Alabama became a state of the Unite States of America in 1819. After the Indian wars of the 1830s pushed Native Americans out of the state, white settlers arrived in large numbers. Wealthy planters created large cotton plantations based in the fertile central Black Belt, which depended on the labor of enslaved African Americans. Tens of thousands of slaves were transported and marketed in the state by slave traders who purchased them in the Upper South. Elsewhere in Alabama, poorer whites practiced subsistence farming. By 1860 African Americans comprised 45% of the state's population of 964,201.