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154
A L A B A M A
Warrior, Alabama, Cahaba, Coosa, and Tallapoosa) come together lo seek the sea.
Unless one accepts the romantic legend that Prince Madoc and fellow Welshmen put ashore in this area during the twelfth century, venturesome Spaniards were the first identifiable whites to discover this bay (although Martin Waldseemiiller?s map of 1507 shows the bay). Only twenty-seven years after the (irst voyage of Columbus, Admiral Alonso Alvarez de Pineda probed this body of water and christened it ?Bahia de Spiritu Santo.? It has since acquired the secular but more prosaic name of Mobile Bay. Panfilo de Narvaez and Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca halted here briefly in I52S. Hernando de Soto passed north of the bay in 1540 after destroying the village of Mabilu, leaving little to memorialize these Indians except their name. In 1559 Don Tristan de Luna made an unsuccessful effort to found a Spanish colony on the Gulf Coast, perhaps in the Mobile area.
Frenchmen planted the first permanent colony at Mobile in 1711 after abandoning an earlier settlement within the flood plain of the Mobile River. The French Canadian brothers, Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d?lberville and Jean Baptiste le Moyne. Sicur de Bienville, were seeking to further the ambition of France to control the Mississippi River basin. Until 1720 the little village which they founded held the eminent title of capital of the vast French province of Louisiana which extended from the Gulf of Mexico into Canada and westward to the Rocky Mountains. Superseded by New Orleans, Mobile was demoted to a mere district capital of this French empire.
In the momentous territorial swaps of the Treaty of Paris ot 1763. France ceded its territory east of the Mississippi, including Mobile, to England but reserved western Louisiana and New Orleans for its ally Spain. Although England had failed to win the city which commanded the exit of the Mississippi, she gained at Mobile a bay which could easily have accommodated her entire navy.
At the start of the American Revolution, agents of the Continental Congress distributed copies of the Declaration of Independence in Mobile. But Mobilians, fearful of the Spanish at New Orleans, tied to Britain through trade, and seeing nothing
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to be gained from revolution, remained overwhelmingly Tory. Their anxiety about the Spanish proved well-founded. In 1780 Spanish forces under Don Bernardo de Galvez, governor of Louisiana, invaded the bay which Pineda had circled 260 years earlier and forced the surrender of Fort Charlotte. Mobile remained in Spanish hands for thirty-three years.
In April 1813, Gen. James Wilkinson and 600 Americans surprised a garrison of sixty Spaniards and claimed Mobile for the United States. When it became part of the United States, Mobile was a small but cosmopolitan outpost on the fringe of the rural South, her 300 residents more oriented to trade than to agriculture, more closely tied to the sea than to the hinterland.
Although finally an American city. Mobile retained her strong Latin flavor throughout the antebellum era. As late as the 1850s Philip Gosse noted ?a certain something of a foreign appearance." 4 The British visitor attributed this to unfamiliar trees and plants such as the China tree, Adam's needle, honey locusts, magnolias, fan palms, and thickets of prickly pears. This observant naturalist appears to have seen no sign of a luxuriant Oriental flower transplanted by French settlers to the Gulf Coast where it was to blossom so profusely that twentieth-century Mobile would proclaim itself ?azalea capital of the world."
Other travellers found Mobile distinctive by reason of a joyous, unbounded appetite for food and drink. The British writer Thomas Hamilton took care to lay in a store of cognac and Scotch biscuits at cosmopolitan Mobile before embarking on a river steamer in 1831 for provincial Montgomery. Another Englishman, James S. Buckingham, remarked upon how openly these southerners partook of strong drink. Grog shops occupied almost every major street corner of Mobile in 1839. Thus tempted, many Mobilians exhibited rowdyism, particularly on election days. When a new Mobile mayor was to be chosen in 1839, sedate residents warned Buckingham that he would encounter five hundred drunk voters before noon and at least one thousand by sunset.
Fondness for spiritous beverages was not confined to the
4.	Gosse. Letters front Alabama, pp. 25-29.
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