Alabama Historical Law Guide

Contents

Legal Ages at a Glance

General Principles

An English common-law system

Alabama was an English common-law state through 1950. Its courts took the common law of England, so far as it was not inconsistent with the state's own constitution and laws, as the rule of decision wherever those were silent. That reception was stated in successive codes and stands in the code today.¹

The English origin is worth fixing at the outset, because the ground Alabama covers changed hands several times. Mobile was founded by the French in 1702, passed to Britain in 1763, and was held by Spain from 1780 until the United States took it in 1813; the surrounding country became part of the Mississippi Territory in 1798, was split off as the Alabama Territory in 1817, and entered the Union as a state on 14 December 1819. Alabama's law came to it through the Mississippi Territory, and its marital property rules are common-law rules throughout — separate ownership, dower, and curtesy.² (The French and Spanish records of the Mobile district before 1813 are governed by other law and fall outside this guide.)

The oldest statutes a researcher will meet here are therefore territorial. Acts of the Mississippi Territory reaching back to 1805 were still in force at statehood and were printed in the first Alabama digest, Toulmin's, in 1823; several of the rules described below begin there rather than with the first state code.³

A common law rewritten by statute

From an early date the legislature restated and revised the common law in a series of digests and official codes, each superseding the last: Toulmin's Digest (1823), Aikin's Digest (1833, reissued with a supplement in 1836), Clay's Digest (1843), and then the official Codes of 1852, 1867, 1876, 1886, 1896, 1907, 1923, and 1940.⁴

For any given year, the rule in force is the statute where one had been passed by then, and the common law otherwise.

Legal Age of Adulthood

Majority at twenty-one

Full legal age in Alabama was 21, for both sexes, throughout the period. It was the common-law age, and it governed because the legislature left it alone.⁵ Anyone under 21 was an "infant" in legal language, even a 20-year-old.

The age dropped to 19 in 1975.

A minor's legal capacity

A minor could own property. What the law limited was the minor's power to part with it. A minor's contracts and deeds were voidable, meaning they stood until the minor undid them: on coming of age he could confirm them or reject them, and he had a reasonable time to decide.⁶

Two statutory relaxations generate records. On a petition filed in the equity court — the court that granted relief the ordinary common-law courts could not give, also called the chancery court — a person over 18 could be declared an adult ahead of time, free to sign contracts, sell his land, borrow money, and go to court in his own name without waiting for 21. The court papers call this removing the disabilities of minority. The statute allowed three routes and no others: a petition by the father or mother; a petition by the minor himself where he had no parent or guardian living, or where a parent was insane or had abandoned him for a year; and a petition by the minor joined by his guardian where he had a guardian but no parents. Separately, a married woman or widow who was 18 but under 21 was treated as an adult for general purposes, though not for voting or holding office.⁷ Such a decree in the equity or chancery records places a person between 18 and 21.

Marriage

Who was old enough to marry

By the Code of 1852 the minimum age was 17 for a male and 14 for a female: a male under 17 or a female under 14 was incapable of contracting marriage, and that rule ran forward through the later codes into the 1940s.⁸ Before that statute no territorial or state act fixed a minimum age, so the common-law ages governed — 14 for a boy and 12 for a girl.³

A marriage below the legal age was voidable: it stood unless someone went to court to set it aside.⁹ In practice an ancestor's underage marriage was almost certainly valid.

Parental consent

Capacity to marry and freedom to choose were different things, and the line between them held steady for almost a century. A man of 21 and a woman of 18 could marry on their own. A man between 17 and 21, or a girl between 14 and 18, needed the consent of a parent or guardian. The consent could be given in person or in writing. Anyone who had been married before did not need it. The Code of 1852 set that same 21 and 18 line, and required with it a bond of $200 payable to the state, void if there was no lawful cause against the marriage. The wording was unchanged in the Code of 1923.¹⁰ The requirement is far older than the code: the territorial act of 5 January 1805 already had the register of the orphans' court enter the consent of parents and guardians alongside the license and the bond.³

The consent left a record of its own. The judge of probate kept a book registering every license, and had to enter whether the parties were of those ages; if not, whether either had been married before, and whether a parent or guardian had consented. A written consent was copied out on the same page as the license.¹⁰ A consent noted in a marriage bond or license file therefore signals a groom under 21 or a bride under 18, and often preserves the consenting parent's own words.

How a marriage was made

The statute required a license, issued by the judge of probate of the county where the woman lived, and named who could perform the ceremony: a licensed minister in regular communion with his own church, a judge of the supreme or circuit court, a judge of probate, or a justice of the peace. The officiant returned a certificate to the probate judge within the month, and it was recorded in the book kept for the registry of licenses. The same section provided for marriages between free white persons and for marriages between free persons of color.¹¹

That framework is territorial in origin — the license, the named officiants, and the register kept by the court all appear in the act of 1805³ — and it shifted twice afterward. By 1876 the list of officiants had grown to take in chancellors and the judges of the city courts, and the word free had dropped out, the section then reading simply “between white persons, or between persons of color.”¹¹

Common-law marriage

Alabama recognized common-law marriage through 1950. A marriage good at common law was good in Alabama, license or no license. What the law required was that both parties be capable of marrying, that they presently agree to be husband and wife, and that they live together and hold themselves out to the community as married.¹²

A couple may be validly married with no license, no minister's return, and no church record at all, their marriage provable only from census entries, deeds, tax lists, and the testimony of neighbors. Common-law marriage was abolished for unions formed on or after 1 January 2017.

Void and voidable marriages

The law barred marriage between close relatives. Such a marriage was incestuous and void — treated as though it had never happened. A man could not marry his mother, stepmother, aunt, or his uncle's widow; his sister, half-sister, or niece; his daughter, granddaughter, or his son's widow; or his wife's daughter or granddaughter. The same bars applied whether or not the relatives had been born to married parents.¹³ This list is remarkably stable: the relatives named in the territorial act of 1805 are substantially those still named in the Code of 1876.³

If a couple was convicted of incest, the court declared the marriage void, but children born before that point kept their standing as legitimate children. Marrying again while a husband or wife from an earlier marriage was still living was bigamy, and the second marriage was void.¹³

Interracial marriage

Marriage between a white person and a person of color was prohibited and criminally punished. Under the Code of 1876 the parties to such a marriage, or to adultery or fornication across the color line, each faced two to seven years' imprisonment or hard labor, and a separate penalty fell on any justice, minister, or other officiant who performed the ceremony. It was this section of the Code of 1876 that the United States Supreme Court sustained in Pace v. Alabama in 1883. The Constitution of 1901 carried the bar forward, forbidding the legislature ever to authorize a marriage between a white person and a person of color.¹⁴ The prohibition became unenforceable after Loving v. Virginia in 1967, and the constitutional language was removed by amendment in 2000.

Enslaved people and after emancipation

Enslaved people had no legal capacity to marry, so their unions, however stable and long-standing, appear in no Alabama marriage register before 1865.

That changed in 1865. An ordinance of the 1865 constitutional convention ratified and made valid all marriages between freedmen and freedwomen who were then living together as man and wife, and declared that freedmen and freedwomen then living together and recognizing each other as husband and wife were married and bound by the obligations of that relationship. The same ordinance legitimated the children of such marriages or cohabitation, giving them the same relations to and from their parents as children born in wedlock.¹⁵ For these families the Freedmen's Bureau marriage and cohabitation registers are often the fullest surviving record of a union the state had for so long refused to record.

Property Ownership

Which men could own land

Any free person of full legal capacity could own and convey land. The right rested on being free and of age, and on that alone.

A foreign-born man could own land without waiting to become a citizen: a foreigner who was a bona fide resident of the state — genuinely living there rather than passing through — had the same rights of possession, enjoyment, and inheritance of property as a native-born citizen.¹⁶

Enslaved men owned nothing at all. The law gave whatever they held to the enslaver, and treated their labor and their persons as the enslaver's property.¹⁶ Free men of color could own and convey land, and did, under a growing set of legal restrictions described below.

Women and land ownership

At common law a single adult woman or a widow — a feme sole, "woman alone" — held and conveyed land in her own name like a man. A married woman — a feme covert, "covered woman" — was under coverture: her legal identity merged into her husband's, he managed her lands during the marriage and took the rents, and she contracted only through him.

Alabama began dismantling coverture in the late 1840s, but in two distinct stages, and the stage matters to the records.

Under the Code of 1852 everything a wife brought to the marriage or acquired during it was already called her separate estate and was beyond the reach of her husband's creditors — but the property vested in the husband as her trustee. He managed and controlled it, took the rents, income, and profits, and was not required to account to her for them; her land could be sold only by husband and wife together, by a writing attested by two witnesses. That regime ran to the act of 28 February 1887.¹⁷

The act of 28 February 1887 completed the change. From then on a wife held and managed her property in her own right, and a married woman of 18 could make contracts as if she were single. Three constitutions — those of 1868, 1875, and 1901 — each guaranteed her separate estate, which kept the legislature from ever handing a wife's property back to her husband.¹⁷

Two limits survived, and both leave a documentary trail. She could sell or mortgage her own land only if her husband joined in the deed. And she could not become surety for her husband's debts, meaning she could not make herself answerable to pay them if he failed to. Where the husband was mentally incapable, had abandoned her, lived out of state, or was imprisoned for two years or more, she dealt with her lands on her own.¹⁷

When a wife had to sign her husband's deed

A widow's dower was her life estate in a share of her husband's land — the use of that share for as long as she lived, not ownership of it. Dower attached not only to land the husband owned at his death but to every parcel of which he had been seized in fee at any time during the marriage, that is, every parcel he had held as its outright owner while they were married.

Because her dower covered land he had already sold, a buyer took that land subject to her claim unless she released it. She released it by joining in her husband's deed, by joining him in a power of attorney to convey, or by a separate instrument executed by her alone after his conveyance; her signature was witnessed or acknowledged like any other conveyance. Her age is the part researchers most often get wrong, because the rule moved twice and in opposite directions. Under the territorial act of 1803 a wife under twenty-one could not convey land or release dower at all.¹⁸ An act of 1836 threw that open, and from then through the Code of 1852 and the Code of 1876 a married woman could release dower whether she was of full age or not. The Code of 1886 then set the age at eighteen, and there it stayed through 1950.¹⁹ So a release by a wife under twenty-one is void before 1836, unremarkable between 1836 and 1886, and worth checking against her age after it.

One requirement did run the whole way through. From 1803 onward the wife had to be examined privately, apart from her husband, and to say that she signed freely and without his compulsion, and the officer had to certify that on the deed.¹⁸ That separate examination is why a nineteenth-century Alabama deed so often carries a second certificate below the first, and its absence is worth noticing.

A married man's deed therefore normally carries his wife's signature, and its absence on a married grantor's deed is worth investigating.

Homestead

From the Constitution of 1875 onward, the family dwelling and its ground carried a further protection that likewise required the wife's hand. If the homestead belonged to a married man, he could not sell or mortgage it unless his wife signed too, and signed of her own free will. The Constitution of 1901 repeated the requirement in the same words. A sale made without her signature passed no good title.

To show she had signed freely, an official authorized to take acknowledgments — usually a judge, a justice of the peace, or a notary — questioned her alone, out of her husband's hearing. He then wrote out a certificate saying so, in the exact wording the code laid down, on the deed itself or on a paper attached to it.²⁰ That homestead certificate is a distinct thing from an ordinary acknowledgment, and finding it on a deed tells you the land was the family homestead — which is in turn good evidence of a marriage, and often of minor children.

Which children could own land

A child could own land at any age, most often by inheritance or gift, but could not manage or convey it. Sales of a minor's land were made through a guardian under an order of the probate court, and a minor's own deed was voidable and could be disaffirmed after majority.¹⁶ The Code of 1852 put the positive rule plainly: a person of twenty-one, not otherwise under a legal incapacity, could convey his land or leave it by will.²¹ Guardians' sales and settlements in the probate records are therefore among the richest sources for identifying a landowning child and his parents.

Witnessing a deed

A deed of land had to be written or printed, signed at the bottom by the grantor — the person giving up the land — and attested by one witness. Two witnesses were required where the grantor could not write his name — in that case his name was written for him with the words "his mark" beside it, and both witnesses had themselves to be able to write. Acknowledging the deed before an officer took the place of witnesses altogether. The Code of 1852 and the Code of 1876 state the rule in identical terms,²¹ and the pattern is older than either: a territorial act of 4 March 1803 already required a deed to be acknowledged or witnessed, and certified, before any clerk could record it.¹⁸

That one-witness rule makes the exceptions worth noticing. A deed carrying two witnesses signals a grantor who signed by mark, which is useful evidence about an ancestor's literacy. Two witnesses were also required on a married woman's own conveyance of her land or stocks, unless she acknowledged it before an officer,²¹ and on a wife's release of dower in her husband's deed.

No statute fixed an age for a witness to a deed. What the law asked for was competency — that the witness could observe what happened and afterward relate it — so a mature minor could serve.²¹

Free people of color and Creek land

Free people of color could keep property they had lawfully acquired, but the state took away more and more of their other rights as the years went on. Laws passed before the Civil War restricted them from moving into the state, from keeping a shop, and from preaching. One of those restrictions reached inheritance directly: an act of 1832 barred free people of color from inheriting property in Alabama, exempting those who had entered the state before it passed.²²

One group stood outside these restrictions altogether. The code expressly exempted any free person of color who had become a citizen of the United States under the treaty with Spain, and the descendants of such a person — in practice the Creole families of the Mobile district, whose forebears had lived there under Spanish rule. A Mobile family of color may therefore appear in the records holding rights its counterparts elsewhere in the state did not have.²²

A distinct body of records belongs to the Creek (Muscogee) country of eastern Alabama, whose lands were ceded and allotted under federal treaty — chiefly the 1832 Treaty of Cusseta, which set aside individual reserves that were largely lost to fraud in the years that followed. Those transactions are federal treaty and land matters rather than Alabama statute, and the researcher should look to the federal treaty and land records.

Inheritance

Two kinds of property, two sets of rules

When a person died without a will (intestate), Alabama divided two kinds of property by two different sets of rules. Land descended straight to the heirs, carrying the surviving spouse's life interest with it. Personal property — money, livestock, furniture, debts owed to the deceased, and before 1865 enslaved people — was distributed outright by the administrator, the person the court appointed to settle an estate that had no will, after the debts were paid. It helps to keep the two apart.

Land: who took it

Land descended to the children and their descendants in equal parts, whatever their sex or birth order, the children of a child who had died taking their parent's share between them. Sons and daughters, eldest and youngest, inherited alike.

Where there were no children or their descendants, the land ran outward in a fixed order — and here the year matters more than anywhere else in this guide, because Alabama reversed that order in the middle of the period. Brothers and sisters came before the parents, which is the reverse of what most researchers expect, and they did so for nearly ninety years: the rule is already in the territorial act of 10 February 1806 and runs unbroken from there.²³ An act of 23 February 1893 put the parents first, and the new order held from the Code of 1896 through 1950.

From the territorial act of 1806 to 1893:

From 1893:

Two rules survived the change and ran through both schemes. First, when a relative had died before the person whose estate was being divided, that relative's children could step into his place and take the share he would have taken — but only if he was a brother or sister of the deceased. A dead cousin's children, for instance, took nothing. Second, relatives who shared only one parent with the deceased inherited alongside those who shared both, except that where two relatives stood equally close, the one who shared both parents came first.²⁴

The surviving husband or wife took the land itself only where none of those relatives survived.²⁵ What the widow took in every other case was dower, which is the next thing to understand.

Land: the widow's dower

A widow took dower, a life estate in a graduated share of her husband's land. How much she took depended on two things: whether he left children or grandchildren, and whether his estate held enough to pay his debts:

These three fractions were already law by 1843, and were still in the code in 1923. Before them the share was simply a third: the territorial dower act of 22 December 1812 gave the widow one-third of the lands her husband died seized of, or had conveyed without her release, for her life, with the dwelling house he most generally occupied included in it.²⁶ If the wife had her own separate estate worth as much as her dower and her distributive share — her portion of the personal property — combined, she took nothing further; if it was worth less, she took the difference. For that comparison her dower was valued at seven years' rent of the dower interest.²⁷

Dower gave the widow the use of her share for life while ownership passed to the heirs, so expect to find her holding a life interest in land the children own.

Personal property: the distributive share

The husband's personal estate, after debts, went to the widow and children in shares that turned on the number of children. The shape is territorial: an act of 1812 already gave the widow one-half where there were no children or only one, and a child's part where there were more, though it set no minimum one-fifth share for the largest families.²⁶ Of the four shares below, three were already law by 1843 and held through 1950. The fourth — what a childless widow took — changed at the Code of 1886, so for that one the year matters:

Whatever the widow did not take was divided by the same rules that governed the land — which means the 1893 reversal described above moved the residue of the personal estate with it. So in an estate settled before 1886 with no children, look for the other half going to the husband's brothers and sisters and their descendants, ahead of his parents.²⁸

A surviving husband's interest in an intestate wife's estate was the old curtesy (a widower's life interest in his late wife's land), reshaped by statute: he took one-half of her personal property absolutely and the use of all her land for his life.²⁹

The widow's immediate provision and her right to dissent

Several provisions supported a widow at once, and each of them appears in the estate file. She could stay in the dwelling house, with the outbuildings and the plantation attached, rent-free until her dower was set apart — the old right of quarantine. The family was allowed twelve months' provisions, the family clothing and furniture, and personal property to the value of $1,000, all exempt from the estate's debts.³⁰

A widow could not be disinherited. Within the time allowed she could dissent from her husband's will — formally refuse what it gave her — and take instead her dower and the share of the personal estate she would have received had he died intestate. From 1932, where he left no children or their descendants and the personal estate came to more than $50,000, she took the first $50,000 and the will disposed of the rest. From the same year, where the will made no provision for her at all, she could claim her dower and distributive share without dissenting.³¹ That last rule is worth remembering when a widow takes dower with no dissent on file.

The homestead passed by a rule of its own. Where the estate did not hold enough to pay its debts, or where the homestead was the only real estate the husband owned in the state, title to it vested at once and absolutely in the widow and the minor children, free of administration and of the estate's debts.³⁰ A family home can therefore pass to a widow and children without ever appearing in the division of the rest of the estate.

One wartime provision is worth knowing for widows of Confederate soldiers. An ordinance of the 1865 convention directed that the period between 11 January 1861 and 29 September 1865 was not to be counted as part of the time within which a widow could claim dower or dissent from her husband's will.³¹ A widow whose husband died during the war therefore had those four and a half years added to her window, which can explain a dower claim or a dissent filed years after the death.

Minors, guardians, and the age of fourteen

Where a child inherited, the probate court appointed a guardian of the estate, the father being preferred for his own child. A guardian who was not the child's parent could not control the child's person during the life of the father, or of the mother where the child was a girl of any age or a boy under fourteen; a parent could name a testamentary guardian of the estate by will, but the surviving parent kept custody of the child.³² Before the court issued letters of guardianship — its written authority for the guardian to act — the guardian gave bond to the judge of probate in twice the estimated value of the child's property,³² so the sum named in the bond is a rough index of what the child had inherited.

A child over fourteen could nominate his own guardian, subject to the court's approval and still with a preference for the father, so a minor's choice of guardian in the record marks him as over fourteen.³³ Guardianship ran until the child reached 21, when the guardian filed in the probate court a full account of the guardianship with its vouchers, sworn to, and the court set a day for the settlement on ten days' notice to him once he had come of age. That final settlement often fixes his coming-of-age year and names the family.³³

Children born outside marriage

A child born outside marriage could inherit from and through the mother. If such a child died intestate leaving no descendants, the mother inherited; the courts read the statute to give the mother one-half and the child's brothers and sisters the other half.³⁴

A child could be legitimated as to the father in three ways: by the later marriage of the mother and reputed father together with the father's recognition of the child; by the father's written declaration, attested by two witnesses and acknowledged before and recorded by the probate judge, naming the child and recognizing it as his; or, until 1901, by a private act of the legislature. Any of the three made the child capable of inheriting from the father as if born in wedlock. The Constitution of 1901 forbade the legislature to pass a special, private, or local law legitimizing a child, which closed the third route and left the two general ones.³⁵

Children of freed parents

For families freed by emancipation, the 1865 ordinance that validated the parents' marriage also settled the children's inheritance. Because the children of freedmen and freedwomen living together as man and wife were declared legitimate, with the full relations of children born in wedlock, they could inherit from and through both parents — where a child of an enslaved couple could once look only to the mother. The parents' relationship, and so the child's legitimacy, could be proved by showing that the couple lived together and were known to their neighbors as husband and wife. No document was needed — which matters, because these couples rarely had one. This is often the key that opens African American inheritance research in Alabama.¹⁵

Wills, executors, and witnesses

Alabama drew a line between the two kinds of property in wills as well. A person could devise land — leave it by will — at 21, and could bequeath personal property — leave money, goods, and livestock by will — at 18. A will disposing of both therefore required the testator, the person making the will, to be twenty-one as to the land. That split ran unchanged from the Code of 1852 through the Code of 1923, so it holds for any Alabama will made before 1950.³⁶

Capacity to make a will and capacity to manage property were not the same thing. An 18-year-old could bequeath his personal property, but he remained a minor for every other purpose until 21, so property he had inherited was managed for him by a guardian and came under his own free control only when he came of age, or earlier if a court declared him an adult.⁷

A valid will had to be in writing, signed by the testator or by someone else in his presence and at his direction, and attested by at least two witnesses who subscribed their names in his presence.³⁶ Every will needed those two witnesses, so a paper offered as a will should carry them even where it is written entirely in the maker's own hand. A witness could be of any age; what mattered was competency. A later marriage together with the birth of a child revoked an earlier will, and the marriage of a single woman revoked a will she had made before.³⁷

An executor had to be at least 21. The court also turned away anyone convicted of a serious crime that cost him the right to hold office or testify, and anyone shown to be unfit through heavy drinking, reckless handling of money, or lack of understanding. Where the person named in the will was under 21, the court appointed someone else to carry out the will in his place — the records call this administration with the will annexed — until he came of age, at which point he could take over.³⁸ A married woman named as executrix needed her husband's written consent, filed with the probate judge; by giving it, he became answerable along with her for what she did.³⁸

Taxation

What was taxed

Alabama taxed land and personal property according to what it was worth; the records call this an ad valorem tax. It also charged adults a poll tax, sometimes called a capitation tax — a flat amount owed by the person himself, whether he owned anything or not. Two more taxes on individuals arrived in the twentieth century: a state income tax, authorized by constitutional amendment in 1933 and levied by the legislature in 1935, and a sales tax, which began as a gross receipts tax in 1936 and took its familiar form in 1939.³⁹

For genealogy the poll tax is the prize, because it lists people who owned nothing — which makes early tax lists into census substitutes.

Poll tax rates before the Civil War

The state fixed its own poll rates from 1822, and revised them every few years. Each revenue act repealed and replaced the last, so the rate an ancestor paid depends on the year:

Two exemptions ran alongside every one of these schedules. A free person excused by bodily infirmity from working the public roads was also excused from the poll tax, and a free person of color who had reached sixty stopped paying it. An enslaved person who was blind, insane, or otherwise entirely unprofitable to the owner was not taxed either.⁴²

What the tax lists show

From 1843 onward, free women of color were taxed while white women were not, so free families of color can often be identified in the tax lists before the Civil War by the taxation of their wives and daughters. Before 1843 the schedules reached only free men of color, so the marker does not work at all in the earlier decades, and it disappears with the racial schedules themselves in 1867.

One exception limits this clue even after 1843. Where the head of a free family of color paid more than a dollar in tax on his real or personal property, the women of his family were not taxed,⁴² so an untaxed woman in such a household is not evidence that the family was white.

Enslaved people appear among the owner's taxable assets rather than as taxpayers, which makes these early tax rolls a substitute census of the enslaved.⁴³

The poll tax after emancipation

Emancipation ended the separate racial rates, and what replaced them was heavier and reached further down the age range. A revenue act of 19 February 1867, carried into the Revised Code of that year, laid two dollars on every male inhabitant between eighteen and fifty, without distinction of race, excepting only those between eighteen and twenty-one whose earnings went to a parent or master. Persons of unsound mind were exempt, as were disabled or crippled persons whose taxable property did not exceed five hundred dollars.⁴⁴

That act also created a record worth hunting for. To secure payment, every partnership, corporation, officer, and individual had to return to the assessor each first of February the number and the names of the clerks, bookkeepers, overseers, deputies, agents, workmen, journeymen, and laborers in their employment who were subject to the tax. The assessor charged the tax to the employer, who deducted it from the worker's wages, and an employer who failed to make the return owed double.⁴⁴ Where these returns survive they amount to a payroll of named working men, taken in the first years of freedom.

The rate then fell and the age range narrowed back. The Constitution of 1868 capped the poll tax at one dollar and fifty cents and directed it exclusively to the public school fund; by the Code of 1876 it stood at that figure on each male inhabitant over twenty-one and under forty-five, collected in the county and kept there for its schools. A town or city could levy a poll tax of its own besides, up to two dollars on a male inhabitant over twenty-one who had lived there three months.⁴⁴

The poll tax after 1875

Under the Constitution of 1875 property was assessed ad valorem and the poll tax was applied to the public schools.⁴⁵

The Constitution of 1901 turned the poll tax into a barrier to voting. It laid a tax of $1.50 on each male inhabitant over 21 and under 45 who was not otherwise exempt, and made payment of every year's tax since 1901 a condition of registering.⁴⁶ That cumulative feature is what gave the tax its force: a man who had fallen behind owed the whole arrears, not a single year's dollar and a half, and had to clear it by the first of February before the election. The scheme worked, and was meant to work, to keep poor men of both races, and Black men in particular, off the rolls. It was pared back by amendment in 1953 and struck down as a condition of voting in 1966.⁴⁶

Poll-tax and voter-registration records, where they survive, are a source for men between 21 and 45 — and, for the years 1867 to 1876, for men as young as 18.

Courts

Jury service

Before the Civil War the panel came off a county list. Every two years the sheriff obtained a list of the county's householders and freeholders — men who headed a household, and men who owned land outright — and he, the judge of probate, and the clerk of the circuit court selected from it the men they thought able to serve with honesty, impartiality, and intelligence, taking only those esteemed in the community for integrity, fair character, and sound judgment. A juror had to be at least 21 and not over 60, free of permanent disease, not a habitual drunkard, and able to read and write. A long list of occupations was excused unless the man consented to serve, among them attorneys in practice, judges, ministers in charge of churches, practicing physicians, teachers, keepers of public mills, ferry and toll keepers, and steamboat officers and crew.⁴⁷

Heading a household qualified a man just as fully as owning land, so a name on one of these lists is not evidence that he had bought property. The selected list gave each man's name, his residence, and his occupation, and was filed with the judge of probate within ten days⁴⁷ — a biennial roll of the county's householders and freeholders, with occupations, sitting in the probate records.

By the twentieth century the qualifications had shifted at the edges while keeping their shape. Only male citizens qualified under the statute were placed on the jury roll. The qualifications, as they stood in the code quoted by the Supreme Court in Norris v. Alabama, ran to male citizens between 21 and 65 who were of good character and sound judgment and could read English — excusing the illiterate freeholder or householder — and excluding habitual drunkards, the infirm, and those convicted of crimes of moral turpitude, meaning offenses the law treated as showing a corrupt character. The twentieth century kept a listing habit worth knowing about too: under an act of 1931 the clerk of the jury board had to obtain the names of every male citizen of the county over twenty-one and under sixty-five, together with each man's occupation, place of residence, and place of business — the modern counterpart of the sheriff's list described above.⁴⁸

Women as jurors

Jury service was limited to men through 1950: the statute placed only male citizens on the jury roll. The federal court struck that exclusion down in White v. Crook in 1966, and the legislature then amended the jury statute to admit women.⁴⁹

Black men as jurors

Black men were legally eligible for jury service after the Reconstruction constitution of 1868, but in practice they were kept off Alabama juries for generations, because the county jury commissions that picked the names had broad discretion over who went on the list and used it to leave Black men off — the discrimination the Supreme Court condemned in Norris v. Alabama in 1935.⁵⁰ Eligibility in law and presence on the rolls were, for a long time, two very different things.

Criminal responsibility

The common-law ages governed a child's criminal responsibility: a child under 7 was legally incapable of committing a crime; between 7 and 14 the law presumed incapacity, but the State could rebut that presumption by proving the child knew the act was wrong; and at 14 and above a person answered as an adult.

Statute changed this in 1907. An act of that year defined a delinquent child as any child under fourteen who broke a state law or town ordinance, or who was incorrigible, idle, or kept bad company, and sent such cases to the chancery court or any court with equity powers — and, in cities whose police courts could try misdemeanors, to those courts as well. Each such court kept a separate juvenile docket and minute book, and the hearing was closed to everyone but the officers of the court, the lawyers, and the child's parents or guardian.⁵¹

An act of 1919 then created juvenile courts in every county with a population of at least 150,000, and set a wider age range for them: a male child under sixteen and a female child under eighteen.⁵² Jefferson County alone was that large in 1920, so elsewhere the 1907 arrangement continued and the probate judge became the usual juvenile judge.⁵³ A child within these ages has a juvenile file rather than a criminal case file, and juvenile files are usually closed.

Witnesses

The test for an ordinary witness was competency — the capacity to understand the oath and to observe and relate facts — so a child of sufficient understanding could testify. Husband and wife were competent for or against each other in civil cases, except as to confidential communications between them, and a wife was a competent witness against a husband charged with abandoning his family. By the 1920s the criminal rule was broader still: either spouse could testify for or against the other in a criminal case, though neither could be compelled to.⁵⁴

Before emancipation the rule turned on race. Under the Code of 1852, people of African or Native American descent — a bar the statute traced down to the third generation, and applied whether the person was enslaved or free — could be witnesses only for or against one another. This barred the testimony of people of color against a white party in exactly the disputes where it would have mattered most. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866 swept the disability away and gave people of color full competence as witnesses.⁵⁵

Sources & Where to Verify

Constitutions

• Alabama. Constitution. 1819, 1861, 1865, 1868, 1875, and 1901. Digital images. Justia US Law. https://law.justia.com/constitution/alabama/ (accessed 23 July 2026). Also available through the Alabama Department of Archives and History.
• Constitution and Ordinances Adopted by the State Convention of Alabama. Montgomery: Gibson & Whitfield, State Printers, 1865. The ordinance of 29 September 1865 ratifying marriages between freedmen and freedwomen. Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-constitutional-convention-ordinances-1865 (accessed 23 July 2026).

Codes and Compilations

• Aikin, John G., comp. A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama. Philadelphia: Alexander Towar, 1833. Reissued with a supplement by Alexander B. Meek and the public acts of 1833–35 as Tuskaloosa, Ala.: D. Woodruff; Mobile: S. Smith, 1836. The title "Taxes — Subjects and Rate of Taxation" (pp. 408–09) carries the schedule of the revenue act of 1827; the supplement carries that of 1835 (p. 650). Digital images of the 1836 edition. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1836 (accessed 23 July 2026).
• Alabama. The Code of Alabama. Montgomery: Brittan and De Wolf, State Printers, 1852. Prepared by John J. Ormond, Arthur P. Bagby, and George Goldthwaite, with head notes and index by Henry C. Semple. Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/codeofalabamapre00alab (accessed 23 July 2026).
• Alabama. The Code of Alabama. 3 vols. Nashville, Tenn.: Marshall & Bruce Company, 1907. Prepared by James J. Mayfield, Code Commissioner. Digital images. HathiTrust, catalog record 008597549. Vol. 1, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421814; vol. 2, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421731; vol. 3, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421723 (accessed 3 August 2026).
• Alabama. The Code of Alabama. 4 vols. Atlanta, Ga.: Foote & Davies Co., printers, 1923. Prepared by James J. Mayfield, Code Commissioner. Each section prints its own history line back through the earlier codes, which makes this the fastest volume for tracing a rule. Digital images. HathiTrust, catalog record 010447350. Vol. 1, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421848; vol. 2, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421830; vol. 3, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421822; vol. 4, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421756 (accessed 27 July 2026).
• Alabama. The Code of Alabama, 1876. Montgomery, Ala.: Barrett & Brown, Printers for the State, 1877. Prepared by Wade Keyes and Fern M. Wood, and by John D. Roquemore as successor to Wood. Each section prints its Revised Code of 1867 number in parentheses, which makes the volume the fastest way to trace a rule backward. Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1876 (accessed 3 August 2026).
• Alabama. The Code of Alabama, 1886. 2 vols. Nashville: Marshall & Bruce, printers, 1887. Prepared by Robert C. Brickell, Peter Hamilton, and John P. Tillman. Digital images. Vol. 1 (civil), Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1886-v-1; vol. 2 (criminal), Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1886-v-2 (accessed 23 July 2026).
• Alabama. The Code of Alabama, 1896. 2 vols. Atlanta, Ga.: The Foote & Davies Company, printers, 1897. Prepared by William L. Martin, commissioner. Digital images. HathiTrust, catalog record 008597548. Vol. 1, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433009075833; vol. 2, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433009075841 (accessed 27 July 2026).
• Alabama. Code of Alabama 1940. 10 vols. Charlottesville, Va.: Michie, 1941. Edited and annotated by the Code Commissioner under the supervision of the Code Committee of the Legislature. Adopted by act approved 2 July 1940 and published the following year. The code in force through the close of the period covered by this guide. Not digitized for open access; consult it in a law library or through a subscription archive. The sections cited from this code in the notes below were read in the U.S. Women's Bureau report listed under Secondary and Reference Works.
• Alabama. Code of Alabama 1975. Current code; online at the Alabama Legislature and at Justia US Law.
• Alabama. The Penal Code of Alabama. Montgomery: Reid & Screws, State Printers, 1866. By George W. Stone and John W. Shepherd. Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-penal-code-1866 (accessed 23 July 2026).
• Alabama. The Revised Code of Alabama. Montgomery, Ala.: Reid & Screws, State Printers, 1867. Prepared by A. J. Walker; adopted by act approved 19 February 1867. The front matter reprints the ordinances and resolutions of the convention of 1865 at pp. 52–68, including No. 36 (dower limitation) and No. 39 (marriages of freedmen and freedwomen). Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1867 (accessed 3 August 2026).
• Clay, Clement Comer, comp. A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama. Tuskaloosa: Marmaduke J. Slade, 1843. The title "Taxes — Subjects and Rate of Taxation" carries the antebellum poll-tax schedule and its exemptions. Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1843 (accessed 23 July 2026).
• Toulmin, Harry, comp. A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama. New York: Ginn & Curtis; J. & J. Harper, printers, 1823. Title 60, "Taxes," carries the earliest state revenue acts, including that of 27 December 1822 with the first state poll schedule (pp. 752–53). Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1823 (accessed 23 July 2026).

Session Laws

• Alabama. Acts of Alabama. Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery; portions digitized on HathiTrust and the Internet Archive. Session laws not folded into a code, including the anti-miscegenation acts and the 1966 act admitting women to juries.
• Alabama. General Acts of Alabama, 1907. No. 340, the act defining delinquent children (p. 442). Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-acts-1907_general (accessed 23 July 2026).
• Alabama. General Acts of Alabama, 1919. No. 146, creating juvenile courts in counties of 150,000 or more (p. 128); No. 457, establishing the Child Welfare Department (p. 693); No. 704, on commitment where no juvenile court exists (p. 1025). Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-acts-1919_general (accessed 23 July 2026).
• Alabama. General Acts of Alabama, 1923. The amendment of the Child Welfare Department act, requiring reports from probate judges and other judges exercising jurisdiction over dependent, neglected, and delinquent children (p. 271). Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-acts-1923_general (accessed 3 August 2026).
• Alabama. General Acts of Alabama, 1931, 1932, and 1936–37. The acts amending the Code of 1923: 1931, No. 116 (homestead alienation, § 7883) and No. 704 (notice of guardians' settlements, § 8209); 1932, No. 304 (the widow's dissent, § 10593, reproduced with its full derivation chain); 1936–37, No. 95 (relief from the disabilities of non-age, § 8280). Each sets out the amended section in full, which makes these volumes the readiest open-access check on the text of the Code of 1923. Digital images. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/alabama-acts-1931_general; https://archive.org/details/alabama-acts-1932_general; https://archive.org/details/alabama-acts-1936_1937 (accessed 3 August 2026).

Court Cases

• Beggs v. State. 55 Ala. 108 (1876).
• Bell v. Burkhalter. 176 Ala. 62, 57 So. 460 (1912).
• Campbell's Adm'r v. Gullatt. 43 Ala. 57 (1869).
• Carter v. Jury Commission of Greene County. 396 U.S. 320 (1970).
• Dorsey v. Dorsey. 224 Ala. 496, 140 So. 540 (1932).
• Gordon, Rankin & Co. v. Tweedy. 71 Ala. 202 (1881).
• Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections. 383 U.S. 663 (1966).
• Hoyt v. Florida. 368 U.S. 57 (1961).
• Joyner v. McMurphy. 26 Ala. App. 549, 163 So. 533 (1935).
• Loving v. Virginia. 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
• McCoy v. State. 221 Ala. 466, 129 So. 21 (1930).
• Merchants' National Bank v. Hubbard. 222 Ala. 518, 133 So. 723 (1931).
• Moore v. Heineke. 119 Ala. 627, 24 So. 374 (1898).
• Norris v. Alabama. 294 U.S. 587 (1935).
• Owen v. Coffey. 201 Ala. 531, 78 So. 885 (1918).
• Pace v. Alabama. 106 U.S. 583 (1883).
• Peddy v. Montgomery. 345 So. 2d 631 (Ala. 1977).
• Rogers v. McLeskey. 225 Ala. 148, 142 So. 526 (1932).
• Tannis v. Doe ex dem. St. Cyre. 21 Ala. 449 (1852).
• Thompson v. New England Mortgage Security Co. 110 Ala. 400, 18 So. 315 (1895).
• Ticer v. Holesapple. 226 Ala. 271, 146 So. 614 (1933).
• United States v. Alabama. 252 F. Supp. 95 (M.D. Ala. 1966).
• Ward v. Mathews. 122 Ala. 188, 25 So. 50 (1899).
• White v. Crook. 251 F. Supp. 401 (M.D. Ala. 1966).

Secondary and Reference Works

• Alabama Council on Crime and Delinquency. "Our Story." ACCD. https://accdonline.org/our-story/ (accessed 23 July 2026). For the 1911 establishment of the Juvenile Court of Jefferson County.
• Alabama Department of Archives and History. Montgomery. Constitutions, session laws, and county records. "Research Tips," for the county records held on microfilm, including guardianship records running from before statehood into the 1950s. https://archives.alabama.gov/research/guidance/tips.aspx (accessed 27 July 2026).
• Alabama Department of Revenue. "Individual Income Tax" and General Summary of State Taxes. For the 1933 income-tax amendment and the arrival of the gross receipts and sales taxes in 1936 and 1939. https://www.revenue.alabama.gov/tax-types/individual-income-tax/ (accessed 3 August 2026).
• Encyclopedia of Alabama. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org (accessed 23 July 2026). Context on the constitutions, slavery, and Reconstruction.
• FamilySearch Research Wiki. "Alabama Probate Records." Estate, guardianship, dower, and bond records, county by county. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Alabama_Probate_Records (accessed 27 July 2026).
• Freedmen's Bureau. Marriage and Cohabitation Registers. Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, National Archives. For the unions and children of formerly enslaved families.
• Key, V. O. Southern Politics in State and Nation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. On the working of the cumulative poll tax.
• Library of Congress. "Alabama: Local History and Genealogy Resource Guide." https://guides.loc.gov/alabama-local-history-genealogy (accessed 27 July 2026).
• University of Alabama Law Library. "Alabama State Statutes & Session Laws: Code of Alabama — Historical." https://guides.library.law.ua.edu/c.php?g=1440661&p=10700441 (accessed 23 July 2026). The succession of digests and codes, with adoption dates.
• U.S. Women's Bureau. The Legal Status of Women in the United States of America: Report for Alabama. Bulletin of the Women's Bureau 157-1, revised. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1949. PDF. FRASER. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/women/b0157-01-rev_dolwb_1949.pdf (accessed 23 July 2026). States the law as of 1 January 1948, topic by topic, on majority, married women's property, dower, curtesy, intestacy, guardianship, marriage, and jury service.

Citations

1. James J. Mayfield, comp., The Code of Alabama, 3 vols. (Nashville, Tenn.: Marshall & Bruce Company, 1907), vol. 1, § 12, p. 220, headed "Common law of England; adopted," read in the volume; digital images, HathiTrust, catalog record 008597549 (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421814 : accessed 3 August 2026); carried forward at James J. Mayfield, comp., The Code of Alabama, 4 vols. (Atlanta, Ga.: Foote & Davies Co., printers, 1923), § 14; digital images, HathiTrust, catalog record 010447350 (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421848 : accessed 27 July 2026); and Code of Alabama 1940, 10 vols. (Charlottesville, Va.: Michie, 1941), tit. 1, § 3, now Ala. Code § 1-3-1, which provides that the common law of England, so far as it is not inconsistent with the constitution, laws, and institutions of this state, shall together with those institutions and laws be the rule of decisions and continue in force until altered or repealed by the legislature. The reception was not codified as a numbered section until 1907; before that it rested on the statutes of the Mississippi Territory (1807) and on Alabama Constitution of 1819, art. VI, § 5, which continued in force the laws then operating. Justia US Law (https://law.justia.com/constitution/alabama/ : accessed 23 July 2026). The Code of 1940 was issued in ten volumes and has not been digitized for open access; except for tit. 1, § 3, every 1940 section in these notes is cited as read in U.S. Women's Bureau, The Legal Status of Women in the United States of America: Report for Alabama, Bulletin of the Women's Bureau 157-1, rev. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1949), which states the law as of 1 January 1948; its topic number is given with each. ↩
2. Joyner v. McMurphy, 26 Ala. App. 549, 163 So. 533 (1935), holding that community property does not exist in Alabama; U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, nos. 10 and 30. For the territorial sequence given in the text, see Encyclopedia of Alabama, entries on the colonial and territorial periods (https://encyclopediaofalabama.org : accessed 23 July 2026). ↩
3. Toulmin's Digest, title 42, "Marriage," ch. I, "An Act regulating the solemnization of Marriages," passed 5 January 1805 by the Legislative Council and House of Representatives of the Mississippi Territory, read in the volume: § 1 (who might solemnize the rites of matrimony between free persons producing a license, and the register of the orphans' court keeping a book for licenses, the consent of parents and guardians, and certificates of solemnization), § 7 (the officiant's certificate transmitted to the register and there recorded, the register's fee for taking bond and the consent of parents or guardians, and a forfeit of fifty dollars on any officiant who failed to transmit it), and § 8 (the prohibited degrees, with the marriage declared null and void on conviction). The same title carries "An Act to make Lawful and Obligatory certain Marriages therein named," 19 November 1818, and the act of 1821 on licensed ministers. The act fixes no minimum age to marry, so the received common law governed until the Code of 1852, § 1944; on the reception of the common law see note 1. Digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1823 : accessed 3 August 2026). ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
4. Harry Toulmin, comp., A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama (New York: Ginn & Curtis; J. & J. Harper, printers, 1823); digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1823 : accessed 23 July 2026). John G. Aikin, comp., A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama (Philadelphia: Alexander Towar, 1833), reissued with a supplement as (Tuskaloosa, Ala.: D. Woodruff; Mobile: S. Smith, 1836); digital images of the 1836 edition, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1836 : accessed 23 July 2026). Clement Comer Clay, comp., A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama (Tuskaloosa: Marmaduke J. Slade, 1843); digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1843 : accessed 23 July 2026). John J. Ormond, Arthur P. Bagby, and George Goldthwaite, comps., The Code of Alabama (Montgomery: Brittan and De Wolf, State Printers, 1852); digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/codeofalabamapre00alab : accessed 23 July 2026). A. J. Walker, comp., The Revised Code of Alabama (Montgomery, Ala.: Reid & Screws, State Printers, 1867); digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1867 : accessed 3 August 2026). Wade Keyes, Fern M. Wood, and John D. Roquemore, comps., The Code of Alabama, 1876 (Montgomery, Ala.: Barrett & Brown, Printers for the State, 1877); digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1876 : accessed 3 August 2026). Robert C. Brickell, Peter Hamilton, and John P. Tillman, comps., The Code of Alabama, 1886, 2 vols. (Nashville: Marshall & Bruce, printers, 1887); digital images, vol. 1, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1886-v-1 : accessed 3 August 2026), vol. 2, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1886-v-2 : accessed 23 July 2026). William L. Martin, comp., The Code of Alabama, 1896, 2 vols. (Atlanta, Ga.: The Foote & Davies Company, printers, 1897); digital images, HathiTrust, catalog record 008597548 (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433009075833 : accessed 27 July 2026). The codes of 1876, 1886, and 1896 each carry a title year one earlier than the imprint year, having been adopted early in the following year. Short forms are used below. ↩
5. U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 1, giving 21 for both sexes in the absence of statutory provision. Lowered to 19 by Acts of Alabama 1975, No. 77, now Ala. Code § 26-1-1. ↩
6. Bell v. Burkhalter, 176 Ala. 62, 57 So. 460 (1912), applying the received rule that a minor's contracts are voidable and may be disaffirmed within a reasonable time after majority; the reception of the common law is at note 1. The annotator of the Code of 1923 treats the case as reaching conveyances as well, at the notes to § 8265. ↩
7. Code of 1923, § 8280, headed "When circuit court in equity may relieve from disabilities of non-age," allowing the several circuit courts in equity, in term time or vacation, to relieve minors over eighteen in the cases named "and none other"; set out in full as amended by General Acts of Alabama, 1936–37, No. 95, approved February 1937, read in the volume; carrying Code of 1907, § 4505, Code of 1896, § 829, Code of 1886, § 2357, and Code of 1876, § 2735, from the acts of 17 March 1873 and 13 February 1879. Code of 1940, tit. 27, §§ 13–20, and tit. 34, § 76 (a married woman or widow 18 but under 21 relieved for purposes other than political), read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 2. ↩ ↩
8. Code of 1923, § 8993, headed "What minors incapable of marriage," read in the volume; carrying Code of 1907, § 4879, Code of 1896, § 2839, Code of 1886, § 2309, Code of 1876, § 2672, Revised Code of 1867, § 2333, and Code of 1852, § 1944, its notes recording that such a marriage is voidable merely. Code of 1940, tit. 34, § 4, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 18. ↩
9. Owen v. Coffey, 201 Ala. 531, 78 So. 885 (1918). ↩
10. Code of 1852, §§ 1950 (consent where the male is under twenty-one and the female under eighteen and neither has been married before, with a bond of two hundred dollars payable to the State) and 1951 (the probate judge's register of licenses, a written consent transcribed on the same page). Still in the same words at Code of 1923, § 8999, headed "When consent of parents and bond required," read in the volume, carrying Code of 1907, § 4885, Code of 1896, § 2845, Code of 1886, § 2315, Code of 1876, § 2678, Revised Code of 1867, § 2339, and Code of 1852, § 1950, and traced in its note to Aikin's Digest, p. 305, § 5, and Clay's Digest, p. 373, § 5. Code of 1940, tit. 34, § 10, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 18. ↩ ↩
11. Code of 1852, § 1946 (who may solemnize a marriage, between free white persons or between free persons of color), § 1949 (license from the judge of probate of the county in which the female resides), and § 1952 (the officiant's certificate returned within one month and recorded in the register of licenses); §§ 1947–1948 cover marriages in the forms of a religious society, the society's clerk keeping a register. For the widened list of officiants and the dropped word free, Code of 1876, § 2674, read in the volume, adding a chancellor and a judge of the city court on the authority of the act of 17 February 1873, and reading "between white persons, or between persons of color." ↩ ↩
12. Campbell's Adm'r v. Gullatt, 43 Ala. 57 (1869); Beggs v. State, 55 Ala. 108 (1876); Moore v. Heineke, 119 Ala. 627, 24 So. 374 (1898); Rogers v. McLeskey, 225 Ala. 148, 142 So. 526 (1932); U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 19. Abolished for unions formed on or after 1 January 2017 by Ala. Code § 30-1-20. ↩
13. Code of 1876, §§ 2670–2671 (incestuous marriages and the prohibited degrees, § 2671 extending the bar to illegitimate relatives), § 2673 (marriage declared void after conviction, the issue born before annulment not illegitimate), and §§ 4185–4186 (bigamy); carried from Revised Code of 1867, §§ 3599–3600. ↩ ↩
14. Code of 1876, § 4189, the section sustained in Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883), and § 4190 (the penalty on the officiant); the earlier version is in The Penal Code of Alabama (Montgomery: Reid & Screws, State Printers, 1866); digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-penal-code-1866 : accessed 23 July 2026). The constitutional bar is Alabama Constitution of 1901, art. IV, § 102, unenforceable after Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), and repealed by Amendment 667, ratified 2000. ↩
15. Ordinance No. 39, "To ratify marriages between freedmen and freedwomen, and for other purposes," adopted 29 September 1865, § 1 (ratifying the marriages, and declaring those recognizing each other as husband and wife to be married) and § 2 (legitimating the issue, with the relations of children born in wedlock). Constitution and Ordinances Adopted by the State Convention of Alabama (Montgomery: Gibson & Whitfield, State Printers, 1865), p. 63; digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-constitutional-convention-ordinances-1865 : accessed 23 July 2026); reprinted in the front matter of the Revised Code of 1867 at p. 64. ↩ ↩
16. Code of 1852, § 1018 (an enslaved person could own no property). That any free person of full capacity could own and convey land, and that a minor could own but not freely convey it, are rules of the received common law; see notes 1 and 6. On foreign-born owners, Alabama Constitution of 1901, art. I, § 34, and Constitution of 1875, art. I, § 36, in identical terms. ↩ ↩ ↩
17. For the earlier regime, Code of 1852, §§ 1982–1988, read in the volume: § 1982 (all property held by the wife before the marriage or coming to her after it is her separate estate and not subject to her husband's debts), § 1983 (that property vests in the husband as her trustee, who may manage and control it and need not account to her for the rents, income, and profits), § 1984 (her property sold only by husband and wife jointly, by writing attested by two witnesses), and § 1987 (her separate estate liable for articles of comfort and support of the household). Alabama Constitution of 1901, art. X, § 209, the same provision verbatim at Constitution of 1875, art. X, § 6, and entering the Constitution of 1868 to prevent a return to the common-law rule, Peddy v. Montgomery, 345 So. 2d 631 (Ala. 1977). Code of 1923, read in the volume: §§ 8265–8267 (capacity to contract as if sole), § 8269 (no alienation of her lands without the husband joining, with the four exceptions), and § 8272 (she shall not become his surety); carrying Code of 1907, §§ 4490–4497, Code of 1896, §§ 2524–2529, and Code of 1886, §§ 2344–2349, from the act of 28 February 1887. Code of 1940, tit. 34, §§ 65, 67, 70, 71, 73, 74, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, nos. 4, 5, and 9. ↩ ↩ ↩
18. Toulmin's Digest, title 18, "Deeds and Conveyances," ch. I, "An Act respecting Conveyances," passed 4 March 1803 by the Legislative Council and House of Representatives of the Mississippi Territory, p. 234, read in the volume: § 1 (a deed acknowledged by the party who executed it, or proved by one or more of the subscribing witnesses, before a judge of the superior court or a justice of the county court of the county where the land lay, with the officer's certificate written on or under the deed, is received in evidence), § 2 (no conveyance to be recorded in any clerk's office unless first so acknowledged or proved and certified), and § 3 (no estate of a feme covert to pass by her deed without a previous acknowledgment made by her "on a private examination, apart from her husband," that she signed it freely "without any fear, threats, or compulsion of her husband"; such a deed releases and bars her dower; provided that the clause is not to be construed "to enable any feme covert, under the age of twenty-one years, to convey lands, tenements, or hereditaments, or any right of dower, interest or estate therein"). Later acts of 21 November 1818, 17 December 1819, and 20 December 1820, in the same title, widened the officers who could take an acknowledgment or a relinquishment of dower to clerks of court, justices of the peace, and circuit and county judges. digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1823 : accessed 6 August 2026). ↩ ↩ ↩
19. On the wife's age, the requirement is not original to the code and does not run through the period. Clay's Digest, title "Dower," § 9, pp. 173–74, read in the volume, carrying an act of 1836, makes it lawful for all femes covert in the state, "whether under or over the age of twenty-one years," to relinquish dower; so also Code of 1852, § 1358 ("married women may convey or release their right of dower, whether of full age or not") and Code of 1876, § 2236, headed "Infants may relinquish dower," each read in the volume. The age of eighteen first appears at Code of 1886, § 1894, read in the volume, and is carried forward from there. Code of 1923, § 7433, vol. 3, p. 659, read in the volume, which prints the derivation chain (3818) (1509) (1894) (2234) (1626) (1356) beside the section: a wife of eighteen may relinquish dower by joining her husband's conveyance, by joining him in a power of attorney to convey, or by a separate instrument executed by her alone afterward, witnessed or acknowledged as for other conveyances; carrying Code of 1907, § 3818, Code of 1896, § 1509, Code of 1886, § 1894, Code of 1876, § 2234, Revised Code of 1867, § 1626, and Code of 1852, § 1356. Dower reaching all lands of which the husband was seized in fee during the marriage is Code of 1876, § 2232. Code of 1940, tit. 34, § 46, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, nos. 5 and 15. The separate examination under Homestead below is a homestead requirement, not a general one. ↩
20. Alabama Constitution of 1901, art. X, § 205, restating Constitution of 1875, art. X, § 2. The statutory text is Code of 1923, § 7883, headed "Alienation of homestead when owner a married man," set out in full by General Acts of Alabama, 1931, No. 116, approved 9 March 1931, read in the volume, which requires her examination separate and apart from her husband before an officer authorized to take acknowledgments of deeds and that officer's certificate substantially in the form at § 6845. It carries Code of 1907, § 4161, Code of 1896, § 2034, Code of 1886, § 2508, and Code of 1876, § 2822. The homestead was limited to $2,000 in value and 160 acres, Code of 1940, tit. 7, § 625, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 3; Thompson v. New England Mortgage Security Co., 110 Ala. 400, 18 So. 315 (1895). ↩
21. Code of 1852, §§ 1265 (persons of twenty-one not under legal incapacity may alien their lands by writing or by will), 1266 (the writing signed at its foot and attested by one witness, or by two able to write where the party signs by mark), and 1267 (acknowledgment operating as compliance). The same rules at Code of 1876, §§ 2145–2146, with § 2161 (a married woman's conveyance of land or stocks) and § 2234 (dower relinquished before two attesting witnesses). Neither code fixes an age for a witness to a conveyance; the requirement is competency, for which see note 54. On the two witnesses to a dower release, Code of 1852, § 1356, and Code of 1886, § 1894 (the witnesses to be able to write), each read in the volume. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
22. Code of 1852, §§ 1033–1054, the article on free persons of color (§ 1033, entering the state; § 1036, retailing; § 1044, preaching without leave), and §§ 1055–1061 (tavern and retail licenses). The exemption is § 1037: the preceding sections of the article do not apply to or affect any free person of color who by the treaty between the United States and Spain became a citizen of the United States, or the descendants of such. On inheritance, Tannis v. Doe ex dem. St. Cyre, 21 Ala. 449 (1852), on the act of 1832. An 1861 act separately barred them from owning, hiring, or controlling enslaved people: Public Laws of the State of Alabama, 1860–61, ch. 36, § 1. The Creek (Muscogee) cessions proceeded by federal treaty rather than by Alabama statute: Treaty with the Creeks (Treaty of Cusseta), 24 March 1832, proclaimed 4 April 1832, 7 Stat. 366, arts. I–II; digital images, govinfo (https://www.govinfo.gov/link/statute/7/366 : accessed 3 August 2026). ↩ ↩
23. Toulmin's Digest, "An Act concerning Wills and Testaments: the Settlement of Intestates' Estates; and the Duty of Executors, Administrators, and Guardians," passed 10 February 1806 by the Legislative Council and House of Representatives of the Mississippi Territory, p. 883, read in the volume: § 16 (land not devised descends to the children and their descendants in equal parts, the descendants of a dead child taking that child's share among them, "and when there shall be no children of the intestate, nor descendants of such children, then to the brothers and sisters of the intestate, and their descendants, in equal parts"), § 27 (goods and chattels not bequeathed descend and are distributed "in the same way and manner that real estates not devised, descend by this act"), § 8 (estate neither devised nor bequeathed distributed as an intestate's), § 7 (a posthumous child unprovided for takes the share it would have taken had the father died intestate), and § 9 (a subscribing witness to whom the will makes a devise or bequest loses it where the will cannot otherwise be proved, but is compellable to testify). digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1823 : accessed 6 August 2026). ↩
24. Clay's Digest, title "Descents," § 2, p. 168, read in the volume, which sets out the order given in the text together with the three qualifications — no representation among collaterals except through the descendants of brothers and sisters, whole blood of equal degree preferred to half blood, and the widow's dower saved in all cases. The same canon at Code of 1852, § 1572, read in the volume, and unchanged at Revised Code of 1867, § 1888, Code of 1876, § 2252, and Code of 1886, § 1915, the last read in the volume and still placing brothers and sisters at clause 2 and the father and mother at clause 3. The order was reversed by the act of 23 February 1893, p. 1055, first codified at Code of 1896, § 1453, p. 482, whose clause 2 gives the estate "to the father and mother, in equal parts" and whose clause 3 divides it one-half to a sole surviving parent and one-half to the brothers and sisters; digital images, HathiTrust (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433009075833 : accessed 6 August 2026). Carried in that form to Code of 1907, § 3754, and Code of 1923, § 7365, p. 629, read in the volume, which prints the chain (3754) (1453) (1915) (2252) (1888) (1572); digital images, HathiTrust (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421822 : accessed 6 August 2026). Still so at Code of 1940, tit. 16, §§ 1, 10, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 27 ("Parents inherit equally from their intestate deceased child"). The personal estate followed the same rules apart from the widow's shares: Code of 1923, § 7374. ↩
25. Code of 1923, § 7365, subsec. 6, read in the volume: where the intestate leaves no children or their descendants, no father or mother, and no brothers or sisters or their descendants, the whole goes to the husband or wife; so also Code of 1940, tit. 16, § 1, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, nos. 15 and 27. ↩
26. Toulmin's Digest, title 20, "Dower," ch. I, "An Act concerning Dower," passed 22 December 1812 by the Legislative Council and House of Representatives of the Mississippi Territory, p. 258, read in the volume: § 1 (a widow dissenting in court within a year of probate takes "one third part of all the lands, tenements, and hereditaments of which her husband died seized, and possessed of, or had before conveyed, whereof said widow had not relinquished her right of dower," for life, the dwelling house her husband most generally occupied to be comprehended in it), § 2 (of the personal estate she takes one-half if there be no children or but one child, and a child's part in fee simple if more than one), and § 3 (allotment by five disinterested freeholders summoned as commissioners, who set the third off by metes and bounds). digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1823 : accessed 6 August 2026). ↩ ↩
27. Code of 1852, § 1355, headed "Quantity of the dower interest," read in the volume; the same three fractions in Clay's Digest, assembled from title "Dower," § 2, p. 172 (one-third only where the estate is insolvent, though there be no children), § 3, p. 172 (one-third where the husband died intestate or made no provision), and the editor's note to § 3 referring to title "Descents," § 2, p. 168, for the widow's one-half where the husband left no lineal descendants; unchanged at Code of 1923, § 7428, p. 658, read in the volume, headed "Extent of widow's dower interest" and printing the chain (3813) (1505) (1893) (2233) (1625) (1355), carrying Code of 1907, § 3813, Code of 1896, § 1505, Code of 1886, § 1893, Code of 1876, § 2233, Revised Code of 1867, § 1625, and Code of 1852, § 1355. On the offset of the wife's separate estate, §§ 7429–7430, carrying Code of 1876, §§ 2715, 2716, valuing the dower interest at seven years' rent. Code of 1940, tit. 34, §§ 40–43, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 15. ↩
28. Clay's Digest, title "Dower," § 4, p. 173, read in the volume; the same rule at Code of 1852, § 1581, Revised Code of 1867, § 1897, and Code of 1876, § 2261, each read in the volume and each printing its predecessor's section number beside its own. The childless widow's share was raised to the whole at Code of 1886, § 1924, read in the volume. Carried forward at Code of 1896, § 1462, Code of 1907, § 3763, and Code of 1923, § 7374, p. 633, headed "Distribution of personal estate," read in the volume, which prints the chain (3763) (1462) (1924) (2261) (1897) (1581) and directs that the personal estate be distributed "in the same manner as his real estate, and according to the same rules" apart from the widow's share — so the reversal of the order of descent in 1893, note 24, moved the residue of the personal estate with it, now Code of 1940, tit. 16, § 10, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, nos. 15 and 27, which states the four shares in these terms: the personal estate remaining after debts and charges goes absolutely to the widow if there are no children; if there is one child she takes one-half; if more than one and not more than four, a child's portion; and if more than four, one-fifth. Each distributes the personal estate in the same manner as the real estate and by the same rules, apart from the widow's share. ↩
29. Code of 1923, § 7376, headed "Husband's distributive share of the wife's estate," read in the volume; carrying Code of 1907, § 3765, Code of 1896, § 2534, Code of 1886, § 2353, Code of 1876, § 2714, Revised Code of 1867, § 2379, and Code of 1852, § 1990, its notes recording that common-law curtesy was abolished and replaced by this statutory estate in the nature of curtesy. Code of 1940, tit. 16, §§ 10, 12, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 15. ↩
30. On the widow's immediate provision, Code of 1876, read in the volume: § 2824 (on the owner's death, exempting the wearing apparel of the deceased and of the widow and children, yarn and cloth on hand for their use, family books and portraits, such grain, stores, and groceries as may be necessary to support the family for twelve months, and the necessary bedding and household and kitchen furniture) and § 2825 (the widow, or the guardian of the minor children, selecting from the inventory that exempt property together with further property to the value of one thousand dollars, exempt from administration for the payment of debts, and accounted for on final settlement where the estate is solvent); the same figure is the personal-property exemption of Alabama Constitution of 1875, art. X, § 1. Code of 1940, tit. 7, § 661 (homestead exempt from administration and debts in favor of the widow and minor children, title vesting at once and absolutely where the estate is insolvent) and § 663 (title vesting absolutely where it is the only real estate the decedent owned in the state), with §§ 654, 662 (the $2,000 allowance in lieu of homestead) and § 669 (the same applied to the estates of women leaving minor children); read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 3; Ticer v. Holesapple, 226 Ala. 271, 146 So. 614 (1933). ↩ ↩
31. Code of 1923, read in the volume: § 7437 (quarantine), carrying Code of 1907, § 3824, Code of 1896, § 1515, Code of 1886, § 1900, Code of 1876, § 2238, Revised Code of 1867, § 1630, and Code of 1852, § 1359; § 10593 (dissent), carrying Code of 1907, § 6168, Code of 1896, § 4259, Code of 1886, § 1963, Code of 1876, § 2292, Revised Code of 1867, § 1928, and Code of 1852, § 1609; and § 10595 (a widow of eighteen may dissent as if twenty-one). Section 10593 is set out in full, with that whole chain printed in its heading, by General Acts of Alabama, 1932, No. 304, approved 9 November 1932, read in the volume; that act introduced both the $50,000 limit and the widow's right to claim without dissenting where the will makes no provision for her. Both stood unchanged at Code of 1940, tit. 61, § 18, with tit. 34, § 50, and tit. 7, §§ 664, 665, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, nos. 16 and 17; Dorsey v. Dorsey, 224 Ala. 496, 140 So. 540 (1932); Merchants' National Bank v. Hubbard, 222 Ala. 518, 133 So. 723 (1931). On the wartime suspension, Ordinance No. 36, adopted 29 September 1865, § 1, printed in the front matter of the Revised Code of 1867 at p. 63. ↩ ↩
32. Code of 1852, §§ 2014 (guardian appointed where a minor with a father living has an estate of his own, the father preferred, and the limit on controlling the ward's person), 2015 (a guardian named by the father's will), and 2018 (bond in twice the supposed value of the estate). Final settlement: Code of 1923, §§ 8208–8209, the latter amended by General Acts of Alabama, 1931, No. 704, approved 30 July 1931, "providing for notice of settlements of guardians," read in the volume; carrying Code of 1907, §§ 4435, 4436, Code of 1896, §§ 2345, 2346, and Code of 1886, §§ 2460, 2461. Code of 1940, tit. 21, §§ 3, 4, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, nos. 25 and 26, which confirm the father's preference and the limit on a non-parent guardian's control of the ward's person, and which show that the power to name a testamentary guardian had by then widened: under the earlier codes it belonged to the father alone (Code of 1852, § 2015; Code of 1876, § 2751, each read in the volume), while by 1940 either parent could exercise it, the surviving parent keeping custody in both eras. ↩ ↩
33. Code of 1876, § 2749 (a minor over fourteen may nominate his guardian, in person or by a nomination certified to the probate judge by a justice of the peace) and § 2750 (the father's preference); carried from Code of 1852, § 2013, through Revised Code of 1867, §§ 2409, 2410, and forward unchanged to Code of 1923, § 8095, p. 21, headed "Minor over fourteen may nominate guardian," read in the volume, which prints the chain (4338) (2248) (2371) (2749) (2409) (2013) and traces the rule to Aikin's Digest, p. 220, § 1, and Clay's Digest, p. 267, § 1 — so the age of fourteen governed from the 1830s to the end of the period; digital images, HathiTrust (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421756 : accessed 6 August 2026). ↩ ↩
34. Code of 1923, § 7371 (every illegitimate child the heir of his mother, inheriting as if born in lawful wedlock) with § 7372 (the mother, or her kindred on the mother's side, inheriting from such a child in default of the child's own descendants), read in the volume; carrying Code of 1907, §§ 3760, 3761, Code of 1896, §§ 1459, 1460, Code of 1886, §§ 1921, 1922, Code of 1876, §§ 2258, 2259, Revised Code of 1867, §§ 1894, 1895, and Code of 1852, §§ 1578, 1579, traced in the note to Aikin's Digest, p. 129, § 4, and Clay's Digest, p. 168, § 4. Code of 1940, tit. 16, § 8, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 29; Ward v. Mathews, 122 Ala. 188, 25 So. 50 (1899). ↩
35. Code of 1876, § 2742 (legitimation by the marriage of the mother and reputed father with his recognition of the child) and § 2743 (legitimation by the father's written declaration, attested by two witnesses and acknowledged before and recorded by the probate judge); carried from Revised Code of 1867, §§ 2404, 2405. The private-act route closed with Alabama Constitution of 1901, art. IV, § 104, cl. 4; cl. 2 likewise closed it for relieving a minor of the disabilities of nonage. ↩
36. Code of 1876, § 2274 (a person of twenty-one, of sound mind, may devise land), § 2280 (persons over eighteen, of sound mind, and no others, may bequeath personal property), § 2294 (no will effectual unless written, signed by the testator or by another in his presence and at his direction, and attested by at least two witnesses subscribing in his presence), and § 2295 (witnesses competent when they attest); carried back to Revised Code of 1867, §§ 1910, 1916, 1930, and forward without change of age to Code of 1886, §§ 1945, 1951, and to Code of 1923, § 10577, p. 849, headed "Who may devise lands" ("Every person of the age of twenty-one years, of sound mind, may, by his last will, devise his lands"), printing the chain (6152) (4241) (1945) (2274) (1910) (1589), and § 10582, p. 851, headed "Who may bequeath personal property" ("All persons over the age of eighteen"), printing the chain (6157) (4247) (1951) (2280) (1916) (1595); both read in the volume, HathiTrust (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112105421756 : accessed 6 August 2026). ↩ ↩
37. Code of 1876, § 2282 (a will revoked where the testator marries and has issue living at his death), § 2283 (the marriage of a woman revoking a will made while unmarried), and § 2284 (a child born after the will). The woman's-marriage rule is Code of 1923, § 10584, read in the volume, carrying Code of 1907, § 6159, Code of 1896, § 4250, Code of 1886, § 1954, Code of 1876, § 2283, Revised Code of 1867, § 1919, and Code of 1852, § 1598. Code of 1940, tit. 61, § 9, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 14. ↩
38. Code of 1876, § 2340 (disqualification of a person under 21, one convicted of an infamous crime, and one incompetent from intemperance, improvidence, or want of understanding), §§ 2341, 2343 (administration with the will annexed until the disability is removed), and § 2342 (a married executrix needing her husband's written consent, he becoming jointly responsible). The same disqualifications, in the same words, at Code of 1923, vol. 3, p. 38, read in the volume: no person is a fit person to serve as executor "who is under the age of twenty-one years, or who has been convicted of an infamous crime, or who, from intemperance, improvidence, or want of understanding, is incompetent to discharge the duties of the trust." ↩ ↩
39. Alabama Constitution of 1901, Amendment 25, proclaimed ratified 2 August 1933, authorizing a tax on individual income at a rate not exceeding 5 percent, levied by the legislature in the Revenue Act of 1935; and the gross receipts tax of 1936, repealed and replaced by a sales tax, general sales taxation dating from 1939. Alabama Department of Revenue, "Individual Income Tax" (https://www.revenue.alabama.gov/tax-types/individual-income-tax/ : accessed 3 August 2026), and General Summary of State Taxes. Neither tax turns on age. ↩
40. Toulmin's Digest, title 60, "Taxes," ch. XI, "An Act to raise a Revenue for the Support of Government, until otherwise provided by Law," passed 27 December 1822, § 3, pp. 752–53, read in the volume, setting the rates given in the table: twenty-five cents for an enslaved person not exceeding ten years and one dollar for all over ten and under sixty; one dollar for free men of color over twenty-one; and fifty cents for free white males above twenty-one and not exceeding forty-five. The same title carries the act of 17 December 1821 on assessing and collecting the taxes of the state, at p. 749, and the territorial revenue acts of 1809 to 1816 that preceded both. ↩
41. Aikin's Digest, title "Taxes — Subjects and Rate of Taxation," § 7, pp. 408–09, read in the volume, carrying the schedule of the revenue act of 13 January 1827; the exemptions are §§ 3–4 at p. 408, in the terms later printed in Clay's Digest. The halved schedule is in the supplement to the same volume: "An Act to raise a revenue for the support of government, until otherwise altered by law," 10 January 1835, § 3, p. 650, whose § 4 continues the act of 1827 so far as it is not expressly repealed. ↩
42. Clay's Digest, title "Taxes — Subjects and Rate of Taxation," § 10, p. 559, read in the volume, giving the rates in the table and the proviso that the women of a free family of color went untaxed where its head paid more than a dollar on his property; and at p. 558, §§ 3 (the infirmity exemption, and free persons of color not liable after sixty), 4 (the enslaved entirely unprofitable to their owners not taxed), and 5–6 (Revolutionary soldiers exempt). ↩ ↩ ↩
43. Code of 1852, § 391: fifty cents on every white male inhabitant between 21 and 45; two dollars on every free man of color between 21 and 50; one dollar on every free woman of color between 21 and 45; and a graduated per-head tax on enslaved people by age, from twenty-five cents under five years, rising to a peak of one dollar and ten cents between fifteen and thirty, and falling away to twenty cents between fifty and sixty, payable by the owner; two dollars on an enslaved person working at a mechanical trade or hired as a mechanic. Real estate and other property were assessed ad valorem in the same section. ↩ ↩
44. Revised Code of 1867, read in the volume, both sections carrying the revenue act of 19 February 1867: § 434, cl. 1 (two dollars on every male inhabitant between eighteen and fifty, excepting those between eighteen and twenty-one "the emoluments of whose labor go to parents or masters," with the requirement that partnerships, associations, corporations, officers, and individuals return to the assessor the number and names of their clerks, book-keepers, overseers, deputies, agents, workmen, journeymen, and laborers subject to the tax on the first day of February each year, the tax to be assessed against the employer and deducted from the employee's hire, wages, or salary, an employer failing to make the return being liable for double the amount), and § 433, cls. 8–9 (exempting persons of unsound mind and their property to the value of one thousand dollars, and exempting from any poll tax disabled or crippled persons whose taxable property did not exceed five hundred dollars). Alabama Constitution of 1868, art. IX, § 1, reprinted in the front matter of the Code of 1876 (all taxes on property assessed in exact proportion to value; the General Assembly may levy a poll tax not exceeding one dollar and fifty cents on each poll, applied exclusively in aid of the public school fund). Code of 1876, § 1006, cl. 6, read in the volume, from the act of 1876–7, p. 41, art. 1, § 1 (the poll tax at one dollar and fifty cents on each male inhabitant over twenty-one and less than forty-five, the tax collected in each county retained there for its public schools); and § 1786 on the municipal poll tax. Digital images of both volumes, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1867 and https://archive.org/details/alabama-code-1876 : accessed 6 August 2026). ↩ ↩ ↩
45. Alabama Constitution of 1875, art. XI, § 1 (property taxes assessed in exact proportion to value; a poll tax not exceeding one dollar and fifty cents, applied exclusively in aid of the public school fund of the county paying it) and art. XIII, § 4. ↩
46. Alabama Constitution of 1901, art. VIII, §§ 194 (the tax, its ages, and its due and delinquent dates) and 178 (payment of all poll taxes due since 1901, on or before 1 February preceding the election, as a condition of voting); art. XIV, § 259 (proceeds to the county's public schools). Amended in December 1953 to be cumulative for only two years, and struck down as a condition of voting in United States v. Alabama, 252 F. Supp. 95 (M.D. Ala. 1966), consistent with the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) and Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966). ↩ ↩
47. Code of 1852, § 3436 (the sheriff's biennial list of householders and freeholders, from which he, the judge of probate, and the clerk of the circuit court select), § 3438 (integrity, fair character, and sound judgment), § 3439 (no person under twenty-one or above sixty, none with a permanent disease, no habitual drunkard, and none unable to read and write), § 3440 (the exempt occupations), and § 3441 (the list, with each man's name, residence, and occupation, filed with the judge of probate within ten days). Section 3323 applied these same qualifications to the venire on the trial of an enslaved person, but required in addition a panel of twenty-four persons, at least two-thirds of them slaveholders, so that venire is not drawn from the same body of men as an ordinary one. ↩ ↩
48. Code of 1923, § 8603, p. 175, read in the volume, placing on the jury roll all male citizens reputed honest and intelligent and esteemed for integrity, good character, and sound judgment, and excluding those under twenty-one or over sixty-five, habitual drunkards, those unfit through permanent disease or physical weakness, those unable to read English, and those convicted of an offense involving moral turpitude — an illiterate freeholder or householder otherwise qualified may still be placed on the roll. Carrying Code of 1907, § 7247, the marginal note giving the act of 31 August 1909, p. 305, § 11. The section is set out in full by the Supreme Court in Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587, 590–91 (1935), which quotes it as directing the jury commission to place on the roll all male citizens generally reputed honest and intelligent and esteemed for integrity, good character, and sound judgment, while barring anyone under twenty-one or over sixty-five, habitual drunkards, those unfit through permanent disease or physical weakness, those unable to read English, and those convicted of an offense involving moral turpitude, with the proviso admitting an otherwise qualified freeholder or householder who cannot read English. The same opinion, at 598, describes the act then governing the jury roll — General Acts of Alabama, 1931, No. 47, p. 55, § 11 at p. 58 — as requiring the clerk of the jury board to obtain the names of all male citizens of the county over twenty-one and under sixty-five with their occupation, place of residence, and place of business. Code of 1940, tit. 30, § 21, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 32. ↩
49. Code of 1940, tit. 30, § 21 (only male citizens qualified under the statute placed on the jury roll), read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 32; White v. Crook, 251 F. Supp. 401 (M.D. Ala. 1966); the amendment of the jury statute is discussed in Carter v. Jury Commission of Greene County, 396 U.S. 320, 327 (1970); and see Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U.S. 57, 62 n.5 (1961). ↩
50. Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935). ↩
51. The common-law ages of criminal responsibility were received with the common law; see note 1. General Acts of Alabama, 1907, No. 340 (H. 30), "To define who are delinquent children and to provide for their arrest, care and reformation," p. 442, § 1 (a delinquent child defined as one under fourteen), § 2 (jurisdiction in the chancery court, any court having equity powers, and police courts able to try misdemeanants), and § 3 (the juvenile docket, the separate minute book, and the closed hearing); digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-acts-1907_general : accessed 23 July 2026). ↩
52. General Acts of Alabama, 1919, No. 146 (S. 68), p. 128, "Relating to dependent, neglected, or delinquent children in all counties of Alabama which have a population of as many as one hundred and fifty thousand people according to the last Federal census," creating juvenile courts in such counties: §§ 2 and 3, read in the volume, defining a dependent, neglected, or delinquent child as a male child under sixteen or a female child under eighteen, and § 12 (transfer from any other magistrate or court); digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-acts-1919_general : accessed 23 July 2026). Jefferson County alone met that population figure at the census of 1920. On its Juvenile Court, established 1911, see Alabama Council on Crime and Delinquency, "Our Story," ACCD (https://accdonline.org/our-story/ : accessed 23 July 2026). ↩
53. General Acts of Alabama, 1919, No. 704 (S. 309), p. 1025, "To provide for the establishment and maintenance of a home for mental inferiors in Alabama" — a statute on commitment to that institution rather than on delinquency, cited here only for where it sends the application — § 8, read in the volume, directing that where the person is under twenty-one the application go to "the judge of the juvenile court, or where no juvenile court exists, to the Probate Judge of the county"; and No. 457, p. 693, § 2, the act establishing the Child Welfare Department, whose duties include advising with the judges and probation officers of the juvenile courts of the several counties, amended by General Acts of Alabama, 1923, No. 275 (H. 312), p. 271, read in the volume, to require reports "from probate judges and judges of other courts exercising jurisdiction over dependent, neglected, and delinquent children"; digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/alabama-acts-1923_general : accessed 3 August 2026). The delinquent-children act of 1907, note 51, had already placed the jurisdiction in the chancery court and in any court having equity powers throughout the state. ↩
54. Code of 1923, § 5639, read in the volume (either spouse may testify for or against the other in criminal cases, neither compellable); Gordon, Rankin & Co. v. Tweedy, 71 Ala. 202, 210 (1881), on confidential communications in civil cases; McCoy v. State, 221 Ala. 466, 129 So. 21 (1930). Code of 1940, tit. 15, § 310 (the wife competent against a husband charged with abandoning his family) and § 311, read in U.S. Women's Bureau, Legal Status of Women: Alabama, no. 13. ↩
55. Code of 1852, § 2276, read in the volume, which disqualified people of African or Native American descent — tracing that descent to the third generation, and whether the person was enslaved or free — from testifying in any cause, civil or criminal, except for or against one another. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866 removed the disability. ↩

Note: This law guide was created with assistance from multiple AI tools. Though a diligent effort was made to ensure the accuracy of the information provided, there may be unintentional errors. It's important to check the primary sources as needed to ensure accuracy.