Alabama (1917) has had six State Consti tutions, each of conventional product and each the vital essence of the community life at the time. The State was one of the groups in the period, 1812-21, when Congress introduced the sanction of that body to membership in the Union. Vermont, the first new State, that is the 14th State, but in both branches two years before she had established any State Consti tution at all Kentucky came next into Con gress by authority of Virginia only. In 1796, the third new State, Tennessee, offered a State Constitution to Congress but in the House it was decided the application should have gone to the Supreme Court only. There the matter was abandoned. Ohio was the fourth, 1802. The State Constitution presented to Congress was referred in the Senate to a special com mittee that never reported.* The Supreme Court is elected for six years. The State is represented in the Senate of the United States by two senators elected by and in the House of Representatives representatives elected each by the people in a prescribed district. The militia is known as the °National Guard," composed of the three arms of service, infantry, artillery and cavalry, with special corps. There were (1916) about 4,400 enlisted men and officers in camp, well dis ciplined and equipped. The functions of execu tive character in the State are, the convict bureau, controlling the penitentiary, under the governor; the department of archives and his tory, under a director, the governor, ex officio president of the board of trustees, composed of one in each Congress district ; State tax com mission of three; State board of health; State department of fish and game; State inspector of prisons and cotton mills, three persons; State banking department, seven persons; State highway commission; State geological survey; State board of examiners of public accounts; State coal mine inspector and his associates: State live-stock and sanitary board; State board of Confederate pensions; State board of me diation and arbitration and various other com missions intended to promote the public weal.
Of those enumerated the Alabama public service commission ranks first in importance. It is made up of three citizens elected by the people. It controls railroads, telephone serv ice, telegraphs, etc., and regulates their rates and charges. It has general supervision of firms, corporations and persons engaged in business. Except in the interregnum of mili tary authority, 1867-74, all senators in Con gress have been Democrats of the Jacksonian school. Senator Gabriel Moore, Democrat, 1832, having offended the Jackson sentiment, was requested by the legislature, in vain, to resign. In 1840 the legislature abolished the congressional district for a general election in order to eliminate two Whigs from Whig districts. In 1844 the Democratic State Con vention recommended Van Buren for Presi dent against Calhoun. For Alabama political history preparatory to the founding of the Southern Confederacy, consult Du Bose's and Times of Yancey.) A complete list of governors follows: Alabamians with national and world-wide reputation won in the succeeding generations under the various political constitutions are: William R. King, senator, Ambassador to
France, Vice-President of the United States; Josiah C. Nott, M.D., author of voluminous, illustrated works on °Type of Mankind"; James Marion Sims, M.D., surgeon; William Lowndes Yancey, political orator and leader; Mrs. Augusta Evans Wilson, novelist;John Pelham, a youthful soldier; John Tyler Mor gan, senator of the United States.
History.— In 1519, the Spanish governor of Jamaica sent Pineda to explore the gulf coast of Florida. Pineda soon reached a fine body of water, supposedly Mobile Bay, which he called Espiritu Santo. He ascended the broad stream emptying into it for six leagues and saw many houses and natives on the banks. Nine years later, Panfilo de Narvaez, a Spaniard, set out westward from Florida on an exploring expedition. He skirted along the coast, but soon drifted out to sea and he and all but three of his men were lost. In 1539, Ferdinand de Soto, governor of Cuba landed in Florida with a thousand men equipped for fighting their way into the unknown West. The Indians who met De Soto were an interest ing type of the American aborigines, and were more numerous than our historians report them in the later time of the white settlements. The men were fairly intelligent, possessed splendid physical forms, were athletic, brave and re sourceful. The women were smaller, with marked personal beauty in individuals. These Indians maintained tribal customs that amounted to a form of civil government. They lived in rude log houses and built bins in which to store pumpkins, corn, and dried beef from the forest. They covered their bodies with gar ments of dressed skins and woven fabrics of bark and grass. At Mauvila, an Indian vil lage near the junction of the Tombigbee and Alabama rivers, De Soto won a hard-fought battle with the Indian chief, Tuscaloosa. After this, De Soto made his way westward to the Mississippi River, and Alabama was undis turbed by the white men for 160 years.
After LaSalle's exploration of the Missis sippi River, Alabama was included in French Louisiana. In 1702 a young French-Canadian, Jean Baptiste La Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded Mobile. To checkmate the British from South Carolina who sought to monopo lize the Indian trade, he built Fort Toulouse near the place where the Tallapoosa and Coosa join; and to protect the colony against the Chickasaws, he built Fort Tombecbe where the Great Southern Railroad now crosses the Tom bigbee. The French colony did not succeed. The settlers sickened in their effort to cultivate the soil; so 15 years after Bienville came, the home government chartered the West India Company to settle Louisiana with a vague idea of its boundaries. During 1721, three slave ships brought negroes to Mobile, and African slavery began in Alabama. The colony now took on a new face. Whites, who had been reduced to their last extremity because of labor in the hot climate, now began to trade in timber, tar and turpentine, and to produce from the soil plenteous crops of corn. Cotton was success fully grown, and many decades before Whitney's invention, a crude machine was put in use near Mobile which served to separate the cotton seed from the lint.