text: With the exception of the area around Mobile and the Yazoo lands, what is now the lower one-third of Alabama was made part of the Mississippi Territory when it was organized in 1798.The Yazoo lands were added to the territory in 1804, following the Yazoo land scandal.Spain kept a claim on its former Spanish West Florida territory in what would become the coastal counties until the Adams–Onís Treaty officially ceded it to the United States in 1819.19th century Before Mississippi's admission to statehood on December 10, 1817, the more sparsely settled eastern half of the territory was separated and named the Alabama Territory.The United States Congress created the Alabama Territory on March 3, 1817.St.Stephens, now abandoned, served as the territorial capital from 1817 to 1819.Alabama was admitted as the 22nd state on December 14, 1819, with Congress selecting Huntsville as the site for the first Constitutional Convention.From July5 to August 2, 1819, delegates met to prepare the new state constitution.Huntsville served as temporary capital from 1819 to 1820, when the seat of government moved to Cahaba in Dallas County.Cahaba, now a ghost town, was the first permanent state capital from 1820 to 1825.The Alabama Fever land rush was underway when the state was admitted to the Union, with settlers and land speculators pouring into the state to take advantage of fertile land suitable for cotton cultivation.Part of the frontier in the 1820s and 1830s, its constitution provided for universal suffrage for white men.Southeastern planters and traders from the Upper South brought slaves with them as the cotton plantations in Alabama expanded.The economy of the central Black Belt (named for its dark, productive soil) was built around large cotton plantations whose owners' wealth grew mainly from slave labor.The area also drew many poor, disenfranchised people who became subsistence farmers.