Alabama became a state of the United States of America on December 14, 1819. After Indian Removal forcibly displaced most Southeast tribes to west of the Mississippi River to what was then called Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), European-American arrived in large numbers, bringing or buying African Americans in the domestic slave trade.
In antebellum Alabama, wealthy planters created large cotton plantations which depended on the labor of enslaved Africans. Tens of thousands of slaves were transported to and sold in the state by slave traders who purchased them in the Upper South. In the mountains and foothills, poorer whites practiced subsistence farming.