The area that includes Henry County had historically been occupied by people of the Lower Creek Confederacy, who now prefer to be known as the Muscogee.

It was occupied for thousands of years before that by varying cultures of indigenous peoples who settled primarily along the waterways.

Between 1763 and 1783, the area that is now Henry County, Alabama was under the jurisdiction of the colony of British West Florida.

The United States acquired it from Britain after gaining independence in the American Revolutionary War.

As population increased in the region, areas of it were taken to organize the present counties of Barbour, Coffee, Covington, Crenshaw, Dale, Geneva, Houston, and Pike.

After Reconstruction, conservative Democratic Party whites regained power in the state legislature and passed Jim Crow laws to suppress African Americans.

They also used intimidation and violence to discourage voting, as the freedmen allied with the Republican Party, which they credited with achieving their emancipation and granting of the franchise.

From 1877 to 1950, whites lynched 13 African Americans in the county, most in the decades on either side of the turn of the 20th century.

[7] Mechanization and other changes resulted in population losses, especially from 1940 to 1970, as many African Americans left in the Great Migration, seeking to escape the oppression of Jim Crow and gain work in northern, midwestern and western industrial cities.

The last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the county was favorite son Jimmy Carter of Georgia in 1980.

The electorate has become more polarized in recent times, with Joe Biden winning less than thirty percent in 2020.

Rural conservative whites had left the Democratic Party following its support of civil rights laws and the movement in the 1960s; many disagreed with its socially liberal positions.

The political affiliations are strongly associated with ethnicity, as African Americans favor the Democratic Party but are a minority in the county.

[19] During the long period of African-American disenfranchisement in the 20th century, the conservative whites of Henry continued their well-established tradition of voting for Democratic candidates, and kept it as part of the "Solid South".

In 1964, Barry Goldwater was the first Republican candidate to carry the county as whites began to shift their alliances.