Alabama Became the 22nd U.S. State
On this day · 14 December 1819
On a December day in 1819, a presidential signature turned a frontier territory into America's newest star on the flag.
On December 14, 1819, President James Monroe signed a congressional resolution accepting Alabama’s new constitution, formally admitting it as the 22nd state of the United States. It was the only state added to the Union that year.
The road there was quick. Congress carved the Alabama Territory out of the eastern half of the Mississippi Territory in 1817. Just two years later, delegates gathered in Huntsville to draft a state constitution, the first state legislature convened in October, and Washington made it official before the year was out.
A territory in 1817, a state by 1819 — Alabama’s leap into the Union took barely two years.
The new state’s first elected governor was William Wyatt Bibb, a former Georgia senator. Alabama’s admission came during a tense era of national expansion, as each new state shifted the balance between free and slave states ahead of the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
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