History of slavery in Alabama

Like its neighbors, the Alabama Territory was fertile ground for the surging cotton crop, and soon became one of the major destinations for African-American slaves who were being shipped to the Southeastern United States.

Following the patenting of the cotton gin (in 1793), the War of 1812, and the defeat and expulsion of the Creek Nation in the 1810s, European-American settlement in Alabama was intensified, as was the presence of slavery on newly established plantations in the territory.

[15]: 99–100 Slavery had been theoretically abolished by President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation which proclaimed, in 1863, that only slaves located in territories that were in rebellion from the United States were free.

Chattel slavery was officially abolished in the United States, following the end of the American Civil War by the Thirteenth Amendment which took effect on December 18, 1865.

Contract labor systems were put into place in southern states that forced freed blacks to work in jobs that they could not legally quit, left them permanently in debt, and which often involved violent physical punishment by white property owners.