Editor’s note: As the Press-Register celebrates its 200th anniversary, the newspaper and AL.com are taking a decade-by-decade look at major events that shaped Mobile and Baldwin counties, the Gulf Coast and the nation during those years. Today we look back on the years from 1870 to 1879.
Circumstances had spared Mobile physical bombardment that other Southern cities endured during the Civil War; the worst damage was fire ignited by an explosion after the war had ended.
But the conflict and its aftermath took a terrible toll, nonetheless.
In 1870, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Mobile’s population stood at 32,034.
By the end of the decade, it had declined by more than 2,900, a 9.1 percent drop that was the city’s steepest in history.
“Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama,” a history of the war and its aftermath published in 1905, described severe declines in property values. It included an anecdote about a house bought in Mobile before the war for $45,000 that sold “with difficulty” in 1876 for $10,000.
By the end of the decade, federal troops had left Alabama and conservative Democrats had wrested control of Mobile from the Radical Republicans and Unionists that held sway after the war. But the city was bankrupt and its once-vibrant cotton trade was a shambles that never again would attain its pre-war level of importance.
As it seemed to do every decade in the 19th century, Mobile also contended with disease. Yellow fever outbreaks struck four times in the decade, beginning with an outbreak in 1870 that lasted until November and was fueled by smallpox, according to a 1990s Press-Register story on the history of the disease in Mobile.
The city reported several hundred cases in 1874 and another 272 in 1875. In 1878, according to that history, hundreds died from yellow fever throughout the South. Although Mobile experienced few cases, it caused havoc elsewhere. The L&N Railroad lost about $300,000 because of interruptions to its traffic. The outbreak threw 500 employees out of work, and it did not charge passengers fleeing Memphis.
Fight for control of Mobile
Newly freed slaves, teaming with moderate whites, exercised political power during the Reconstruction era for the first time ever, according to historian Michael Fitzgerald’s “Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile.”
But Fitzgerald wrote that internal divisions, economic instability and political changes at the national level doomed Reconstruction in Mobile and throughout the South.
“Almost everywhere internal struggles hastened the overthrow of Reconstruction,” he wrote. “Factionalism was a serious problem, and the resulting disputes often followed one particularly destructive pattern. The scalawag vs. carpetbagger leadership rivalry has become almost a stereotype, so pervasive is it in the literature.”
According to “New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile 1860-1910,” Reconstruction made Mobile a magnet for newly freed slaves. By 1870, blacks made up 43 percent of the city’s population, a significant base for Republicans to build electoral success.
But Fitzgerald wrote that the black population, itself, was divided. One faction, mostly the masses of new arrivals favored radical measures and a greater emphasis on civil rights. Another faction, made up of more prosperous blacks with deeper roots in Mobile, sought to build ties to Mobile’s white leaders.
The volatility of this mix was on display the previous decade, when a May 1867 appearance by U.S. Rep. William “Pig Iron” Kelly, R-Pa., sparked a riot in downtown Mobile. Kelly had been addressing a crowd of 4,000 mostly black residents when violence erupted, author Don Doyle wrote in “New Men, New Cities, New South.”
By the end, one white person and one black resident were dead and the Radical Republicans had an excuse for aggressive action from the federal government, Doyle wrote. The military essentially declared martial law and Gen. John Pope, the military district commander for Mobile, appointed Gustavus Horton mayor.
Horton, a Boston native who had refused to fight with the Confederacy during the war, cleaned house in city government and the Police Department. He hired several black officers to the force, giving Mobile African-American officers almost a century before the city again would hire black police.
On the state level, Radical Republicans pushed through a new constitution in 1868 that gave blacks full voting rights. The gains were short-lived, Doyle wrote. According to “New Men, New Cities, New South,” conservative Democrats regained control of state government in 1874.
In Mobile, Radical Republicans continued to have influence until 1879. Still, the Radicals were decidedly on the defensive during the 1870s, historian George Ewert wrote in “Mobile: The New History of Alabama’s First City.” Democrats managed to get all of the black police officers hired during the Horton administration removed from the force.
Democrats complained loudly -- with some justification, according to historians -- about corruption among leaders during Reconstruction. But Ewert pointed to the election of 1874 to show that corruption ran both ways.
According to Ewert’s account, armed gangs roamed the streets, threatening voters at gunpoint on Election Day.
“Mobs gathered around polling places and allowed only Democratic sympathizers to vote,” he wrote. “Ballot boxes were stuffed and counts altered as the Democrats tried to steal the election.”
The election prompted a congressional investigation and a 1,300-page report, much of it dealing with voter intimidation in Mobile. But Congress eventually allowed the results to stand.
The 1874 election in Alabama prompted a congressional investigation that produced a 1,300-page report, much of which dealt with voter intimidation in Mobile. But Congress allowed the election to stand, and Democrats would more or less control state and local politics for nearly 100 years.
The fall of cotton
Throughout the first half of the 19th century, the cotton trade had remained a constant in Mobile, making it a wealthy city and the fourth-largest in the Confederacy. The cotton trade reached its zenith in the 1850s, and Ewert wrote in “Down the Years: Articles on Mobile’s History,” that city leaders likely saw no reason to diversify their economy.
Indeed, British citizen Hiram Fuller, in a letter cited in “Urban Renewal,” used a bit of hyperbole in describing Mobile’s relationship to the agricultural product. He wrote that Mobilians “buy cotton, sell cotton, think cotton, eat cotton, drink cotton, and dream cotton. They marry cotton wives, and unto them are born cotton children.”
The Civil War disrupted that lucrative trade, though, and it took a devastating hit thanks to the Panic of 1873. Fueled by easy credit and speculative real estate and railroad spending, according to a 2008 New York Times article, the depression caused misery throughout the country. Banks failed, railroads went bankrupt and the price of cotton, as reported in the Atlanta Constitution, fell by 50 percent from July to December in 1873.
According to “Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama,” Mobile shipped 400,000 bales of cotton through its port in 1876, down from a high of 900,000 in 1860.
The reasons had to do with more than war, according to historians. By the 1870s, according to “New Men, New Cities, New South,” the railroads created competition from other cities, like Memphis and New Orleans, for Alabama-grown cotton.
Indeed, the book recounts severe opposition in Mobile to a railroad line completed in 1870 that linked New Orleans to Alabama.
“As predicted, it came to operate as a siphon, diverting trade to the neighboring colossus,” Doyle wrote in “New Men, New Cities, New South.”
Doyle wrote that the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, which fell into receivership in 1874, also drew constant criticism from the press and others in Mobile.
“Its rigid rules and high rates were accused of stifling the trade with planters, ruining Mobile’s grocery trade with the interior and diverting cotton to Memphis,” he wrote.
Mobile had another problem not shared by other cities that decade. Republicans and Unionists who took control of the city during Reconstruction enacted a radical shift away from the public market system that had guaranteed the city a steady stream of tax revenue, according to “Down the Years.”
Ewert wrote that city law prior to Reconstruction prohibited the sale of fresh food outside of the public markets.
Ewert wrote that Horton, the military-appointed mayor, broke the public markets’ monopoly after taking office in 1868. The city passed a “green grocer” ordinance, allowing vendors to sell food throughout Mobile.
Favored by the city’s business interests at the time, Ewert wrote, the law deprived Mobile of revenue that led to a financial crisis the following decade.
As they did at the state level, according to “New Men, New Cities, New South,” Republicans in charge of Mobile spent heavily on public education and railroads. The book states that the city spent $360,000 to take over wharves.
As taxes and borrowing rose, however, Mobile became overburdened by debt.
“The debts of the city of Mobile of every kind, character and description had now reached a little over $5,000,000,” the Mobile Register reported in a 1905 story explaining the history of the city’s debt.
Creditors took the city to court, and in 1878, Mobile acknowledged that it could not meet its public debt and faced insolvency. According to Ewert, the city agreed the following year to accept a new municipal authority, the Port of Mobile, also known as the “Police Board, controlled by the state Legislature.
The Legislature appointed three receivers, who elected an eight-man commission in March 1879 to run the city on $100,000,” according to “Down the Years.” The law severely restricted taxing power, and the board slashed expenses by more than half, according to “New Men, New Cities, New South.” The law also redrew the city’s boundaries, excluding some thinly settled suburban areas.
The crisis hit with Democrats in control of city government, and Radical Republicans blamed their political opponents, according to “New Men, New Cities, New South.” The Radical forces had enough of their waning influence to help elect “fusion” candidate George Duffee mayor in 1878.
A flavor for the political debate can be seen in the 1905 Register article: “The city of Mobile was thus brought down to the darkest days of her financial history,” the paper wrote. “Mobile had been in the hands of the Republican party and all of her misfortunes had been charged up to this party. … It seems the people were disposed to hold the Democratic party responsible for burdens not lifted and promises not fulfilled.”
The conservative Democrats effectively fought back, though, and used the financial crisis to vanquish their rivals.
“The debate surrounding this drastic remedy to Mobile’s debt crisis revealed an ulterior motive, which was to rid city politics of the last remnants of the Radical regime,” Doyle wrote in “New Men, New Cities, New South.”