University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2019 Alabama's Public Wilderness: Reconstruction, Natural Resources, and the End of the Southern Commons, 1866-1905 Joshua Stephen Hodge University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Hodge, Joshua Stephen, "Alabama's Public Wilderness: Reconstruction, Natural Resources, and the End of the Southern Commons, 1866-1905. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2019. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5334 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Joshua Stephen Hodge entitled "Alabama's Public Wilderness: Reconstruction, Natural Resources, and the End of the Southern Commons, 1866-1905." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. Ernest F. Freeberg, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Derek H. Alderman, Robert J. Norrell, Carl T. Olsson Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Alabama's Public Wilderness: Reconstruction, Natural Resources, and the End of the Southern Commons, 1866-1905 A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Joshua Stephen Hodge May 2019 ii Copyright © 2019 by Joshua Hodge All rights reserved. iii Dedication For Erica and Hazel. iv Abstract “Alabama’s Public Wilderness: Reconstruction, Natural Resources, and the End of the Southern Commons, 1850-1905,” examines the environmental history of the longleaf pine forest in nineteenth-century Alabama. The research draws on newspapers and census reports, and the records of a federal land office in the state’s capitol. Once the domain of innumerable American Indian tribes, the public lands owned by the federal government became a common resource for a range of people in the antebellum period, used for foraging, grazing, and squatting. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republican legislators passed the Southern Homestead Act, which reserved southern public lands – numbered at some 47-million acres in 1865 – for African Americans naturalized by the Fourteenth Amendment, and for small-scale white settlers. This experiment in promoting the Republican goal of “free soil” failed. Poor soil conditions and a wave of white backlash doomed the Act, and its repeal by ex-Confederate Democrats in 1876 opened these marginalized lands to direct purchase. Northern lumber companies came, bought much of the remaining public domain, and within two decades cut down the ancient longleaf forest. A new generation of scientific experts first promoted this economic development, and later raised concerns about the environmental devastation of poorly regulated logging. A once-great forest, with its original inhabitants removed, became a space for democracy, but the southern captains of industry privatized even these most rural places on the road to the Jim Crow Era. This dissertation argues that a pitched battle between the forces of industrial capitalism and egalitarian democracy took place not only in city centers or scientific laboratories, but in the “middle of nowhere.” In the nineteenth century, the public domain – an area cleared of its original inhabitants, then held-in-trust by the federal government, used but unsettled, and not owned in fee- v simple by its citizens – became an arena where industrialists and citizens alike sought to bend natural resources, namely land, lumber, and minerals, to their own economic benefits. vi Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Into the Wilderness ...................................................................................................................... 21 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 21 The Environmental and Human Context of the Territory that became Alabama ............................ 24 The National Land System and Territorial Development in Alabama ................................................ 33 Antebellum Alabama: Settlers in the Longleaf ........................................................................................ 47 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................... 60 Chapter 2: Dividing the Wilderness .............................................................................................................. 61 Railroad Development and the State ........................................................................................................ 64 Swamp Land, Pre-Emption, and the Problem of Public Land Administration ................................. 71 Alabama and the Democratic Fissure ....................................................................................................... 81 The Civil War, the Republican Congress, and the Homestead Acts .................................................... 84 Chapter 3: Reconstructing the Land Office ................................................................................................. 90 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 90 Reconstruction in Alabama ........................................................................................................................ 95 The Southern Homestead Act of 1866.................................................................................................. 100 Alabama’s Land Offices ........................................................................................................................... 106 Reconstructing Land Use in Alabama ................................................................................................... 116 Repeal ......................................................................................................................................................... 122 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 126 Chapter 4: The Industrialized Wilderness ................................................................................................. 127 The New South in the Southern Longleaf ............................................................................................ 132 Science in the New South ........................................................................................................................ 137 Lumber Companies from Inside and Outside the South ................................................................... 143 Alabama’s Land Offices during “Cut-out and Get-out” .................................................................... 148 Conclusion: Wilderness Reimagined .......................................................................................................... 156 Exploring the Reimagined Wilderness .................................................................................................. 157 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................... 163 Vita .................................................................................................................................................................. 171 vii List of Figures Figure 1. Alabama Soils. .................................................................................................................................. 25 Figure 2. Mississipi Region Map, 1814. ........................................................................................................ 36 Figure 3. Alabama County Map, 1824. ......................................................................................................... 42 Figure 4. Alabama Map, 1856. ....................................................................................................................... 59 1 Introduction At the end of the Civil War a fierce debate raged over the redistribution of plantation lands to people emancipated from slavery. Once William Tecumseh Sherman issued General Field Order No. 15, freed people expected its promise of “forty acres and a mule” to become a reality in the wake of the Union general’s fiery march from upcountry Georgie to the eastern seaboard. The expectation spread quickly through slave communities across the U.S. South as the war concluded. After Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson rescinded Sherman’s