The Annotated Pickett's History of Alabama: And Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period

Albert James Pickett, Alabama's first historian, was born on 13 August 1810 in Anson County, North Carolina, and settled with his parents - William Raiford and Frances Dickson Pickett - in Autauga County, Alabama Territory in 1818. His father started with a trading post and became a prominent landowner and successful planter, eventually serving in both houses of the Alabama legislature. As a youth, he encountered Creek Indians, Indian countrymen, slaves, Loyalists and patriot participants of the Revolutionary War. His father's career in business, farming, and state politics exposed him to the unique social and cultural milieu of early Alabama. Pickett's formal education included local field schools, two years at Virginia's Harwood Academy, and tutelage in law for two years by his brother William Dickson Pickett, judge of the Sixth Judicial Circuit. However, he never practiced law and gravitated to journalism instead - writing articles for the Alabama Journal and the Planter's Gazette. Pickett's History was his only book-length publication. With a completed book manuscript by Christmas 1850, Pickett traveled to New York City in February 1851 where an engraver completed the illustrations for his book and to Charleston in March where he worked with his publisher Walker and James through June 1851. Upon publication, his History of Alabama received high praise and only a modicum of criticism from the state's newspapers and literary journals in New York, New Orleans, Charleston and elsewhere. Pickett aggressively promoted his book as a speaker and lecturer before a variety of audiences in subsequent years, focusing on the hardest work of my life and fulfilling his duty to his History. The work is Pickett's magnum opus and remains one of the most significant documenting the early settlement of the state of Alabama and the Deep South. Albert Pickett died in 1858.