts’s friend and neighbor, for his encouragement throughout the process.

Many people in Huntsville can tell you colorful stories about Frances Roberts. By the end of her life she had become somewhat eccentric, living alone in her antebellum home with her clowder of cats. But I was less curious about that Dr. Roberts and more interested in discovering the many secrets hidden in her vast historical record. The Frances Cabaniss Roberts Collection is housed on the ground floor of the Salmon Library at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The collection is a rich trove of manuscripts, documents, photographs, books, and personal items that Dr. Roberts saved during her lifetime. In all, her papers occupy 131 linear feet and 156 archival boxes. Kudos to Reagan Grimsley, Head of Special Collections and Archives at UAH, for providing easy access to the Roberts collection.

In a similar vein, a big hug must go out to my good friend Nancy Rohr, who along with Anne Coleman organized and archived the Roberts collection. A nod as well to Teresa Gray, Public Services Archivist for the Special Collections and University Archives at Vanderbilt University, for locating correspondence between Frances Roberts and one of her mentors, Frank Lawrence Owsley.

My introduction benefitted from a series of interviews conducted in 2008 by UAH student Charles Westbrook. Mr. Westbrook spoke to many of Dr. Roberts’s former colleagues, including Eleanor Hutchins, John and Carolyn White, and, of course, Johanna Shields. I cited portions of these interviews in my introduction.

The University of Alabama Press was the natural publishing outlet for The Founding of Alabama because, among other things, this is a story about the creation of the state by an author who was the first woman to graduate with a PhD in history from the University of Alabama. Thanks to my friends Donna Baker and Dan Waterman at UA Press. (Incidentally, Donna and I studied together in Tuscaloosa and earned our PhDs the same year.) Thanks to both of you for seeing this work through to completion.

My editor, Joanna Jacobs, did the hard work of cleaning and correcting (mostly my) errors, which was no small feat. I would like to thank her as well as our copyeditor, Laurie Varma, for creating a finished product that just might have satisfied Dr. Roberts’s exacting standards!

My wife, Anne Marie, deserves more than a thank you for supporting my efforts while simultaneously moving her medical practice in 2017. Her energy continues to amaze me and although we have been married now for over thirty-seven years, I am not altogether certain she is human.

Introduction

Thomas Reidy

Huntsville, 1819: Just four weeks before the constitutional convention was scheduled to assemble in Huntsville, President James Monroe paid an unexpected visit to the community while on an inspection tour of the defense of the southeastern area. A public dinner, given in his honor at the Huntsville Inn on June 3rd, was attended by all the dignitaries of the Bend of the Tennessee. At this time, cannons were discharged, patriotic songs sung, speeches made, and toasts drunk to a wide variety of subjects, including the president, the Constitution of the United States, the late treaty with Spain, the army and navy, the Territory of Alabama, and the fair country women.

Frances Cabaniss Roberts completed Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County in 1956 as a dissertation in partial fulfillment of her requirements for a doctorate in history from the University of Alabama. Once finished, Roberts became the first woman to earn a PhD in history from the university. Accounts such as this vivid description of Monroe’s visit from chapter 7 make The Founding of Alabama catnip for students of Alabama history. In its pages, one can find tales of Andrew Jackson battling Creek warriors, stories about white settlers taking up arms against federal authorities while keeping local tribes at bay, reports on political hotheads dueling in the public square, and census figures revealing a growing number of enslaved blacks who were making northern Alabama a paradise for cotton growers. The title of her dissertation refers to a broad dip in the Tennessee River that forms the southern border of an area between the cities of Guntersville and Florence and that encompasses today’s Madison, Morgan, Limestone, and Lauderdale Counties. The work is exceptional both for its attention to detail and its description of the processes that forged a thriving northern Alabama out of dense woodlands. Roberts wove a magnificent tapestry of life—from prehistoric times until 1830—in early Huntsville and Madison County. Her dissertation is a classic study of antebellum Alabama.

Scholars have long recognized the seminal quality of Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County. But until today it has been available only to those willing to scroll through reels of microfilm or travel to archives in Alabama.¹ Dozens upon dozens of historians have done just that over the years, drawing upon pieces of the dissertation for their own scholarly purposes.²

While the work was unique in the scope of its historical discovery, its author, Frances Cabaniss Roberts, was an Alabama original. Knowing a bit about the author and the context in which she anchored this magisterial study will help readers appreciate The Founding of Alabama. Born in Gainesville, Alabama, on December 19, 1916, Frances was the middle of Richard H. Roberts and Mary Watson Roberts’s three daughters. Her father ran a mercantile store in town, managed his properties, and raised cotton. Frances’s mother was a teacher. Moreover, Mary was a Cabaniss, one of the original families to settle in northern Alabama, a planter family from Tennessee who would become large cotton producers and slaveholders. Charles Cabaniss, Frances’s grandfather, was one of a quintet of planters who purchased prime land around Hunt’s Springs in the federal auction of 1809. He paid $23.50 an acre, nearly four times more than what others paid for the rest of the acreage. This land is now part of downtown Huntsville. Between 1815 and 1817, Cabaniss developed Madison County’s first cotton spinning factory at his farm, two and one-half miles northeast of the town on Barren Fork on Flint River. Much of the Cabaniss wealth had dried up by the time Frances was born, and more of what was left would be eaten up by the 1920s boll weevil infestation. Yet she grew up as a Cotton Bale Aristocrat and, as we shall see, felt the responsibility of class status throughout her life.³

Despite her family’s genteel poverty, growing up in a rural setting suited Frances. Gainesville, a town in Sumter County, is located in the Black Belt along the Mississippi border. At the time the Roberts family welcomed Frances into the world, the village’s declining population stood at less than 500 souls. The Roberts’s property was modest, assessed in 1937 at a value of $5,180—not an insignificant valuation for the height of the Great Depression but a far cry from the Cabaniss clan’s antebellum heyday. Roberts fondly remembered spending time swimming in the Tombigbee River, hunting squirrels with her 22-caliber rifle, and driving a hay truck at ten years old. A photograph of a toddler in the arms of her black caregiver (found among others saved in a folder from Frances’s childhood) reminds us, too, that she grew up in the Jim Crow South, where mammies and other help were widely used in the homes of middle- and upper-class whites.⁴

As young Frances enjoyed the diversions of a rural Alabama childhood, she signaled early on that she had a desire to teach. She often spent time alone inventing games and playing teacher. By three, she was giving lessons on the ABCs to her pets under a chinaberry tree in her backyard. In 1932, at age sixteen, she graduated from State Normal Senior High School in Livingston (today’s University of West Alabama), and five years later she received a bachelor of science degree from Livingston College. While working on her degree, Roberts landed her first classroom assignment at nearby Ward Grammar School. The rules at the school forbade teachers from smoking, drinking, going to movies, or being Roman Catholic but, she confessed, I broke all the rules.⁵

In the summer of 1937, the University of Alabama accepted Roberts into its extension program to study history—extension classes did not require regular attendance in Tuscaloosa—and this allowed her to finish her bachelor’s degree and pursue a master’s while continuing to teach. When her acceptance letter arrived in the mail, she noted that the university had misspelled her name, using the masculine form Francis. In fact, correspondence over the next couple years continued to spell her name with an i, not an e. Frances never corrected the institution—not surprising given the difficulty women had developing professional careers at that time. To this day it is unclear whether the university realized it was admitting a woman into the history program when it accepted Roberts.

Yet we can assume the University of Alabama knew who Frances was by the time she graduated in 1940. For her master’s thesis, titled An Experiment in the Emancipation of Slaves by an Alabama Planter, she used old Cabaniss family papers extensively as primary sources and, years after she finished, donated dozens of boxes of historical material to the school’s archives. Today those documents take up thirty-one linear feet of shelf space at the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library at the University of Alabama. After Roberts received her diploma, Professor A. B. Moore fired off a congratulatory letter to her father, Richard H. Roberts: Our history department regards your daughter as one of the very strongest students whom we have graduated in history.⁶ Moore mentored Roberts and later advocated for her admission into the university’s doctoral history program.

In 1937, the year she began her master’s degree, Roberts moved from her parents’ home in Gainesville to Huntsville to help her great aunt. Fannie Cabaniss lived in the antebellum family home on Randolph Street in Huntsville’s tony Twickenham neighborhood. The house was built in 1832 by Roberts’s great-grandfather Septimus D. Cabaniss, the son of city founder Charles Cabaniss, and a successful lawyer and planter in his own right.⁷ Another aunt, Ellen Roberts, Frances’s father’s sister, also lived in the house. Fannie Cabaniss died shortly after the move-in, but Roberts and her aunt Ellen lived together in the same home for over thirty years. The move to Huntsville proved fortuitous. Its city schools provided greater opportunities for young teachers than did Gainesville. That and the harsh reality that the Great Depression was hitting Gainesville harder than Huntsville made Frances’s decision sensible, and once settled in she never looked back. Huntsville’s stronger economy, the development of Redstone Arsenal during World War II, and the rise of the space program in the years afterward meant Roberts had relocated to a place that could provide more outlets for someone with her drive and talents.

Those years were still to come. After being hired by the Huntsville school system, in 1937 at age twenty-one, Roberts spent the next seventeen years molding the hearts and minds of young people in her civics and social studies classes. During World War II, she developed a reputation as a demanding but fair taskmaster who maintained high expectations for her pupils. Years later she explained, I am a teacher. I help people to learn. To think through. I point the ways for them to achieve their objectives. I help them do what they hope.⁸ She did her part in the war effort by organizing student drives to collect scrap metal.⁹ Tragically, many of her Huntsville High School students were lost to the war; some returned home disfigured or were in other ways permanently impaired. Frances certainly attended many students’ funerals, which must have truly saddened her.

As was the case for most teachers in the South, Roberts’s classrooms were segregated by race. She resigned from the city schools in June 1952, a couple of years before the Supreme Court would rule in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) that separate facilities were inherently unequal, and thus she did not have to deal with the extreme racial tensions the persisted for years after the Court’s decision in white southern school districts. It would take another 10 years before Huntsville finally integrated its classrooms. Race played little part in Roberts’s published works, notable because the period from 1955 to 1965 was the height of the civil rights era, and these years coincided with Roberts’s productive period of writing. The Montgomery bus boycott was in the news for most of 1956, the year she defended her dissertation at the University of Alabama. The fifteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till had been murdered in Mississippi the year before. His assailants’ acquittal energized antisegregationists and civil rights activists across the United States. Only briefly do the issues of race and segregation appear in the pages of the book covering the history of the Huntsville’s Church of the Nativity from 1943 to 1993 (the year the volume was published).¹⁰ Because Roberts freely opined on a host of matters large and small, the fact that little discussion of race is found in her records is conspicuous.¹¹

At the same time, we should not be surprised by her reticence to discuss the difficult topic of race. A woman attempting to build a career in an academic world dominated by men might well conclude that crusading for racial equality would be counterproductive to her other goals. Likely too, but difficult to prove, was that based on her cotton aristocracy heritage, she may have been animated by paternalistic feelings toward African Americans, or a sense of noblesse oblige. In this regard, Roberts had dedicated her master’s thesis to her descendants’ efforts to manumit their bondsmen, a process that often required funding slaves’ removal to another state—in her family’s case, to Kansas. And although she never said much on the topic, ultimately her volunteerism spoke volumes. She once revealed that, While our generation of the family was never in a position to contribute a lot financially to the community, we always felt it important to make a contribution to civic . . . activities.¹²

A new era began for Roberts in 1949. It was between then and 1956 that she began to work in earnest on Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County. In 1949, she returned to graduate school, enrolling in summer classes at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Then in 1954, after taking additional graduate classes at the University of Alabama, she was accepted into its doctoral program in history. On her application for Preliminary Examinations for Admission into the Doctoral Program, she listed language proficiency in French and Statistics.¹³

Roberts was not the typical doctoral candidate. She was a woman, for one thing, and the only one in the program. She was already a driving force behind the creation of the new university center that opened in Huntsville in 1950. The center offered classes as an extension of the university in Tuscaloosa, and it was the precursor to the University of Alabama in Huntsville. While writing her dissertation, Frances taught three courses a semester, mostly to GI Bill recipients, for which she was paid an honorarium starting at $200 per class. She earned her first salary in the academic year 1953–1954 when she signed an annual contract for $3,400. Roberts remained the center’s only history professor until 1956, when the school outgrew its original home in what later became Stone Middle School. Today this site is called Campus 805, home to several craft beer companies and fittingly a popular gathering spot for current University of Alabama in Huntsville graduate students studying history and their professors.

Underlying Roberts’s herculean effort to finish her doctorate while helping to create a new university center was a passion grounded in the unshakable belief that understanding American history was everyone’s civic and moral obligation. She saw a connection between her life’s work and the founding principles that gave birth to the nation. Her classrooms were laboratories for perfecting the union established in the preamble to the US Constitution. When Roberts asked Eleanor Hutchens to join her at the university center in 1955, she was shocked that Hutchens refused. Roberts rebuked her, stating that she had a civic duty to teach. It did not take long to cajole Hutchens into joining the team. She discovered what many would learn, that when Frances Roberts asked you to do anything, it was never meant to be voluntary; it was involuntary.¹⁴

Roberts was a true patriot who believed that every American was born a debtor to the greatest democracy the world had seen and that one paid back this debt by living an educated and morally solvent life. My very life is a debt to those who have labored and thought and planned and sacrificed. . . . We are debtors for this country in which we live. We neither bought nor paid for the liberty we enjoy.¹⁵ She understood sacrifice and carried with her the memory of her student soldiers who lost their lives in World War II, as well as of those who came home damaged and were unable to fulfill their dreams.

Roberts’s faith in the American experiment was buoyed by what she saw in postwar society. In 1956 she witnessed the greatest expansion of the American economy in its history. Babies were born at unprecedented rates; it seemed nearly every house—at least in white neighborhoods—had its own television set; youngsters walked the streets with tiny transistor radios; and the city of Huntsville was building rocket ships, starting to make a name for itself. Today’s historians may scoff at Roberts’s quaint view of history; nonetheless, her interpretations of the past made her scholarship and teaching authentic and entirely honest.

But Roberts never worried about what other historians thought. She was always far more interested in the lives of her students than in the opinions of scholars. Students marveled at her passion and commitment to make their lives better through an appreciation of the past. You will never know the inspiration I and many others received from you during our Huntsville High School days, wrote Richard Carter, a Huntsville High graduate. Your support and confidence in me directly contributed to my attending a university, later receiving a law degree and thereafter practicing. Shirley Green thanked Roberts for being an inspiration: Your life was an example before me. Gail Bagwell wrote simply, You seem to be afraid of nothing—I know that strength comes from above.¹⁶ Roberts understood that if students leave a university with no sense of values, with no appreciation for the meaning of Western Civilization, then they are doomed to forever wander in the pilgrimage of life, neither positive enough to be good, nor negative enough to be evil.¹⁷

Roberts’s willingness to mentor young folks extended beyond her classroom. C. Lynwood Smith, who was appointed federal judge for the United States District Court in the northern district of Alabama during the Clinton administration, recalled an amusing but momentous event that occurred in his life during a winter break from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1962. Smith was despondent; his semester had not gone well, and in search of a sympathetic ear, he walked over to speak with Roberts, a Randolph Street neighbor. Instead of consoling the young man, she administered a tongue-lashing: Go back to school, she scolded. Get your grades high enough to transfer; and then get-the-hell out of there! You had no business going to Georgia Tech in the first place. I never did think you would make a good engineer. Wisely, Smith heeded her advice.¹⁸

When Frances Roberts finished her dissertation in 1956, she had created a work that reflected a distinct historical moment. She was very much a Cold Warrior in the sense that she rejected philosophies that she saw as subverting the ideals promised in the US Constitution. If the 1950s was a decade of choosing sides between a democratic capitalistic world and some authoritarian alternative, Roberts left no doubt which team she was on. She taught courses on communism at University of Alabama in Huntsville that outlined the flaws in that system and the inherent evils of Marxist ideology. A few short years after finishing her doctorate, Roberts proposed writing a book titled The Truth about Communism. A line from her proposal warned, To save ourselves and our nation from the clutches of a vicious, organized, materialistic force which would destroy the fundamental beliefs which we have always held as a free people, we must know the nature of this force and how to combat it.¹⁹ Her many textbooks preached the benefits of living in a democratic, capitalistic society.

Roberts’s dissertation also has a Cold War feel in its largely binary look at a society divided between whites and Indians. While the book does not tell a story of settlers vanquishing native populations and their hunting grounds, its narrative commemorates those same white men’s abilities to overcome great odds in creating capitalistic and democratic institutions that undermined the native population’s way of life. Thus, The Founding of Alabama is a microstudy of an emerging antebellum society and, more broadly, an affirmation of the blessings of western civilization. All this is in keeping with notes from her 1950s lectures. Roberts spoke of Americans being the keepers of the keys to human progress and quoted men such as Arnold Toynbee, a British historian who also wrote about the rise of western civilizations.²⁰ Roberts’s early Alabamians were more than mere pioneers. As they built cabins, tilled lands, and constructed towns, they were vanguards of human progress and western values.

Yet Roberts showed that democratic, capitalistic society did not develop easily in early Madison County and that its founders often relied on the looming presence of militia groups and federal troops. One of the strengths of The Founding of Alabama is that it asks readers to think about what law and order looked like in an emerging frontier society and what levels of coercion a community was willing to accept to achieve safety and stability. Armed militia units muster regularly in the pages of Roberts’s tome, performing a range of duties. According to Roberts, these loosely configured armed locals represented important units in the county’s early development . . . not only from the standpoint of providing defense, but also in finishing organized groups through which public affairs could be administered. At the local muster grounds located in various settlements in the county, taxes were assessed and collected, notices of elections read, politics discussed, and terms of court announced.

Still, Roberts argues that progress in the forests of Alabama came about more by settlers’ individual self-determination than through any mustering of arms. Throughout The Founding of Alabama, Roberts informs early Alabamians with a zeitgeist conforming to her own, which was fundamentally atomistic and assumed that civilization could be achieved only when citizens accepted individual responsibility for the burdens of society. Time and again, her early pioneers were able to construct the institutions necessary for lawful society—courthouses, jails, schools, newspapers, roads, stores—because of singular resolve and a very personal sense of providence.

While Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County was a product of the Cold War era, it likewise reflected the nature of historical scholarship in 1956, specifically the contributions of her mentor Frank Lawrence Owsley. For several years leading up to the completion of her dissertation, she and Owsley shared regular correspondence and became trusted friends.²¹ Owsley was sixty-seven years old when Roberts graduated. By this time, he was both renowned and vilified among scholars of southern history for his membership in a group of historians known as the Southern Agrarians. Reaching the height of their popularity in the 1930s, the Agrarians feared that southern culture was groaning under industrialism, and that if it could not restore traditional southern virtues such as manliness, duty, honor, and religion, all would be lost.²² Owsley’s most lasting contribution to the field of southern history was his insight into the yeomanry and their struggles with the planter class. In Plain Folk of the Old South (1949), he demonstrated that the antebellum South was far more than just a plantocracy, that small farmers and poor whites would use their numbers to sway political, social, and economic decisions.²³ Indeed, the plain folk spearheaded a populist movement that many refer to today as Jacksonian democracy, after the best-known southern populist, Andrew Jackson.

Like Owsley, Roberts never forgot the plain folks. In one colorful passage, she describes an annual picnic where feuds of longstanding were sometimes settled by a ‘square stand up fight’ in a ring. Whiskey was plentiful, and the gingerbread peddler of the town erected his stand nearby and sold ‘unlimited quantities’ of molasses gingerbread to the hungry army. On hand to solicit votes were the political figures engaged in local and state politics.²⁴ Roberts’s observations are especially keen when she contextualizes Madison County according to class status, as when she depicts the Royalist or the Castor Oil parties. The former group consisted of wealthy slaveholding planters who had migrated from the Broad River region of Georgia; the latter comprised heads of families who had come from Tennessee seeking better land and opportunities. In chapter 7 of The Founding of Alabama, Roberts observes that the [land] sales of 1830 were as momentous to the small farmers as the 1818 sales had been to the land speculators and planters. Whether talking about whiskey or gingerbread, the reader knows from the book’s outset who the prosperous settlers are and who are not. People such as Leroy Pope, John Williams Walker, and Clement Comer Clay, who had resources, acted individually for the benefit of the community. Those without wealth are usually depicted as relying on the Popes, Walkers, and Clays of their society to create solutions that redound to the most common of folk. The tension between the haves and have-nots is very Owsleyan.

To the extent that Roberts’s dissertation reflected the era in which it was published, today it stands as a reminder of how much historical scholarship has changed since 1956. Missing from The Founding of Alabama is a nuanced look at the southern middle class and a frank discussion about slavery, subjects that could not be overlooked in a book written today about the antebellum period. Indeed, it would be several decades after her dissertation was completed for historians to discover that the southern antebellum period had a robust middle class filled with consumers who purchased European goods, read magazines published in the North, and shared middle-class values of living a virtuous, ambitious life with their children. Though Roberts does not mention them as such, the middle class appears throughout The Founding of Alabama. They are doctors, lawyers, merchants, and clergymen, and they help build the institutions that create Madison County.²⁵

Slaveholding is quite another story. Her bibliography lists no secondary sources discussing slavery in the antebellum period. At the time she wrote Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County, Roberts was firmly in the Ulrich B. Phillips camp. Phillips’s American Negro Slavery, written in 1918, was considered the era’s definitive treatment of the subject. Phillips argued that masters had paternalistic relationships with their bondsmen and that, although slavery was not an efficient economic system, the slaves were fed and treated well. One is left to speculate on how Kenneth Stampp’s highly influential book The Peculiar Institution, published the same year Roberts finished her dissertation, might have affected her views on slavery. Stampp convincingly rebutted Phillips’s sentiments and argued that slaves exercised agency in their struggle to survive, utilizing tactics such as slowing down at work, breaking tools, setting fires to houses, poisoning meals, or staging escape attempts. Stampp also argued that the institution of slavery was neither benign nor paternalistic but rather evil and perfidious.²⁶

Lastly, in 1956 most historians did not focus much on how women experienced the past. Because none of the fairer sex became presidents, senators, plantation owners, or colonels, they seldom appeared in history books.