Word: cottons
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...Immense Irony. With cotton as king and the Negro as slave, Alabama was in the forefront of the secessionist movement that led to the Civil War. It was in Montgomery that the South established the Confederacy and made Jefferson Davis its President. Proudly, Alabama sent about 120,000 men-nearly all of its male white population -into the Civil War. Proudly, it boasted 39 generals. Proudly, it was vanquished...
...unlike many of its sister Southern states, Alabama suffered few ravages from Union troops; indeed, the most notable battle came on the water, with Farragut's damn-the-torpedoes victory in Mobile Bay. What the war did do was rip the foundations from beneath Alabama's cotton-based economy. And what the Civil War did not finish, the boll weevil...
...When cotton ceased to be king, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal took its place. The issue of federal v. state sovereignty was all but buried under the weight of federal dollars for public power, military installations, dams, forests and scads of pork-barrel projects. (In 1962 the U.S. Government poured $229 million in grants-in-aid into Alabama...
...Tuscumbia is bursting with new heavy industry, while southeast is Guntersville, a thriving resort area that features fine fishing, sailing and impressive scenery. There, too, along the Tennessee River, is a splendid rolling countryside and good red earth that produces much of Alabama's annual 700,000-bale cotton crop...
...Bother. Below the northern tier is the Black Belt, cutting a 100-mile-deep, 14-county swath across the state. The Black Belt got its name not so much for its concentration of Negroes as for its fertile dark brown soil. Once the heart of Alabama's cotton kingdom, the rolling, sparsely populated belt has changed radically in recent years: the houses where cotton sharecroppers once lived are now stuffed with hay to feed cattle, for livestock raising has become Alabama's No. 1 agricultural business...