in the antebellum South. At the end of the American Revolutionary War, Great Britain ceded West Florida to Spain as part of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. When this transaction was made however, West Florida's boundaries, which had changed while under British sovereignty, were not specified. As a result of this omission, control of the region was claimed by both Spain and the United States; resulting in a dispute commonly referred to as the West Florida Controversy. Spain claimed sovereignty over the region south of boundary established for West Florida by the British in 1774. The U.S. claimed that Spain had regained only the territory transferred to Great Britain in 1763that laying south of the 31st parallel. In 1784, the Spanish closed New Orleans and the Mississippi River Delta, which they controlled, to American goods coming down the Mississippi. After several years of negotiations, Spain and the United States signed a treaty of friendship October 27, 1795. Commonly called Pinckney's Treaty, the agreement defined the border between the United States and Spanish Florida, and guaranteed the United States navigation rights on the Mississippi River, and the right to transfer goods without paying cargo fees (right of deposit) when they transferred goods from one ship to another at the Port of New Orleans. Nine months later, on August 3, 1796, the U.S. officially took possession of the region. Then, on April 7, 1798, the United States Congress established the Mississippi Territory (comprising both the Natchez and Tombigbee districts), with Natchez as its first capital. Cotton boom Eli Whitney’s development of the cotton gin in the late 18th century contributed to the development of the area, and the Deep South as a whole, as it made mechanized processing of short-staple cotton profitable. This type of cotton was better suited to the upland areas of the Deep South. Planters in the Natchez District became very wealthy by converting their tobacco plantations to cotton, for which there was a large market between 1785 and 1800. The rich loess soils proved very fertile for cotton cultivation. The planters developed new, more productive strains of cotton, improved cotton gins, and developed a large-scale system dependent upon both machinery and large numbers of slaves. Their model was expanded in the antebellum South, creating such a demand for slaves that more than one million were transported from the Upper South in the domestic slave trade. They were brought