Henry Sale Halbert
Henry Sale Halbert (1837-1916) was a teacher, historian, and archivist who also served in the Confederate Army. One of his most notable works included The Creek War of 1813 and 1814, which he co-authored with Timothy Horton Ball. In his work, Halbert drew upon his extensive knowledge of Native Americans gained through years of interactions with Native tribes as a soldier and teacher.
Halbert was born near Yorkville (present-day Ethelsville), Pickens County, on January 14, 1837. His father, Percival Pickens Halbert, had moved to Alabama from South Carolina in 1816. His mother, Jane Owen Halbert, also came from a South Carolina family. Halbert had six siblings. Growing up in Alabama, Halbert received a primary education at old field schools, rural elementary schools established with minimal educational resources, before attending Oktibbeha Academy in Mississippi. He later went on to attend Union University in Tennessee and graduated with a master's degree in 1857.
Halbert then moved to Texas, where he enlisted and served in the Texas State Troops during their campaigns against Native Americans in 1860. Nearly five months after the beginning of the Civil War, Halbert enlisted as a private in the Sixth Texas Cavalry Regiment at Camp Baxton, Texas, on September 7, 1861. He served with the regiment throughout the war, fighting in battles and skirmishes across multiple states, including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. While in Georgia, Halbert and his regiment fought against U.S. forces under the command of Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman during his Atlanta Campaign. Halbert and his fellow Confederate forces successfully repelled an assault by federal troops on New Hope Church northwest of Atlanta on May 25, 1864, but he was shot through the thigh. Although the Confederates held their ground, Sherman shifted his forces around the Confederate line and continued his march toward Atlanta. Halbert was taken prisoner and remained disabled for about eight months. He was paroled, or permitted by the U.S. Army to return home, provided that he did not take up arms again, at the end of the war in May 1865 in Mississippi.
Following his parole, Halbert returned to Texas in 1866 and began teaching at Waco University, where he would teach for the next six years. In 1872, Halbert left Waco and continued his teaching career at various institutions in Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama. In 1884, he began teaching members of the Choctaw tribe in Mississippi. He remained with them until 1899 and, at one point, worked as a colonizing agent during the removal of Mississippi Choctaws to Oklahoma.
During his time among the Choctaws, Halbert co-authored The Creek War of 1813 and 1814 with Timothy Horton Ball. Unlike Halbert, who had lived in the South his whole life, Ball was born in Massachusetts and spent most of his life in Indiana. But both men had extensive interactions with Native Americans that motivated and informed their writing. For the book, Halbert collected oral histories from surviving soldiers and contemporaries. The men claimed that their history offered a more complete account of the conflict than previous historians such as Albert James Pickett provided. In particular, the book offers a full account of the Creek attack on Fort Sinquefield that followed the Kimbell-James Massacre the previous day; both were major events at the outbreak of the Creek War. The men aimed to draw the attention of northerners to the conflict, especially after the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which the pair said, demonstrated a lack of knowledge of the conflict in the north.
In addition to The Creek War of 1813 and 1814, Halbert also co-authored a Choctaw dictionary in 1895 and wrote for the American Antiquarian and American Anthropologist. Halbert was also an active member of the state historical societies in Alabama and Mississippi. He dedicated much of his research to locating old Choctaw villages and recovering their names and meanings.
At the request and invitation of Thomas McAdory Owen, Halbert moved to Montgomery, Montgomery County, in 1904, and worked as a clerk at the newly established Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH). Owen had founded the state archives in 1901 and served as the organization’s first director. Halbert continued to work and reside in Montgomery through the next 12 years. In early 1916, he applied for a Confederate soldier pension. Soon afterward, on May 19, 1916, he died of tuberculosis in Owen’s house. Halbert was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Montgomery. He never married and was a lifelong Baptist.
The ADAH holds a large collection of Halbert’s papers. Among them are descriptions of Choctaw dress, marriage customs, war fighting, farming, and towns, as well as Creek towns, Hernando de Soto, the post-Civil War imprisonment of Clement Clayborne Clay, relations with the English and French, references to historians Thomas Simpson Woodward and Peter Joseph Hamilton, and more.
