France, Britain, Spain, and the Imperial Contest for the Gulf Coast Frontier, 1699–1813.
Before Alabama became a state, before it belonged to the United States, and even before most Americans thought of it as part of their country, the land was already the center of a fierce imperial struggle.
Before Alabama Was American tells the story of the Gulf Coast frontier from 1699 to 1813, when France, Britain, Spain, Native nations, and eventually the United States all competed for influence over the region that would become Alabama.
The story begins with the French founding of Mobile and the creation of a fragile colonial world built around forts, river routes, Native alliances, trade, slavery, and survival. It follows the rise of Fort Toulouse and Fort Tombecbe, the violent struggle between France and the Chickasaw, the arrival of enslaved Africans, and the complicated diplomacy that allowed European settlements to exist inside a landscape still overwhelmingly controlled by Native nations.
When France lost the region in 1763, Mobile became British. During the American Revolution, British West Florida remained loyal to the Crown while much of the Atlantic coast rebelled. The war eventually reached Alabama through Spanish governor Bernardo de Gálvez, whose campaigns brought the Siege of Fort Charlotte in 1780 and the little-known but bloody Battle at The Village near present-day Daphne in 1781.
Spain then ruled Mobile for more than three decades, creating another complicated borderland of French Creoles, Spanish officials, former British Loyalists, enslaved Africans, free people of color, Native diplomats, merchants, soldiers, smugglers, and settlers from the growing United States.
Throughout it all, the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and other Native peoples were not simply spectators to European conquest. They remained powerful political actors who traded, negotiated, resisted, fought, and used competing empires to protect their own interests.
Drawing on military records, treaties, maps, archaeology, correspondence, parish records, trade documents, and the stories of the people who actually lived there, Before Alabama Was American reconstructs a world that existed long before Alabama appeared on an American map.
It is the story of a place that changed flags repeatedly—but never changed as simply as the maps suggested.
