Alabama Republican Party - 1867-2010: Notes and Observations of a Deep South State

This work is a historical overview of an emerging anti-slavery political party in a deep South state. The Alabama Republican Party was organized in the state capitol in Montgomery on June 4-5, 1867. The South, governed solely by Democrats, had been severely punished by the Union Army because of its slave culture. Organizing a new Republican Party in Alabama was not surprising. The South had lost The War and understood why they lost the war.

Alabama was a state deeply divided over the slavery issue. Leading up to the Civil War, the call for secession came almost entirely from wealthy planters in the southern region of the state, despite dissatisfaction in north Alabama over leaving the union. If secession had been voted on by the people - it probably would have failed.

The Republican party was organized to reconstruct the state under the authority of the U.S. Congress - the first state to do so. The GOP had two administrations, filled with conflict and harassed by the Klan, before voters returned control of the state back to Democrats. Republicans would endure a century as back-benchers in a Democrat controlled state, and decades of failed elections as Democrats run rough-shod over them. The harsh Reconstruction experience completely turned people against the Republican Party.

When the Eisenhower administration advanced new Civil Rights laws in 1957 and 1960, the Democratic South rebelled again, but the laws failed to reconnect African-Americans to the original Republican Party. Instead, when President Lyndon Johnson passed Civil Rights legislation in 1964 and 1965, blacks found Democrats more sympathetic of their interests.

There were random signs of a Republican resurgence in Alabama; in 1964 with the Goldwater sweep, and again in 1986, when Democrats shot themselves in the foot in the governor's race and the election of the highly improbable candidate Guy Hunt. Hunt was the first Republican to win the governor's office in Alabama since 1872. He was later convicted of using the office for personal gain and booted out of office. In 1994, Perry Hooper won the chief justice position on the Alabama Supreme Court, and subsequently the remaining seats on the supreme court and the court of appeals were won by Republicans.

It was not until 2010, that Alabama's New South Governor Bob Riley marshalled the resources that won control of the Alabama legislature that had power over the state. Today, the Alabama Legislature, the entire court system, and the sentiments of the voting population have turned Alabama into a conservative stronghold in the Deep South.