 European-American settlers did not develop the area for cotton plantations until after Indian Removal in the 1830s, at which time they brought in numerous slaves through the domestic slave trade, which transported a million slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South.Using enslaved African Americans as laborers, planters created long, narrow plantations that fronted on the Mississippi to the west and the Big Black River to the north, the transportation byways.As in other parts of the Delta, the bottomlands areas further from the river were frontier and undeveloped until after the American Civil War.