southern states of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia each claimed that their western boundary extended to the Mississippi River. White residents of Virginia's western territory separated in 1790 and entered the union as the Commonwealth of Kentucky in 1792. North Carolina's western claim briefly became the illegal State of Franklin in the 1780s. In 1790 it was organized as the Southwest Territory, and in 1796 it became the State of Tennessee. In the 1790s, Georgia politicians conspired to sell off western land in the Yazoo land scandal. The state finally gave up all its western claims to the federal government in 1802, in exchange for a promise to acquire all property belonging to Indians in Georgia. The western land was organized as the Mississippi Territory, which eventually became the states of Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819). The Spanish province of West Florida extended along the Gulf Coast from the Mississippi River to the Apalachicola River. American incursions between 1811 and 1818 gradually absorbed most of West Florida, and in 1819 Spain ceded all its Florida land to the United States. Economy The region's climate and soils favored commodity agriculture over industrial development. The U.S. purchase of New Orleans from France in 1803 gave the region a large seaport to facilitate global trade. American troops annexed the Spanish port of Mobile in 1813, then occupied Pensacola. By the 1840s, the Old Southwest states of Alabama and Mississippi had become wealthy by using slave labor to produce cotton for economic use. See also Royal Proclamation of 1763 Indian removal Indian barrier state Southwest Territory Indian Reserve (1763) Overmountain Men Notes References Bateman, Fred, and Thomas Weiss. A deplorable scarcity: the failure of industrialization in the slave economy. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). Clark, Thomas Dionysius. The Old Southwest, 1795-1830: Frontiers in Conflict. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996) Flora, Joseph, Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, and Todd Taylor. "Old Southwest". The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). 1775 establishments in the Thirteen Colonies 1819 disestablishments in the United States Geography of the United States Regions of the United States