Alabama Fever

Alabama Fever was the land rush that occurred after 1817 as settlers and speculators moved in to establish land claims in the territory and U.S. State of Alabama as Native American tribes ceded territory.

[1][2][3] It was one of the first great American land booms until superseded by the California Gold Rush in 1848.

[6] Global demand for cotton, spurred on by new industrial textile manufacturing processes, made its cultivation extremely lucrative.

Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were producing half of the cotton in the United States by 1834.

In an era before inorganic fertilizers, this made a continually expanding frontier necessary so that settlers and their slaves could relocate further westward in an effort to keep production as high as possible.