the South

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This entry includes 2 subentries:
The Antebellum South
The New South

The Antebellum South

If the United States possesses an official history, it is a heroic tale in which Americans struggle over numerous obstacles to advance the principles of freedom, equality, and democracy. In this story, when so told, one part of the United States, the South, has repeatedly thrown up the barriers whose removal has been necessary for the nation to achieve its destiny. In the mid-nineteenth century, such resistance caused the gravest crisis in American history, as the nation erupted into civil war. Only enormous self-sacrifice and massive carnage allowed the Union to survive and to extend its principles of freedom by abolishing slavery. With its rejection of majority rule, the antebellum South helped bring about this crisis. If for no other reason, this society—the great antagonist to the semi-official United States dream—deserves careful scrutiny. Yet, like other Americans, antebellum southerners saw themselves as defending liberty.

Time and Place

Historically, both for the region and for the nation, there are good reasons to focus on the antebellum period, generally understood as the years from 1830 to 1860. Southern distinctiveness blossomed after 1830, as the region increasingly set itself apart from the rest of the nation in politics, economics, religion, and philosophy. Several related developments occurred around 1830 that paved the way for regional separatism. Among these events were the growth of a northern abolitionist movement, the most famous slave revolt in U.S. history, a definitive decision by Virginia to maintain slavery, and a bitter struggle over tariffs. By the early 1830s, in light of these occurrences, the South saw itself as besieged by hostile forces and organized to defend its institutions. Its philosophers increasingly pictured slavery as a positive good; its churches severed their northern connections; its politicians grew more belligerent in defense of southern rights; its people became intensely suspicious of reformist ideas. Then, to safeguard its perceived interests, to protect its distinctive way of life, and to constitute its own version of republican liberty, the South attempted to create a new nation.

Definitions of the South's geographical borders are often fluid and depend on the criteria used. Using economic measures, for example, one might define the antebellum South as the fifteen slave states. Employing a political yardstick, another definition would focus on the eleven states that seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy, and would thus exclude the slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Applying cultural benchmarks such as dialect and social habits, one might even include parts of some free states in a definition of the South. In essence, there was a central core of Deep South states that included most areas that joined the Confederacy and where southern distinctiveness was strongest, and there were transitional zones of southern influence to the north and west.

Inside the South there existed considerable geographic diversity. The climate was generally warm, normally well watered, but nowhere entirely frost free. In the Appalachian and Ozark Mountains, the climate was cooler and the soil generally poor. Swamps and sandy tracts dotted the coastal plains and were often unsuitable for productive agriculture. Because of early frosts, cotton did not generally thrive in the Upper South, roughly the area north of central Tennessee, and the cash crop was often tobacco or wheat. On the other hand, much of the Lower South, especially the humid climate and rich black soil of the Mississippi Delta, was perfectly suited to production of enormous crops of cotton. Coastal South Carolina and Louisiana were warm enough and wet enough to support the cultivation of rice and sugar cane as well.

Plantations and the Antebellum Economy

The antebellum South was a slave society, but most white southerners owned no slaves. In 1860, slave-owning families composed roughly twenty-five percent of the region's white population. Planter families, usually defined as possessing at least twenty slaves, were much scarcer, comprising only some three percent of southern whites. Yet plantation slavery thrived in antebellum years and continued to expand westward. The key crop was cotton. The South was the world's leading producer of this commodity, which was a vital component of the global economy. Demand for cotton continued strong through the 1850s, and southern cotton fed the world's textile mills. During the 1850s, the South exported more than $100 million worth of cotton per year, comprising more than fifty percent in value of U.S. exports.

Slavery facilitated large-scale, profitable agricultural operations, providing economic opportunities not available in the free states. In most areas, farming would not support high enough wages to attract a reliable work force. Plantation owners, on the other hand, purchased their laborers, provided them with housing and sustenance, and made tidy profits. American slaves were defined as chattel, that is, as moveable property, and few legal restrictions hindered their exploitation. Not tied to the land like Russian serfs, American slaves could be relocated at the will of the owner. Owners were free to pursue economic gain even to the point of breaking up black families. In some areas, particularly in the east, slave sales were crucial to plantation profitability. Plantations enjoyed the advantage of economies of scale. They purchased supplies in bulk at low prices and produced a large enough crop to make money, even if profit per unit was relatively low. Though concentrating on cash crops like cotton, plantations often produced much of their own food and thus reduced overhead expenses. On several levels, then, a plantation was a rational and profitable business investment.

Although there were many variations, plantation management was often quite efficient. Planters used positive incentives to motivate their workers, such as prizes for the most cotton picked or for the most corn shucked. Also present was the negative incentive of the whip. Most cotton plantations used the gang system of labor management in which groups of slaves, often twenty or so, worked systematically at a task throughout the day under supervision of an overseer. Rice-growing areas typically used the task system in which slaves were assigned a specific amount of work per day and toiled with minimal supervision. When the task was finished, the workday ended. In both systems, men and women worked the fields, but men generally did heavy jobs like plowing and women such domestic chores as sewing.

Plantation slavery was a distinctive way of life, not simply a business proposition. Other investment opportunities were available in the South that yielded greater returns than did plantations. For example, southern industrialists, such as William Gregg of South Carolina, often earned higher profits operating factories than planters did farming. But because the southern social ideal was to become a planter, most investment capital nonetheless flowed into agriculture. Even those who made their money as merchants or manufacturers often invested their profits in land and slaves. Most importantly, the relationship between master and slave was qualitatively different than between employer and wage earner. The slave owner invested not just in labor time but in the actual laborer. At least in theory, he had a vested interest in maintaining the health and welfare of the worker, to an extent that employers of hired workers did not. Plantation owners directed the work of slaves but also claimed to safeguard them in sickness and old age. They sometimes equated their role as master with that of a father caring for dependent family members. Many avoided the image of the hard-charging capitalist and embraced the role of manorial lord.

Slavery was a relatively adaptable labor system whose use was not confined to large plantations. On small farms, it was common for slaves to work in the fields beside their owners. Other slaves were rented out, providing cash income for slave owners. Some slaves hired out their own time, receiving wages and remitting a portion to their masters. Industrial concerns used both slave labor and free labor, and slaves worked in iron foundries, textile mills, mines, saw mills, and steamboats. Southern industry developed more slowly than industry in the northern states, but compared with most countries, including many in Europe, the antebellum South experienced substantial industrial growth, including construction of an extensive railway system.

By 1860, the region was one of the wealthier areas of the world, and its per capita income had increased rapidly for the previous twenty years. Relative abundance was widespread and even trickled down to slaves. Slaves ate plain food, mostly corn and pork, but these staples were often supplemented with garden vegetables, fish, and wild game, a diet that provided plentiful energy and sufficient nutrition. Clothing and housing were not luxurious but generally were not much worse than those of poor whites. In material terms, slaves in the antebellum South had a higher standard of living than did many ordinary folk in other countries, much higher, for example, than the standard of living of eastern European peasants.

Meanwhile, the majority of southern whites were neither rich nor poor. Most lived in families headed by yeoman farmers who possessed land but no slaves. Such farmers often practiced an agriculture designed to produce sufficiency and to minimize economic risk rather than to maximize profits. Most of their cultivated land went into food crops, such as corn and sweet potatoes, but they also raised pigs and cattle. Yeomen grew cotton and tobacco to supplement these foodstuffs and thus generated cash to purchase commodities they could not themselves produce. Achieving partial self-sufficiency through this balanced style of farming, yeomen families possessed a degree of independence from market fluctuations.

The People

Some nine million people lived in the eleven states that joined the Confederacy in 1861, and slaves made up about 40 percent of the population. Compared to the rest of the nation, the antebellum South was overwhelmingly rural, as the vast majority of blacks and whites engaged in agriculture. Of the ten largest cities in the United States in 1860, only New Orleans and Baltimore were located within the region. Immigrants tended to avoid the South because wage-paying jobs were scarce. Nonetheless, there were some immigrants, especially Irish refugees, who settled in cotton ports such as Savannah. The region's population continued to grow, quite rapidly in western areas such as Texas, and more slowly in the East, but its population did not increase as rapidly as in the free states. As the South grew more distinctive, its status as a minority within the Union became clearer.

Southern white society had numerous class divisions. Its big planters were among the wealthiest of all Americans, while some ten percent of white families possessed no land and little other property. In economic terms, most whites stood somewhere between these extremes as members of the yeoman order. Clashes and resentments existed, but several factors mitigated class conflict. In a growing economy, upward social mobility was possible and poorer whites of ten sought to emulate rather than to denigrate planters. Planters shared interpersonal connections with other whites, including kinship, commodity exchanges, and church membership. Common identity as citizens and free men also tied whites together. In contradistinction to slaves, white men defined themselves as independent agents, and even if poor, tended to be little patriarchs who professed to rule their wives and children.

Such men zealously guarded their social reputations, and a violent code of masculine honor thrived in the region. Free men were expected to avoid public humiliation and to resent insults. For many elites, protecting one's honor meant fighting duels. Although dueling was generally illegal and many southerners denounced it, a number of the South's antebellum social and political leaders did fight on the field of honor. Poorer men resorted to knives or fists. The roots of this honor code are partly traceable to Celtic practices brought to America by ancestors of antebellum southerners. But the physical force necessary to maintain slavery, which inured many whites to violence, and the determination of white men to avoid the appearance of servility, contributed mightily to survival of the honor ethic in the South.

Amidst this intensely patriarchal society, southern women carved out fruitful and fulfilling lives. Most white women labored rigorously at household tasks including child rearing, cooking, cleaning, and gardening. Plantation mistresses possessed some leisure, but they also worked hard at supervising servants and nursing sick children. Even more than in the rest of the United States, the lives of southern women were closely linked to the household. Wage-earning opportunities were fewer than in northern states. There was little separation between office and home, as the locus of agricultural production remained in the household. Although free white women sometimes complained about loneliness and hard work, few were neo-abolitionists, itching to escape white male domination. Sharing the racial suppositions of their society and enjoying the advantages of property and freedom, most tended to identify with husbands and fathers, not with slaves.

Even in trying conditions of servitude and racial oppression, African Americans were able to resist many of the dehumanizing aspects of their condition. Only rarely did their resistance result in outright rebellion. Southern slave revolts were short-lived and small in scale compared to those in other slave societies. Individual acts of defiance, including flight, arson, even murder, were somewhat more common, but such actions almost always had grievous consequences for those who participated in them. Most slaves knew firsthand the harshness of plantation discipline and tried to avoid it, and few were prepared to challenge their masters directly or to fight to overthrow the system. They did, however, engage in subtler forms of resistance such as feigning sickness, breaking tools, and pilfering plantation livestock.

Furthermore, African Americans were able to maintain their human dignity by building communities and families. On plantations, the slave quarters were small villages. Living close together, residents provided one another with mutual support and participated in communal rituals, including dances, funerals, weddings, and holiday celebrations. Though unrecognized by law, marriage was normal for slave adults, and after marriage, monogamy was expected. Nuclear families, with a father, mother, and children residing together under one roof, were common but not universal. Fathers sometimes served different masters and were unable to reside with their families. Slave families could not establish truly independent households, for their domestic arrangements were always subject to a master's whim. No laws protected families from being broken up or prevented sexual abuse by the slave owner. Polite society frowned on these practices, but such mistreatment occurred rather frequently.

In 1860, 250,000 free blacks lived in the slave states; the great majority of them lived in the Upper South. Such individuals lived in difficult circumstances, typically eking out small incomes as farm workers. They also suffered social persecution, as they did not possess full civil rights, generally being unable to testify in trials or to vote. Free blacks in the Deep South were fewer in number but usually more prosperous. Often the mulatto off spring of slaveholding fathers, these free people of color frequently worked as skilled artisans for wealthy whites. A small number even became substantial slave owners.

Politics

By 1860, southern states typically allowed all adult white males to vote. With Andrew Jackson elected president in 1828, democracy had become increasingly real for the region but was specifically limited to white men. Riches and refinement faded in importance as criteria for political success. Some social deference toward wealth and education remained, but planters and prominent politicians usually felt obliged to court the goodwill of unlettered yeomen farmers and poor whites. Those excluded from this democracy, however, often suffered—as in the forced westward removal of American Indians. Southern politicians also repeatedly argued that white freedom demanded black slavery, that the reduction of African Americans to the permanent status of manual laborers averted the growth of invidious class distinctions among whites.

Perhaps more than in any other period of southern history, partisan politics thrived in the antebellum era. Voter interest was intense. After 1840, 65 to 75 percent of eligible voters regularly turned out for statewide elections. Democrats and Whigs in the South differed on many issues, especially regarding banks and tariffs, but on slavery there was little difference between the parties. In fact, both parties played games of one-upmanship to see which could pose as the most dedicated defender of slavery. To appear less than ardent in support of the South's peculiar institution meant political death in most of the region. Even association with antislavery forces outside the region was problematic, as each party portrayed the other's northern wing as tainted with abolitionism. Such party rhetoric helped heat sectional animosity to fever pitch.

Yet this virtually unanimous defense of slavery by southern politicians did not automatically translate into rabid secessionism or into consistent advocacy of states' rights. Even John C. Calhoun, the great theorist of states' rights, viewed secession as a last resort and proposed political solutions that would allow the South to protect its interests as a minority within the Union. Henry Clay of Kentucky, the nation's leading advocate of high tariffs and internal improvements, was a slaveholding southerner who, as an avid unionist, had many followers in the region. Zachary Taylor, a Louisiana cotton planter and the last antebellum southern president, was an even stronger nationalist than Clay. Perhaps more popular with southern voters was the position championed by Andrew Jackson, which argued for reducing the scope of the federal government, but disapproved of letting states veto federal action. As late as the final secession crisis of 1860–1861, advocates of disunion had to overcome strong opposition even in the Deep South.

Religious and Intellectual Life

For blacks and whites, religious belief provided psychological sustenance and helped to make sense of the world. Most southern believers were evangelical Protestants. Methodists and Baptists far surpassed other denominations in membership, but Presbyterians and Episcopalians possessed significant social prestige. By the 1820s, on the eve of the antebellum era, southern churches began to attract increasing numbers of people from all social classes, including planters and slaves. Church membership, as a percentage of total population, grew throughout the antebellum era but never comprised a majority of the southern population, either black or white. Many churches had strict behavioral requirements and expelled members for all sorts of moral lapses.

In the 1840s, southern believers created the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Both groups broke with their northern counterparts in disputes related to slavery. Both worked energetically to win black converts, through funding missions to the slaves. These missions began in South Carolina in the late 1820s and soon spread across the region. Initially greeted suspiciously by planters, mission advocates eventually convinced slave owners that their message was consistent with maintaining slavery.

Such missionaries had to please both masters and slaves. To maintain access to the slave population, missionaries often preached a message of obedience. On the other hand, church membership remained voluntary so the missionaries had to tailor their message to African American tastes. They therefore addressed a variety of Christian themes, including those that offered solace and psychological liberation to their audiences. Meanwhile, southern churches provided flexible solutions to some problems associated with slavery, allowing, for example, de facto divorces to slave spouses separated by sale.

This evangelizing sank deep roots into the black community, and religion became a vital part of the identity of many black southerners. African Americans often worshiped in biracial churches, in which members attended services together but sat in segregated sections. Even after emancipation, African American believers generally remained loyal to the Baptist and Methodist church traditions, though not to the southern denominations themselves. Religion became one of the most powerful means by which African Americans resisted the dehumanizing effects of slavery. At least privately, southern blacks claimed a moral superiority over masters who disobeyed the tenets of their own religion. They also took solace in God's promises, for individual glory in heaven and for eventual deliverance as a people from bondage on earth.

Simultaneously, southern whites used religion for their own purposes. In frequent debates with northern churches, they championed a nonpolitical church focused on winning converts and getting believers to heaven. For a church to adopt an abolitionist political agenda, they argued, distorted the Christian message and imposed conditions on believers scripture did not justify. Yet such believers saw the Christian message as egalitarian in that God's offer of salvation extended to all—rich or poor, white or black, male or female. Southern churches practiced organized philanthropy, by building colleges, sponsoring missions, publishing tracts, and supporting temperance legislation, but they rarely challenged the South's dominant social order. In fact, religious arguments provided some of the most popular defenses of slavery. These ideas sometimes dealt with Old Testament themes, depicting biblical patriarchs as slave owners who were the chosen instruments of God. More frequently, southern clergymen focused on New Testament notions. They argued that Jesus had not condemned slavery and that human bondage was therefore allowable in Christian society.

Other southern thinkers broke free of scripture. The antebellum South generated one of the most original episodes in American intellectual history, sometimes labeled as the Reactionary Enlightenment. Perhaps more forcefully than any other group in American history, some southern thinkers severed connections with principles of natural rights and the social contract. Sociological theorists, such as George Fitzhugh of Virginia and Henry Hughes of Mississippi, upheld the virtues of inequality, tradition, and social duty. Well-read in contemporary scholarship, these men argued that slavery was a beneficial system that protected workers from the vicious competition of free society, providing them with protection from well-meaning owners. Also part of the pro-slavery argument were racial theories, propounded by such scientists as Josiah Nott of Alabama, which argued that blacks and whites belonged to different species.

Conclusion

The antebellum South was the most prosperous and self-confident slave society of modern times. White southerners were ferociously protective of their own liberty, and most, whether slaveholders or not, believed their independence and economic self-interest best served by the preservation of human bondage. Their politicians, ministers, philosophers, and scientists—often able and articulate men—assured them of the righteousness of their way of life. Critical outside voices were ignored. Slaves knew the cruel side of the South, experiencing the special sting of servitude in a land that prided itself on freedom, but they were not allowed to speak. Only the bitter dregs of defeat would humble this proud society and set its captives free.

Bibliography

Ambrose, Douglas. Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

Bauer, K. Jack. Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.

Berlin, Ira. Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Fogel, Robert William, and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. New York: Norton, 1989. Controversial classic which showed that plantations were successful business operations.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Nuanced and thoroughly researched, it is much the best book on southern women's history.

Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Masterpiece that portrays African Americans as actors in southern history, not mere victims.

Horsman, Reginald. Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1988.

McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

McWhiney, Grady. Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988.

Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

Quist, John W. Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

The New South

The expression "New South" has been used and reused in a variety of contexts; in contemporary usage it connotes an emphasis on economic modernization as a cure for regional ills. In historical literature, however, the term has a more precise meaning; it refers to the campaign by journalists and others after Reconstruction for a new orientation for the southern economy. The New South promoters called for a program of economic diversification and industrial development, based on overt solicitation of outside investment.

The New South concept wasn't that new; even in the antebellum South there had been calls for economic diversification and industrialization. A series of commercial conventions, along with manifestoes by southern nationalist sources such as De Bow's Review, urged industrialization. During the Civil War the Confederate government's prodigies of wartime production demonstrated the possibility of sweeping industrialization. Defeat, moreover, encouraged a regional reappraisal and demands for economic change. But the political bitterness of Reconstruction distracted public attention; it stilled southern white enthusiasm for an economic program that involved cooperation with northern investors. Only after Redemption, the restoration of white supremacy in 1877, did southern opinion leaders turn their full attention to regaining commercial prosperity. As the national economy boomed in the early 1880s, the improved prospects stirred calls for action. Slavery and the vast financial investment it represented were gone, and, while the plantation system had stabilized after the ruin of Civil War and emancipation, agriculture showed little prospect of growth. But northern industry was expanding dramatically, and Southern journalists and spokespeople rhetorically embraced the national trend.

Even with the losses that the elimination of slavery represented for plantation owners, those envisioning a New South could discern some benefits from ruin. Before the war, the slave states had been notoriously resistant to industrial and urban growth, especially the Deep South region. The profitability of staple crop production under slavery had long discouraged alternative investments. The most striking example of this tendency was in textile production, for while the raw material was near at hand, cotton mills nonetheless remained few. Before the war, the northern states demonstrated marked economic development and consequent transportation and educational advances. For southerners, the sectional controversy with the North had limited the appeal of outside immigration and the entrepreneurial values that would facilitate industrial growth. Both the mores of the slaveholding elite and the structure of the economy had kept industrial development at a rudimentary level, and much of what had existed perished in the war. But the elimination of slavery and the overthrow of the plantation elite eliminated these obstructions to economic diversification. Furthermore, Reconstruction, whatever the cost, had encouraged the spread of a railroad network that could facilitate economic diversification. The region's low wages, weak unions, and the practice of leasing prison inmates to private individuals as laborers had obvious appeal for outside investors as well.

Economic diversification became a priority once Reconstruction ended, at least from the point of view of the region's dominant classes. Investment capital was scarce in the still-impoverished South, however, and the bankrupt and downsized southern governments were incapable of spearheading economic development after Redemption. Outside investment was imperative if industrialization was to happen, and this could take place only with the aid of northern investors and the benign encouragement of the Republican-dominated Federal government. There was also a growing understanding that Republican high-tariff policies—wrong as they were by states' rights principles—might nonetheless facilitate southern industrial development.

Given the partisanship remaining from the struggles of the Civil War and Reconstruction, selling collaboration with the Yankee foe was a sensitive matter. The calls for a New South provided an intellectually respectable rationale. The priority was to persuade skeptical northern investors and the southern dominant classes that they could profit by cooperation, and with positive, or at least defensible, results. The general theme was that the nation must move beyond the bitterness of the war to embrace a new era of industrial prosperity and progress. For civic leaders and promoters of growing urban railroad and industrial centers like Atlanta and Birmingham, this rhetoric had obvious appeal. In the Georgia piedmont, the public campaign for investment textile mills took on evangelical overtones, touting industrialization as the salvation of the white laboring class.

Henry Grady (1850–1889), the youthful editor of the Atlanta Constitution, popularized the term "New South" and was its premier spokesman. Grady was troubled by the national public's negative response to Confederate rhetoric, but with the election of Democrat Grover Cleveland as president, a more conciliatory and optimistic approach seemed opportune. In 1886, Grady attracted public attention for his program of national reconciliation before a northern business audience. Before the war, he observed, slavery and agriculture could not sustain healthy economic development. In contrast, "the new South provides a perfect democracy," with "a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace—and a diversified industry that meets the complex need of this complex age" (Bryan, Henry Grady or Tom Watson? The Rhetorical Struggle for the New South, 1880–1890, p. 105). Grady also hoped to demonstrate that practical southerners had moved beyond the bitterness of the war. In Grady's words, "we have sowed towns and cities in place of theories, and put business above politics." New leaders in rising cities would provide the flexibility needed for a region reborn.

Grady, and similar spokesmen, like Henry Watterson of the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal, performed a difficult balancing act. For northern audiences, Grady conceded that it was just as well that the Confederacy lost. The aristocratic ethos of the slave regime had yielded an economically stagnant, caste-ridden society. Grady argued that only economic prosperity could move the region beyond its heritage of sectional bitterness. He urged northerners and southerners to cooperate to move into the future together. This conciliatory rhetoric assured Yankee businessmen that they could make a positive contribution through their investments, and that they would not be subjected to northern criticism for funding sectional extremism. For white southerners, Grady praised the nobility of the departed culture of the old plantation South, and he praised the heroism of the lost cause and its adherents. However, his major emphasis was on the economic limitations of the slave system, and the degree to which it inhibited needed diversification. Grady sentimentalized the values of the Old South, but only to laud an urban, industrial New South in which these values had little place.

To forestall regional criticism, Grady assured southerners that economic modernization would not damage plantation agriculture or challenge the racial order too drastically. The distinctive New South enterprise, cotton textile production, was concentrated in the piedmont areas of the Carolinas and Georgia, well outside the Cotton Belt. Textile production was promoted as suitable work for white laborers, and planters were assured that African American labor would not be sought. This New South promise, at least, was borne out; textile laborers remained overwhelmingly white until after the civil rights era. On the other hand, industries like the coal and steel production around Birmingham featured a significantly biracial workforce.

Perhaps the most sensitive obstacle to the New South program of sectional reconciliation, given the Civil War legacy, was the future status of the African American population. It was in this area that the underlying contradictions of the New South approach were most obvious. Before southern audiences, Grady openly proclaimed himself a white supremacist and depicted social segregation as the cornerstone of southern society. He also engaged in a heated press debate with the South's most well-known racial liberal, George Washington Cable. In Grady's tautological formulation, "the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards—because the white race is the superior race" (Ibid., p. 49). He repeatedly denounced the proponents of Radical Reconstruction in their efforts to interfere with southern racial practices, maintaining that the concept of social equality was "monstrous" and "impossible."

Despite these racist statements, and within the context of segregation and white supremacy, New South rhetoric tended to emphasize its relative moderation. As Grady pointed out, "we have planted the schoolhouse on the hilltop and made it free to white and black." Grady and his fellow publicists did not target their rhetoric toward the African American population, but it was important to them that their northern audience see proponents of the New South as reasonable—at least in terms of the lowered national expectations after Redemption. The New South model thus encouraged a certain businesslike decorum on racial matters, with proponents predicting that prosperity would improve race relations. Grady and his colleagues emphasized that economic diversification would provide opportunities for black people as well as white, and they tended to oppose lynching, disfranchisement, and other forms of overt racial persecution. Race riots and disorder, after all, would deter outside investment. Ironically, it was only the emergence of African American Booker T. Washington, an educator whose conservative views on civil rights for blacks attracted the support of wealthy white businessmen and politicians, that papered over the inconsistencies of the New South rhetoric on race and gave the whole approach a persuasive spokesman.

The 1880s saw the heyday of the New South movement, aided by northern public willingness to view the new regional emphasis as a positive development. This acceptance presented a plausible rationale for the post-Redemption southern social order, and many former critics of the South endorsed it. For example, the ex–Radical Republican William D. "Pig Iron" Kelley of Pennsylvania, himself the near-victim of a Reconstruction riot, now hailed the New South as finishing the work of national reunion. Northerners, moreover, were mollified by the open admission of the failings of the Old South, which paralleled many of the criticisms of the antebellum free labor critique of slave society. Aided by a widespread sense that the Reconstruction intervention had failed, the national press was generally supportive of the New South vision, seeing it as part of the wider process of reconciliation. Inevitably, however, southern criticism of the priorities of the movement gathered from a variety of directions.

From the beginning, there was dissent against the New South priorities from those most invested in the memory of the Old South and the rebellion. Former leaders like Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stevens, for example, opposed dilution of traditional southern political values, especially states' rights. Various ex-Confederate generals weighed in against forgetting the great struggles of the war in the rush toward interregional commercial cooperation. The battle to lead southern opinion took on a generational quality, as the leaders of the Old South confronted younger, urban New South publicists. The Old South dissenters, often elitists identified with the plantation regime, were articulate and had strong emotional appeal but they were clearly doomed to diminishing relevance. In social terms, the greater challenge was the gathering agrarian revolt that directly opposed the priorities of the New South publicists.

After the late 1870s, dissident activity had grown among the hard-pressed farmers of the hill districts, who were faring badly in the postwar decades. Local protest movements often took the form of "green backer" candidacies opposing the dominant Democratic leadership, most spectacularly the "Readjuster" party, which gained power in Virginia. These dissidents tended toward anti-corporate, antimonopoly sentiments, and they demanded inflation of the currency to aid debtors. Agrarian discontent spread across the southern (and western) states in the late 1880s; it took the form first of the Farmer's Alliance and, eventually, the Populists of the 1890s, a full-scale third-party challenge to Democratic rule. The agrarian movement demanded aggressive government action to provide for the needs of farmers through inflationary economic policy, direct federal loans to farmers, and regulation, or even nationalization, of railroads and other corporations. Though the Populist revolt was beaten back by the late 1890s—aided by electoral fraud and an improving economy—the agrarian movement permanently redirected discourse away from the New South priorities.

After the defeat of the Populists, emerging southern "demagogues" voiced a class-based rhetoric of hostility toward outside business interests, along with a flamboyant racist discourse in defiance of national norms. Populist rhetoric imbued turn-of-the-century Democratic politics, which substituted agrarian symbolism and white supremacy in place of the drastic reform the real Populists had demanded. Still, the rhetorical climate had changed by the Progressive era. Plebeian tribunes like Senator Jeff Davis of Arkansas, for example, emphasized hostility toward northern insurance companies in his electoral campaigns. South Carolina's Ben Tillman favored higher taxes and rate regulation for railroads, as well as some limitations on child labor. Similarly, demagogues such as James Vardaman and Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi favored raising taxes on corporations to pay for Progressive regulation and government expenditures to benefit the white rural poor. Other leaders, like Cole Blease of South Carolina, spoke more directly to the class resentments of white textile workers. These leaders were often less hostile toward northern corporations in private than their public statements might suggest. Still, by the early twentieth century, southern political discourse became less enthusiastic about promoting northern corporate expansion than had characterized the New South heyday.

Nevertheless, the general New South concept and terminology of outside investment and economic growth as a regional remedy, and specifically as a means of over-coming the legacy of slavery and racism, has remained in the political discourse to the present day.

Bibliography

Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Bryan, Ferald Joseph. Henry Grady or Tom Watson? The Rhetorical Struggle for the New South, 1880–1890. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1994.

Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Gaston, Paul M. The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Myth-Making. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

———. Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1973.

This entry is a subtopic of United States.

One of the most popular books written about the American South, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), begins with a barbecue. To the 80 million people who live in the region, it would seem only appropriate. Food, like music or a syrupy drawl, has always been one of the cultural touchstones that sets the South apart.

Some of the best-known regional dishes in American cookery come from the great crescent that stretches from Virginia to eastern Texas. The South is home to a groaning table of famously down-home foods, like fried chicken, skillet cornbread, pork barbecue, pecan pie, catfish and hushpuppies, bourbon whiskey, and greens and pot likker (which refers not to real liquor but to the aromatic juices of boiled greens).

When Americans speak of the South, they usually mean the eleven states of the old Confederacy (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia) plus parts of border states, like Kentucky and Maryland, that lean toward Dixie culturally. It is a varied landscape that takes in multiple mountain ranges, a spacious swath of hill country, broad coastal plains, vast alluvial flatlands, and three thousand miles of shoreline. Historians have called it the closest thing to a nation within a nation in the United States, and it has spawned a collection of foods and foodways as varied as the landscape.

The First Southerners

When Europeans began to arrive during the 1500s, they found the land well populated by American Indians whose ancestors had dwelled there for thousands of years. The natives fished, hunted game, gathered berries and nuts (like the indigenous pecan), and cultivated crops, especially beans, squash, and maize (corn). Early European settlers were struck by the bounty. Captain John Smith, who helped found the first permanent English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, wrote of "an abundance of fish, lying so thicke with their heads above the water, as for want of nets . . . we attempted to catch them with a frying-pan" (quoted in Ketchum, 1964). The place-names spoke of plenty; for example, Chesapeake is an Indian word meaning "great shellfish bay."

At least one of the cornerstones of southern food was already in place when the Europeans came, that is, corn. The Powhatan tribe of Virginia showed the English how to plant, harvest, soak, and hull the native grain, which they ground into a gritty meal called rockahominy. They also made a bread of it, appone. Both names stuck, and southerners have enjoyed corn pone and hominy grits ever since.

Many of the foods that came to be associated with the South are not native. The Spanish, who explored the region during the 1500s and colonized Florida, introduced oranges, peaches, sugar cane, pigs, and chickens. The French, who planted their tricolor along the Gulf Coast from Mobile to New Orleans, brought their cooking techniques and used local ingredients to create new dishes like gumbo and jambalaya. The Scotch-Irish, who poured into the southern Appalachian mountains, squeezed a new distilled spirit out of corn. According to legend, a Baptist preacher by the name of Elijiah Craig was the first to make bourbon whiskey in the 1780s in Bourbon County, Kentucky.

But the dominant strains of southern cooking, as of southern life, are English and African. The English who settled the region brought their own livestock and fruits (apples chief among them), a direct, earnest style of cooking, and a taste for stews, puddings, and pies.

The African slaves who were imported to work the fields starting in the 1620s brought some of the most quintessentially southern foods with them, including okra, peanuts, watermelons, and black-eyed peas. Some of these foods, peanuts, for instance, actually originated in South America but did not take root in North America until they were taken to Africa and brought back across the Atlantic in the slave trade. Slave cooks also enlivened the southern kitchen by using peppers and spices they had either known in Africa or picked up in the Caribbean, the first stop in the New World for many of them. This forced collaboration between black and white newcomers laid the foundation for the region's cooking.

Southern Hospitality

By the time of the American Revolution in the 1770s, the southern Atlantic colonies were developing an economic system dominated by the large-scale cultivation of single cash crops, such as tobacco and rice. The plantation system spread west after independence, as cotton bolls blanketed the region and sugar cane sprouted through the lower Mississippi River valley.

The plantations developed a reputation for lavish entertaining that led to one of the enduring legends of the young country, southern hospitality. In 1746 a correspondent for London magazine compared the Virginia planters' lifestyle to that of English country squires: "All over the Colony, a universal Hospitality reigns; full Tables and open Doors, the kind Salute, the generous Detention, speak somewhat like the old Roast-beef Ages of our Forefathers. . . . Strangers are sought after with Greediness, as they pass the Country, to be invited."

Company was so routine at Mount Vernon, George Washington's estate, that the first president once complained in a letter that he and Martha had not dined by themselves in twenty years. The first lady evidently made a custom of large meals. The recipe for Martha Washington's Great Cake in the files at Mount Vernon begins "Take 40 eggs."

The apotheosis of this grand spirit was Thomas Jefferson, the third president and first epicure, who brought vanilla, macaroni, and wine making to the hills of the Virginia Piedmont. Jefferson loved to entertain at the White House and at his neoclassical mansion Monticello. His lavish entertaining was largely responsible for his dying $40,000 in debt.

Hard Times

Few southerners could afford to set a table like Jefferson or Washington. Before the Civil War the great majority were slaves or yeoman farmers. After the war ended slavery and bankrupted the plantation system, millions became tenant farmers or sharecroppers, working fields they rented by giving landlords a large portion of what they grew.

These new American peasants were fueled by a monotonous diet of salt pork, cornbread, molasses, and whatever vegetables they were able to grow or gather. The most commonly eaten vegetables were green beans, black-eyed peas, and leafy greens (turnips in the Upper South, collards in the Lower South), usually boiled for at least an hour with ham hocks or some other pork flavoring. Sweet potatoes joined the plate in late summer, when they were harvested and stored in earthen mounds for consumption through the winter.

Humble though these foods may have been, they could summon powerful emotions among those raised on them. In Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man (1952) the narrator, a young man from the South, practically bursts into homesick tears when he smells Carolina sweet potatoes roasting at a vendor's stand on the sidewalks of New York.

Decades after the devastation of the Civil War, hunger and malnutrition lingered in the South. In the early 1900s federal doctors investigated the widespread listlessness—some called it laziness—that many had noticed among the region's poor. Much of it was blamed on pellagra, a disease of vitamin deficiency caused by a grossly unbalanced diet. Pellagra did not recede until a nutritional campaign was launched during the 1930s and cornmeal, the bulk of so many diets, was enriched with vitamin B₁₂.

Many southern foods have long been linked with poverty. Mark Twain makes the connection in his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), when Huck tells Jim he would rather eat wheat bread because that's "what the quality eat—none of your low-down corn pone."

Indeed, southerners used to regard wheat bread as somehow elevated, calling it "light bread" to distinguish it from run-of-the-mill cornmeal. Baking with wheat did not catch on until commercially milled flour and baking powder became widely available in the late 1800s. Then southern cooks made up for lost time, making light, fluffy biscuits part of their daily routines, especially at breakfast. Kinky Friedman, a country musician from Texas, once wrote a song titled "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed." Most of his listeners no doubt approved of his priorities. In the South, hot bread always comes first.

Some Special Foods

Many distinctively southern dishes are associated with special events, including holidays, family reunions, community fundraisers, and the like. On New Year's Day, for example, a peas and rice dish called hoppin' John is eaten for good luck, often with a side serving of greens to foretell money. Reunions bring out cauldrons of Brunswick stew, Frogmore stew, burgoo, or muddle—hearty concoctions made in particular areas of the South with vegetables and pork, seafood, mutton, or fish respectively. Churches and athletic leagues raise money with plates of catfish and hushpuppies, fried dollops of cornmeal whose name probably derives from the way cooks used to keep dogs at bay by tossing them some batter. Funerals and homecomings produce an amazing variety of pies and cakes, a reflection of the region's pronounced sweet tooth. And some people think it would not be Christmas without ambrosia, a dessert made of grated coconut and orange sections that is virtually unseen the rest of the year.

No matter what the occasion or month, it is considered perfectly normal to accompany any meal with iced tea. Given its hot, humid climate, the South has a powerful thirst for cold beverages. Among the many soft drinks that originated in the region are the world's two most popular, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, both created by pharmacists (the first in Georgia, the latter in North Carolina) in the late 1800s.

Fried chicken, perhaps the most renowned of southern dishes, may have begun as a seasonal specialty. Its genealogy is uncertain. Among the settlers of the South, both Africans and Scots have a tradition of frying poultry. However it got there, fried chicken was already established by 1828, when Mary Randolph included a recipe for it in one of the earliest American cookbooks, The Virginia House-wife. She specified all the essentials, chicken parts dredged in flour, seasoned, and fried in hot fat.

In the nineteenth century fried chicken was usually eaten during the warm months, when hens hatched the chicks that grew into tender young fryers. By the mid-1900s a huge poultry industry that could supply fryers year-round had developed in Georgia, Arkansas, and the Carolinas. Poultry consumption rose throughout the calendar.

Traditionally fried chicken was a Sunday treat reserved for after-church dinners and special company, like the preacher or the in-laws. The dish gradually spread into other days of the week, spurred on by the rise of fast-food franchising after World War II. The first and largest of the chicken chains, Kentucky Fried Chicken, once advertised "Sunday dinner seven days a week." Harland Sanders, who went by the honorary title "colonel," started the business in the 1930s at a roadside cafe in Corbin, Kentucky. By the end of the twentieth century the empire that bears his goateed image was selling a taste of Dixie at nearly eleven thousand outposts around the world.

An Enduring Love Affair

Another food that strongly evokes the South is barbecue. While much of the rest of the United States uses the term to refer to a backyard cookout, southerners use it quite particularly to mean the slow smoking of meat over hardwood coals. The meat is almost always pork.

Southerners have long had a thing about swine. William Byrd, a Virginia planter, observed in the early 1700s that his neighbors were eating so much pig flesh that they "seem to grunt rather than speak." Before refrigeration became common, pigs were usually slaughtered when the weather turned cold in late autumn—"hog-killing time"—and the meat was preserved as bacon, sausage, salt pork, or hams rubbed in spices and allowed to cure for months in a smokehouse. Little of the hog was wasted. The small intestines were breaded and fried or boiled as chitlins, and the fat was rendered into cracklins that flavored cracklin cornbread.

Of all the uses of pork, barbecue is probably the most popular. In the beginning the dish was usually served at political rallies and other community get-togethers. By the end of the twentieth century it was more commonly served at casual restaurants, universally known as barbecue joints, where everyone from blue-collar laborers to white-collar professionals sit cheek by jowl mopping barbecue sauce from their lips.

Southerners love to argue the merits of different barbecue styles. Two areas are particularly known for their expertise. In the Carolinas pit masters smoke whole hogs at gatherings called "pig pickin's" and serve the meat pulled from the bone with a spiced vinegar sauce that, unlike most barbecue dressings, contains no tomatoes or ketchup. In parts of South Carolina the sauce is mustard-based. Meanwhile in Memphis, Tennessee, the self-described "pork barbecue capital of the world," pork ribs or chopped pork shoulders are served in sandwiches with creamy coleslaw. People in Memphis love barbecue so much that some restaurants serve barbeque-topped pizza and barbecue spaghetti, pasta tossed with barbecue sauce.

Changing Tastes

The last half of the twentieth century brought rapid change to the South. The civil rights movement engineered a revolution in race relations, business and government invested heavily in the region, and air conditioning made it more comfortable to live there. Millions of outsiders moved south for jobs or retirement, bringing their tastes and customs with them. In fast-growing areas like Atlanta, Georgia, or Charlotte, North Carolina, it is almost as easy to find a bagel as a biscuit.

In the midst of this evolution southern cooking enjoyed something of a revival, as natives and newcomers alike came to regard it as another ethnic cuisine to be discovered or rediscovered. Native sons and daughters like Craig Claiborne, Edna Lewis, and Nathalie Dupree celebrated the region's foods in cookbooks and television cooking shows. A new generation of chefs lavished their talents on the old cuisine at high-end restaurants from Arkansas to Virginia. Popular road-food guides told travelers where to find the best barbecue joints, seafood shacks, produce stands, ladies' tea rooms, and meat-and-three-plate lunch emporiums.

Even so, traditional southern home cooking seemed to be fading. Fewer people had time to make messy, demanding dishes like fried chicken. Some avoided them altogether out of concern for fat and cholesterol. Oldfashioned southern food was increasingly left to restaurant kitchens or rolled out only on special occasions.

Yet southerners remain deeply attached to their foods and rituals. In a nation that relentlessly wears down regional distinctions, their shared foodways are one of the few things that knits them together and reminds them who they are. How else to explain the enduring appeal of grits, the unremarkable cornmeal porridge that is one of the region's most joked about icons?

Shelby Foote, the Mississippi-born novelist and historian, takes his culinary heritage seriously. Once, when he was staying in a hotel, he hung a breakfast order on his doorknob asking for grits. Room service brought him hash browns instead. Yankees eat hash browns with breakfast. He put out the card again, this time with a note: "This morning you brought me potatoes. Do not commit this outrage again."

All the King's Pone

Back in the 1930s Huey Long, the pot-bellied potentate of Louisiana, tried to show his common touch by talking up the health benefits of cornbread and pot likker, a modest dish enjoyed by southerners everywhere. "The Kingfish" decreed that it was classier to dunk the bread into the likker, the savory juice left behind by boiled greens, instead of crumbling it. Julian Harris, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, disagreed. Thus started the Great Corn Pone Debate of 1931.

For weeks the mock controversy raged in newspapers, as Harris accused Long of closet crumbling and Long charged Harris with yellow-corn journalism in telegrams fired off to the Constitution's Pot Likker and Corn Pone Department. Long even offered a jesting recipe called Pot Likker à le Dictator.

The future president Franklin D. Roosevelt eventually weighed in, proposing that the important question be referred to the 1932 Democratic National Convention. "I must admit that I crumble mine," he wrote, perhaps belying a bias from all the time he spent at the spa in Warm Springs, Georgia.

Bibliography

Belk, Sarah. Around the Southern Table. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.

Dabney, Joseph E. Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking. Nashville: Cumberland House, 1998.

Egerton, John. Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Ketchum, Richard M., ed. The American Heritage Cookbook. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964.

Rogers, Mara Reid, and Jim Auchmutey. The South the Beautiful Cookbook: Authentic Recipes from the American South. San Francisco: Collins, 1996.

Taylor, Joe Gray. Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Walter, Eugene. American Cooking: Southern Style. New York: Time-Life Books, 1971.

Wilson, Charles Reagan, and William Ferris, eds. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

—Jim Auchmutey

The Southern United States as defined by the United States Census Bureau.^[1] See also the map of the Deep South.

The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South— is an area in the southeastern and south-central United States. The region is known for its distinct culture and history, having developed its own customs, musical styles and varied cuisines that have helped distinguish it from the rest of the United States. The South owes its unique heritage to a variety of sources, including Native Americans, early European settlements of Spanish, English, German, French, Scots-Irish and Scottish^[2] importation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, historic dependence on slave labor, presence of a large proportion of African Americans in the population, and the aftermath of the Confederacy after the Civil War.

Historically, the South relied heavily on agriculture but has become more industrialized and urban since the last few decades of the 20th century, attracting national and international migrants. The American South is now among the fastest-growing areas in the United States. While there has been rapid economic growth, every Southern state with the exceptions of Maryland, Virginia and Florida has a higher poverty rate than the American average.^[3] Poverty is especially prevalent in rural areas.^{[citation needed]} Sociological research has indicated that Southern collective identity stems from political, demographic and cultural distinctiveness. Studies have shown that Southerners are more conservative than non-Southerners in several areas, including religion, morality, international relations and race relations.^[4][5] This is evident during presidential elections and in religious attendance figures.^[4][5]

Overall, the South has had lower percentages of high school graduates, lower housing values, lower household incomes, and lower cost of living than the rest of the United States.^[6] These factors, combined with the fact that Southerners have continued to maintain strong loyalty to family ties, has led some sociologists to label white Southerners a "quasi-ethnic regional group."^[7] In previous censuses, the largest ancestry group identified by Southerners was English or mostly English,^[8][9][10] with 19,618,370 self-reporting "English" as an ancestry on the 1980 census, followed by 12,709,872 listing "Irish" and 11,054,127 "Afro-American".^[8][9][10] Almost a third of all Americans who claim English ancestry can be found in the American South, and over a quarter of all Southerners claim English descent as well.^[11] The South also continues to have the highest percentage of African-Americans in the country.

Apart from its climate, the living experience in the South increasingly resembles the rest of the nation. The arrival of millions of Northerners (especially in the suburbs and coastal areas)^[12] and millions of Hispanics^[13] means the introduction of cultural values and social norms not rooted in Southern traditions.^[14][15] Observers conclude that collective identity and Southern distinctiveness are thus declining, particularly when defined against "an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, real, more unified and distinct."^[16] The process has worked both ways, however, with aspects of Southern culture spreading throughout a greater portion of the rest of the United States in a process termed "Southernization".^[17]

Contents 1 Geography 2 History 2.1 Native American culture 2.2 European colonization 2.3 American Revolution 2.4 Antebellum years 2.5 Presidential history 2.6 Civil War 2.7 Reconstruction and Jim Crow 2.8 Late 19th and 20th century—industrialization and Great Migration 2.9 Growth and poverty 3 Economy 4 Education 5 Culture 6 Health 7 Recent politics 7.1 Other politicians and political movements 8 Race relations 8.1 Native Americans 8.2 Civil rights 9 Symbolism 10 Major metropolitan areas 11 See also 12 Notes 13 References 14 Further reading 15 External links

Geography

The question of how to define the subregions in the South has been the focus of research for nearly a century.^[18][19]

As defined by the United States Census Bureau,^[1] the Southern region of the United States includes sixteen states. As of 2010, an estimated 114,555,744 people, or thirty-seven percent of all U.S. residents, lived in the South, the nation's most populous region.^[20] The Census Bureau defined three smaller units, or divisions:

• The South Atlantic States: Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Delaware
• The East South Central States: Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee
• The West South Central States: Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas

Other terms related to the South include:

• The Old South: can mean either the slave states that existed in 1776 (Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina,;^[21] or all the slave states before 1860 (which included the newer states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas.).^[22]
• The New South: usually including the South Atlantic States.^[23]
• The Solid South: region controlled by the Democratic Party from 1877 to 1964. Includes at least all the 11 former Confederate States.^[24]
• Southern Appalachia: mainly refers to areas situated in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, namely Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Western Maryland, West Virginia, Southwest Virginia, North Georgia, and Northwestern South Carolina.^[25]
• Southeastern United States: usually including the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and at times Maryland^[26]
• The Deep South: various definitions, usually including Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. Occasionally, parts of adjoining states are included (sections of East Texas, delta areas of Arkansas and Tennessee, and parts of Florida such as the Panhandle and the north-central part of the state).^[27]
• The Gulf South: various definitions, usually including Gulf coasts of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama.
• The Upper South: Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, and North Carolina.^[28]
• Dixie: various definitions, but most commonly associated with the 11 states of the Old Confederacy.
• The Mid-South: Various definitions, including that of the Census Bureau of the East and West South Central United States;^[29] in another informal definition, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and sometimes adjoining areas of other states.^{[30][31][32][33]}
• Border South: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware were states on the outer rim of the Confederacy that did not secede from the United States, but did have significant numbers of residents who joined the Confederate armed forces. Kentucky and Missouri had Confederate governments in exile and were represented in the Confederate Congress and by the Confederate battle flag. West Virginia formed in 1863 after the western region broke away from Virginia, though support for the Confederacy and the Union in the new state was about evenly divided.^[34]

The popular definition of the "South" is more informal and generally associated with the eleven states that seceded during the Civil War to form the Confederate States of America. Those states share commonalities of history and culture that carry on to the present day. Oklahoma is often included; it was not a state, but all its major Indian tribes signed formal treaties of alliance with the Confederacy.

The South is a diverse meteorological region with numerous climatic zones, including temperate, sub-tropical, tropical, and arid--though the South is generally regarded as hot and humid, with long summers and short, mild winters. Most of the south – except for the higher elevations and areas near the western, southern and some northern fringes – fall in the humid subtropical climate zone. Crops grow easily in the South; its climate consistently provides growing seasons of at least six months before the first frost. Landscapes, particularly in the Southeast, are characterized by live oaks, magnolia trees, yellow jessamine vines, Spanish moss, cabbage palms and flowering dogwoods. Another common environment is found in the bayous and swamplands of the Gulf Coast, especially in Louisiana and Texas. Parts of the rural South have been overrun by Kudzu, an invasive, fast-growing, leafy vine that can spread over trees, land, roads, and buildings, choking and killing indigenous plants. Kudzu is a particularly big problem in the Piedmont regions of South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.^[35]

History

Main article: History of the Southern United States

Native American culture

The first well-dated evidence of human occupation in the south United States occurs around 9500 BC with the appearance of the earliest documented Americans, who are now referred to as Paleo-Indians.^[36] Paleoindians were hunter-gathers that roamed in bands and frequently hunted megafauna. Several cultural stages, such as Archaic (ca. 8000 -1000 BC) and the Woodland (ca. 1000 BC-AD 1000), preceded what the Europeans found at the end of the 15th century — the Mississippian culture.^[36]

The Mississippian culture was a complex, mound-building Native American culture that flourished in what is now the southeastern United States from approximately 800 AD to 1500 AD. Natives had elaborate and lengthy trading routes connecting their main residential and ceremonial centers extending through the river valleys and from the East Coast to the Great Lakes.^[36] Some noted explorers who encountered and described the Mississippian culture, by then in decline, included Pánfilo de Narváez (1528), Hernando de Soto (1540), and Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville (1699).

Native American descendants of the mound-builders include Alabama, Apalachee, Caddo, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Guale, Hitchiti, Houma, and Seminole peoples, all of whom still reside in the South.

Other peoples whose ancestral links to the Mississippian culture are less clear but were clearly in the region before the European incursion include the Catawba and the Powhatan.

European colonization

European immigration resulted in a corresponding die off of native Americans who had not been exposed to various diseases.^[37]

The predominant culture of the South was rooted in the settlement of the region by British colonists. In the 17th century, most voluntary immigrants were of English origins who settled chiefly along the coastal regions of the Eastern seaboard but had pushed as far inland as the Appalachian mountains by the 18th century. The majority of early English settlers were indentured servants, who gained freedom after enough work to pay off their passage. The wealthier men who paid their way received land grants known as headrights, to encourage settlement.^[38]

The Spanish and French established colonies in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana. The Spanish colonized Florida in the 16th century, with their communities reaching a peak in the late 17th century.

In the British colonies, immigration began in 1607 and continued until the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775. Settlers cleared land, built houses and outbuildings, and on their own farms. The rich owned large plantations that dominated export agriculture and used black slaves. Many were involved in the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco, the first cash crop of Virginia. Tobacco exhausted the soil quickly, requiring new fields to be cleared on a regular basis. Old fields were used as pasture and for crops such as corn and wheat, or allowed to grow into woodlots.^[39]

In the mid-to-late-18th century, large groups of Ulster-Scots (later called the Scotch-Irish) and people from the Anglo-Scottish border region immigrated and settled in the back country of Appalachia and the Piedmont. They were the largest group of non-English immigrants from the British Isles before the American Revolution.^[40] In the 1980 Census, 34% of Southerners reported that they were of English ancestry; English was the largest reported European ancestry in every Southern state by a large margin.^[8]

The early colonists, engaged in warfare, trade, and cultural exchanges. Those living in the backcountry were more likely to encounter Creek Indians, Cherokee, and Choctaws and other regional native groups.

The oldest university in the South, The College of William & Mary, was founded in 1693 in Virginia; it pioneered in the teaching of political economy and educated future U.S. Presidents Jefferson, Monroe and Tyler, all from Virginia. Indeed, the entire region dominated politics in the First Party System era: for example, four of the first five Presidents— Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe — were from Virginia. The two oldest public universities are also in the South: the University of North Carolina (1789) and the University of Georgia (1785).

American Revolution

Main article: Southern theater of the American Revolutionary War

With Virginia in the lead, the Southern colonies embraced the American Revolution, providing such leaders as commander in chief George Washington, and the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.

In 1780–81, the British largely gave up reconquest of the northern states, and concentrated on the south, where they were told there was a large Loyalist population ready to leap to arms once the royal forces arrived. The British took control of Savannah and Charleston, capturing a large American army in the process, and set up a network of bases inland. Many Loyalist did join the British, often switching sides once or twice, but not nearly enough to overcome the Americans. Led by Nathaniel Greene and other generals, the Americans engaged in Fabian tactics designed to wear down the British invasion force, and to neutralize its strong points one by one. There were numerous battles large and small, with each side claiming some victories. By 1781, however, British General Cornwallis realized his mission was hopeless, so he moved north to Virginia to await rescue by the British Navy. The British Navy did arrive, but so it too did a stronger French fleet, and Cornwallis was trapped. American and French armies, led by Washington, forced Cornwallis to surrender his entire army in Yorktown, Virginia in October 1781, effectively winning the war.^[41]

The Revolution provided a shock to slavery in the South. Thousands of slaves took advantage of wartime disruption to find their own freedom, catalyzed by the British governor Dunmore of Virginia's promise of freedom for service. Many others were removed by Loyalist owners and became slaves elsewhere in the Empire. There was sharp decline between 1770 and 1790 the percentage of blacks from 61% percent to 44% in South Carolina and from 45% to 36% in Georgia.^[42]

In addition, some slaveholders were inspired to free their slaves after the Revolution. They were moved by the principles of the Revolution, and Quaker and Methodist preachers worked to encourage slaveholders to free their slaves. Planters often freed slaves by their wills, as did George Washington. In the upper South, more than 10 percent of all blacks were free by 1810, a significant expansion from pre-war proportions of less than 1 percent free.^[43]

Antebellum years

Slaves on a South Carolina plantation (The Old Plantation, c. 1790)

Cotton became dominant in the lower South after 1800. After the invention of the cotton gin, short staple cotton could be grown more widely. This led to an explosion of cotton cultivation, especially in the frontier uplands of Georgia, Alabama and other parts of the Deep South, as well as riverfront areas of the Mississippi Delta. Migrants poured into those areas in the early decades of the 19th century, when county population figures rose and fell as swells of people kept moving west. The expansion of cotton cultivation required more slave labor, and the institution became even more deeply an integral part of the South's economy.^[44]

With the opening up of frontier lands after the government forced most Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi, there was a major migration of both whites and blacks to those territories. From the 1820s through the 1850s, more than one million enslaved African Americans were transported to the Deep South in forced migration, two-thirds of them by slave traders and the others by masters who moved there. Planters in the Upper South sold slaves excess to their needs as they shifted from tobacco to mixed agriculture. Many enslaved families were broken up, as planters preferred mostly strong males for field work.^[45]

Two major political issues that festered in the first half of the 19th century caused political alignment along sectional lines, strengthened the identities of North and South as distinct regions with certain strongly opposed interests, and fed the arguments over states' rights that culminated in secession and the Civil War. One of these issues concerned the protective tariffs enacted to assist the growth of the manufacturing sector, primarily in the North. In 1832, in resistance to federal legislation increasing tariffs, South Carolina passed an ordinance of nullification, a procedure in which a state would in effect repeal a Federal law. Soon a naval flotilla was sent to Charleston harbor, and the threat of landing ground troops was used to compel the collection of tariffs. A compromise was reached by which the tariffs would be gradually reduced, but the underlying argument over states' rights continued to escalate in the following decades.

The second issue concerned slavery, primarily the question of whether slavery would be permitted in newly admitted states. The issue was initially finessed by political compromises designed to balance the number of "free" and "slave" states. The issue resurfaced in more virulent form, however, around the time of the Mexican–American War, which raised the stakes by adding new territories primarily on the Southern side of the imaginary geographic divide. Congress opposed allowing slavery in these territories.

Before the Civil War, the number of immigrants arriving at Southern ports began to increase, although the North continued to receive the most immigrants. Hugenots were among the first settlers in Charleston, along with the largest number of Hasidic Jews outside of New York City.^{[citation needed]} Numerous Irish immigrants settled in New Orleans, establishing a distinct ethnic enclave now known as the Irish Channel. Germans also went to New Orleans and its environs, resulting in a large area north of the city (along the Mississippi) becoming known as the German Coast; however, still greater numbers immigrated to Texas (especially after 1848), where many bought land and were farmers. Many more German immigrants arrived in Texas after the Civil War, where they created the brewing industry in Houston and elsewhere, became grocers in numerous cities, and also established wide areas of farming.

Presidential history

The South produced nine of the first 12 U.S. Presidents prior to the Civil War. For more than a century after the Civil War, no Southerner became President unless he either moved North (like Woodrow Wilson) or was vice president when their president died in office (like Vice-Presidents Andrew Johnson, Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson). In 1976, Jimmy Carter defied this trend and became the first Southerner to break the pattern since Zachary Taylor in 1848. The South produced five of the last eight American Presidents: Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–69), Jimmy Carter (1977–81), George H. W. Bush (1989–93), Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and George W. Bush (2001–2009). Carter was from Georgia, Clinton from Arkansas, while George H.W. and George W. Bush were from Texas, although born in New England.

Civil War

Historic Southern United States. The states in red were in the Confederacy and have historically been regarded as forming "the South". Those in stripes were considered "border states", and gave varying degrees of support to the Southern cause although they remained in the Union. (This image depicts the original, trans-Allegheny borders of Virginia, and so does not show West Virginia separately. See the images above for post-1863 Virginia and West Virginia borders.) Although Oklahoma was aligned with the Confederacy, it is not shaded because at the time the region was Indian Territory, not a state.

By 1856, the South had lost control of Congress, and was no longer able to silence calls for an end to slavery—which came mostly from the more populated, free states of the North. The Republican Party, founded in 1854, pledged to stop the spread of slavery beyond those states where it already existed. After Abraham Lincoln was elected the first Republican president in 1860, seven cotton states declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America before Lincoln was inaugurated. The United States government, both outgoing and incoming, refused to recognize the Confederacy, and when the new Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered his troops to open fire on Fort Sumter in April 1861, there was an overwhelming demand, North and South, for war. Only the state of Kentucky attempted to remain neutral, and it could only do so briefly. When Lincoln called for troops to suppress the rebellion, four more states decided to secede and join the Confederacy (which then moved its capital to Richmond, Virginia). Although the Confederacy had large supplies of captured munitions and many volunteers, it was slower than the Union in dealing with the border states. By March 1862, the Union largely controlled Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri, had shut down all commercial traffic from all Confederate ports, had prevented European recognition of the Confederate government, and was poised to seize New Orleans.

Confederate dead of General Ewell's Corps who attacked the Union lines at the Battle of Spotsylvania, May 19, 1864.

In the four years of war 1861–65 the South was the primary battleground, with all but two of the major battles taking place on Southern soil. Union forces relentlessly squeezed the Confederacy, controlling the border states in 1861, the Tennessee River, the Cumberland River and New Orleans in 1862, and the Mississippi River in 1863. In the East, however, the rebel army under Robert E. Lee beat off attack after attack in its defense of their capital at Richmond. But when Lee tried to move north, he was repulsed (and nearly captured) at Antietam (1862) and Gettysburg (1863).

The Confederacy had the resources for a short war, but was unable to finance or supply a longer war. It reversed the traditional low-tariff policy of the South by imposing a new 15% tax on all imports from the Union. The Union blockade stopped most commerce from entering the South, and smugglers avoided the tax, so the Confederate tariff produced too little revenue to finance the war. Inflated currency was the solution, but that created distrust of the Richmond government. Because of low investment in railroads, the Southern transportation system depended primarily on river and coastal traffic by boat; both were shut down by the Union Navy. The small railroad system virtually collapsed, so that by 1864 internal travel was so difficult that the Confederate economy was crippled.

The Confederate cause was hopeless by the time Atlanta fell and William T. Sherman marched through Georgia in late 1864, but the rebels fought on, refusing to give up their independence until Lee's army was captured in April 1865. All the Confederate forces surrendered, and there was no insurgency as the region moved into the Reconstruction Era.

The South suffered much more than the North overall, as the Union strategy of attrition warfare meant that Lee could not replace his casualties, and the total war waged by Sherman, Sheridan and other Union armies devastated the infrastructure and caused widespread poverty and distress. The Confederacy suffered military losses of 95,000 men killed in action and 165,000 who died of disease, for a total of 260,000,^[46] out of a total white Southern population at the time of around 5.5 million.^[47] Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6% in the North and about 18% in the South.^[48] Northern military casualties exceeded Southern casualties in absolute numbers, but were two-thirds smaller in terms of proportion of the population affected.

Reconstruction and Jim Crow

Main articles: Reconstruction era of the United States, Disfranchisement after Reconstruction era (United States), and Voting rights in the United States

After the Civil War, the South was devastated in terms of population, infrastructure and economy. Because of states' reluctance to grant voting rights to freedmen, Congress instituted Reconstruction governments. It established military districts and governors to rule over the South until new governments could be established. Many white Southerners who had actively supported the Confederacy were temporarily disfranchised. Rebuilding was difficult as people grappled with the effects of a new labor economy of a free market in the midst of a widespread agricultural depression. In addition, what limited infrastructure the South had was mostly destroyed by the war. At the same time, the North was rapidly industrializing. To avoid the social effects of the war, most of the Southern states initially passed black codes. Eventually, these were mostly legally nullified by federal law and anti-Confederate legistures, which persisted for a short time during Reconstruction.^[49]

A Home on the Mississippi, Currier and Ives, 1871

There were thousands of people on the move, as African Americans tried to reunite families separated by slaves sales, and sometimes migrated for better opportunities in towns or other states. Other freedpeople moved from plantation areas to cities or towns for a chance to get different jobs and out from under white control. At the same time, whites returned from refuges to reclaim plantations or town dwellings. In some areas, many whites returned to the land to farm for a while. Some freedpeople left the South altogether for states such as Ohio and Indiana, and later, Kansas. Thousands of others joined the migration to new opportunities in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta bottomlands and Texas.

With passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (which outlawed slavery), the 14th Amendment (which granted full U.S. citizenship to African Americans) and the 15th amendment (which extended the right to vote to African American males), African Americans in the South were made free citizens and were given the right to vote. Under Federal protection, white and black Republicans formed constitutional conventions and state governments. Among their accomplishments was creating the first public education systems in Southern states, and providing for welfare through orphanages, hospitals and similar institutions.

Northerners came south to participate in politics and business. Some were representatives of the Freedmen's Bureau and other agencies of Reconstruction; some were humanitarians with the intent to help black people. Also, as is often the case in volatile environments, some were adventurers who hoped to benefit themselves by questionable methods. They were all condemned with the pejorative term of carpetbagger. Some Southerners also took advantage of the disrupted environment and made money off various schemes, including bonds and financing for railroads.^[50]

Secret vigilante organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan—an organization sworn to perpetuate white supremacy—had arisen quickly after the war's end and used lynching, physical attacks, house burnings and other forms of intimidation to keep African Americans from exercising their political rights. Although the first Klan was disrupted by prosecution by the Federal government in the early 1870s, other groups persisted. By the mid-to-late-1870s, elite white Southerners created increasing resistance to the altered social structure. Paramilitary organizations such as the White League in Louisiana (1874), the Red Shirts in Mississippi (1875) and rifle clubs, all "White Line" organizations, used organized violence against Republicans, blacks and whites, to turn Republicans out of office, repress and bar black voting, and restore Democrats to power.^[51] In 1876 white Democrats regained power in most of the state legislatures. They began to pass laws designed to strip African Americans and poor whites from the voter registration rolls. The success of late-19th century interracial coalitions in several states inspired a reaction among some white Democrats, who worked harder to prevent both groups from voting.^[52]

Despite discrimination, many blacks became property owners in areas that were still developing. For instance, 90% of the Mississippi's bottomlands were still frontier and undeveloped after the war. By the end of the century, two-thirds of the farmers in Mississippi's Delta bottomlands were black. They had cleared the land themselves and often made money in early years by selling off timber. Tens of thousands of migrants went to the Delta, both to work as laborers to clear timber for lumber companies, and many to develop their own farms.^[53]

Child laborers, Bluffton, South Carolina, 1913

Nearly all Southerners, black and white, suffered as a result of the Civil War. Within a few years cotton production and harvest was back to pre-war levels, but low prices through much of the 19th century hampered recovery. They encouraged immigration by Chinese and Italian laborers into the Mississippi Delta. While the first Chinese entered as indentured laborers from Cuba, the majority came in the early-20th century. Neither group stayed long at rural farm labor.^[54] The Chinese became merchants and established stores in small towns throughout the Delta, establishing a place between white and black.^[55]

Migrations continued in the late-19th and early 20th-centuries among both blacks and whites. In the last two decades oth the 19th century about 141,000 blacks left the South, and more after 1900, totaling a loss of 537,000. After that the movement increased in what became known as the Great Migration from 1910–1940, and the Second Great Migration through 1970. Even more whites left the South, some going to California for opportunities and others heading to Northern industrial cities after 1900. Between 1880 and 1910, the loss of whites totaled 1,243,000.^[56] Five million more left between 1940 and 1970.

From 1890 to 1908, 10 of the 11 states passed disfranchising constitutions or amendments which had provisions for voter registration, such as poll taxes, residency requirements and literacy tests, which were hard for many poor to meet. Most African Americans, Mexican Americans and tens of thousands of poor whites were disfranchised, losing the vote for decades. In some states grandfather clauses were temporarily used to exempt white illiterates from literacy tests. The numbers of voters dropped drastically throughout the South as a result. This can be seen on the feature "Turnout in Presidential and Midterm Elections" at the University of Texas Politics: Barriers to Voting. Alabama, which had established universal white suffrage in 1819 when it became a state, also substantially reduced voting by poor whites.^[57][58] Legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to segregate public facilities and services, including transportation.

While African Americans, poor whites and civil rights groups started litigation against such provisions in the early-20th century, for decades Supreme Court decisions overturning such provisions were rapidly followed by new state laws with new devices to restrict voting. Most blacks in the South could not vote until 1965, after passage of the Voting Rights Act and Federal enforcement to ensure people could register. Not until the late 1960s did all American citizens regain protected civil rights by passage of legislation following the leadership of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Late 19th and 20th century—industrialization and Great Migration

Main article: Great Migration (African American)

At the end of the 19th century, white Democrats in the South had created state constitutions that were hostile to industry and business development. Banking was limited, as was access to credit. States persisted in agricultural economies.^{[citation needed]} As in Alabama, rural minorities held control in many state legislatures long after population had shifted to industrializing cities, and the legislators resisted business and modernizing interests. For instance, Alabama refused to redistrict from 1901 to 1972, long after major population and economic shifts to cities. For decades Birmingham generated the majority of revenue for the state, for instance, but received little back in services or infrastructure.^[59]

An illustrated depiction of black people picking cotton, 1913

In the late 19th century, Texas rapidly expanded its railroad network, creating a network of cities connected on a radial plan and linked to the port of Galveston. It was the first state in which urban and economic development proceeded independently of rivers, the primary transportation network of the past. A reflection of increasing industry were strikes and labor unrest: "in 1885 Texas ranked ninth among forty states in number of workers involved in strikes (4,000); for the six-year period it ranked fifteenth. Seventy-five of the 100 strikes, chiefly interstate strikes of telegraphers and railway workers, occurred in the year 1886."^[60]

In 1890 Dallas was the largest city in Texas. By 1900 it had a population of more than 42,000, which more than doubled to over 92,000 a decade later. Dallas was the harnessmaking capital of the world and center of other manufacturing. As an example of its ambitions, in 1907 Dallas built the Praetorian Building, 15 stories tall and the first skyscraper west of the Mississippi. Others soon followed.^[61] Texas was transformed by a railroad network linking five important cities, among them Houston with its nearby port at Galveston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and El Paso. Each exceeded 50,000 in population by 1920, with the major cities having three times that population.^[62]

Business interests were ignored by the Bourbon class. Nonetheless, major new industries started developing in cities such as Atlanta, GA; Birmingham, AL; and Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston, Texas. Growth began occurring at a geometric rate. Birmingham became a major steel producer and mining town, with major population growth in the early decades of the 20th century.

The first major oil well in the South was drilled at Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas, on the morning of January 10, 1901. Other oil fields were later discovered nearby in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and under the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting "Oil Boom" permanently transformed the economy of the West/South Central states and led to the most significant economic expansion after the Civil War.

In the early 20th century, invasion of the boll weevil devastated cotton crops in states of the South. This was an additional catalyst to African Americans' decisions to leave the South. From 1910 to 1940, and then from the 1940s to 1970, more than 6.5 million African Americans left the South in the Great Migration to northern and midwestern cities, making multiple acts of resistance against persistent lynching and violence, segregation, poor education, and inability to vote. Their movements transformed many cities, creating new cultures and music in the North. Many African Americans, like other groups, became industrial workers; others started their own businesses within the communities. Southern whites also migrated to industrial cities, especially Chicago and Detroit, where they took jobs in the booming new auto industry.

Photo of sharecropper family in Walker County, Alabama, ca. 1937

Later, the Southern economy was dealt additional blows by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the economy suffered significant reversals and millions were left unemployed. Beginning in 1934 and lasting until 1939, an ecological disaster of severe wind and drought caused an exodus from Texas and Arkansas, the Oklahoma Panhandle region and the surrounding plains, in which over 500,000 Americans were homeless, hungry and jobless.^[63] Thousands left the region forever to seek economic opportunities along the West Coast.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt noted the South as the "number one priority" in terms of need of assistance during the Great Depression. His administration created programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933 to provide rural electrification and stimulate development. Locked into low productivity agriculture, the region's growth was slowed by limited industrial development, low levels of entrepreneurship, and the lack of capital investment.

World War II marked a time of change in the South as new industries and military bases were developed by the Federal government, providing badly needed capital and infrastructure in many regions. People from all parts of the US came to the South for military training and work in the region's many bases and new industries. Farming shifted from cotton and tobacco to include soybeans, corn, and other foods.

This growth increased in the 1960s and greatly accelerated into the 1980s and 1990s. Large urban areas with over 4 million people rose in Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Rapid expansion in industries such as autos, telecommunications, textiles, technology, banking, and aviation gave some states in the South an industrial strength to rival large states elsewhere in the country. By the 2000 census, The South (along with the West) was leading the nation in population growth. However, with this growth has come long commute times and serious air pollution problems in cities such as Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Austin, Charlotte, and others which have relied on sprawling development and highway networks.

Growth and poverty

In the antebellum years, by 1840 New Orleans was the wealthiest city in the country and the third largest in population, based on the growth of international trade associated with products being shipped to and from the interior of the country down the Mississippi River. It had the largest slave market in the country, as traders brought slaves to New Orleans by ship and overland to sell to planters across the Deep South. The city was a cosmopolitan port with a variety of jobs that attracted more immigrants than did other areas of the South.^[64] Because of lack of investment, construction of railroads to span the region lagged behind that in the North. People relied most heavily on river traffic for getting their crops to market and for transportation.

In Mississippi before the war, for instance, most plantations were developed along the Mississippi and other navigable rivers. The bottomlands were not developed until after the war, when the chance to buy land attracted tens of thousands of migrants, both black and white. By the end of the century, two-thirds of farm owners in the Delta bottomlands were black. The long agricultural depression meant that many had to take on too much debt—together with disfranchisement and lack of access to credit, by 1910 many had lost their property and by 1920, most blacks in the Delta were sharecroppers or landless workers. More than two generations of free African Americans had lost their stake in property.^[65]

Economy

In the late 20th century, the South changed dramatically. It saw a boom in its service economy, manufacturing base, high technology industries, and the financial sector. Tourism in Florida and along the Gulf Coast grew steadily throughout the last decades of the 20th century. Numerous new automobile production plants have opened in the region, or are soon to open, such as Mercedes-Benz in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Hyundai in Montgomery, Alabama; the BMW production plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina; Toyota plants in Georgetown, Kentucky, Blue Springs, Mississippi and San Antonio; the GM manufacturing plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee; the Nissan North American headquarters in Franklin, Tennessee; and the Volkswagen Chattanooga Assembly Plant. The two largest research parks in the country are located in the South: Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (the world's largest) and the Cummings Research Park in Huntsville, Alabama (the world's fourth largest). Many major banking corporations have headquarters in the region. Charlotte is home to Bank of America, and was also home to Wachovia before its purchase by Wells Fargo; Birmingham boasts Regions Financial Corporation, AmSouth Bancorporation, and BBVA Compass; Atlanta is home to SunTrust Banks and the district headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta; and BB&T is headquartered in Winston-Salem. Atlanta and its surrounding area are also home to many major corporations outside the banking sector, such as The Coca-Cola Company and The Home Depot, and also to many cable television networks, such as CNN, TBS, TNT, Turner South, Cartoon Network, and The Weather Channel. This economic expansion has enabled parts of the South to report some of the lowest unemployment rates in the United States.^[66] But in the U.S. top ten of poorest big cities, the South is represented in the rankings by two cities: Miami, Florida and Memphis, Tennessee.^[67] In 2011, nine out of ten poorest states were in the South.^[68]

Education

Southern public schools have consistently ranked in the bottom of many national surveys and average test-score rankings before allowances for race are made.^[69] When allowance for race is considered, a 2007 US Government list of test scores often shows white fourth and eighth graders performing better than average for reading and math; while black fourth and eighth graders also performed better than average.^[70] This comparison does not hold across the board. Mississippi scores lower than average no matter how the statistics are compared.

Culture

Main article: Culture of the Southern United States

Street musicians in Maynardville, Tennessee, photographed in 1935

The predominant culture of the South has its origins with the settlement of the region by large groups of Northern English, Scots lowlanders and Ulster-Scots (later called the Scotch-Irish) who settled in Appalachia and the Piedmont in the 18th century, and from parts of southern England such as East Anglia, Kent and the West Country in the 17th century,^[71] and the many African slaves who were part of the Southern economy. African-American descendants of the slaves brought into the South comprise the United States' second-largest racial minority, accounting for 12.1 percent of the total population according to the 2000 census. Despite Jim Crow era outflow to the North, the majority of the black population remains concentrated in the Southern states, and has heavily contributed to the cultural blend (the charismatic brand of Christianity, foods, art, music (see spiritual, blues, jazz and rock and roll) that characterize Southern culture today.

The South has been seen largely as a stronghold of Protestant Christianity. Although the traditional Southerner was Anglican, or more accurately Episcopalian, the predominant denominations in the South are now Baptists (especially the Southern Baptist Convention), followed by Methodists, with other denominations found throughout the region. Roman Catholics historically were concentrated in Louisiana and Hispanic areas such as South Texas and South Florida and along the Gulf Coast. The great majority of black Southerners are Baptist or Methodist.^[72] Statistics show that Southern states have the highest religious attendance figures in the nation. The pervasiveness of religion in the region influences the conservative political philosophy which most Southerners maintain.

Health

Eight Southern states have obesity rates over 30% of the population, the highest in the country: Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Rates for hypertension and diabetes for these states are also the highest in the nation.^[73] A study reported that six Southern states have the worse incidence of sleep disturbances in the nation, attributing the disturbances to high rates of obesity and smoking.^[74]

The South also has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, with states like Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas having rates exceeding 60 per 1,000 teens.^[75]

Recent politics

Main article: Politics of the Southern United States

A rally against school integration in 1959.

In the first decades after Reconstruction, when white Democrats regained power in the state legislatures, they began to make voter registration more complicated, to reduce black voting. With a combination of intimidation, fraud and violence by paramilitary groups, they turned Republicans out of office and suppressed black voting. From 1890 to 1908, ten of eleven states ratified new constitutions or amendments that effectively disfranchised most black voters and many poor white voters. This disfranchisement persisted for six decades into the 20th century, depriving blacks and poor whites of all political representation. Because they could not vote, they could not sit on juries. They had no one to represent their interests, resulting in state legislatures consistently underfunding programs and services, such as schools, for blacks and poor whites.^[76]

As the Supreme Court began to find such disfranchisement provisions unconstitutional, Southern legislatures quickly passed other measures to keep blacks disfranchised, even after suffrage was extended more widely to poor whites. Because white Democrats controlled all the seats apportioned to their states, they had outsize power in Congress and filibustered or defeated efforts by others to pass legislation against lynching, for example. The region became known as the Solid South. The Republicans controlled parts of the Appalachian Mountains and competed for power in the Border States. From the late 1870s to the 1960s, it was rare for a state or national Southern politician to be Republican.^[77]

Civil Rights activists after being beaten by a mob in Montgomery, Alabama, 1961

Increasing support for civil rights legislation by the national Democratic Party beginning in 1948 caused segregationist Southern Democrats to nominate J. Strom Thurmond on a third-party "Dixiecrat" ticket in 1948. These Dixicrats returned to the party by 1950, but Southern Democrats held off Republican inroads in the suburbs by arguing that only they could defend the region from the onslaught of northern liberals and the civil rights movement. In response to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, 101 Southern congressmen (19 senators, 82 House members of which 99 were Southern Democrats and 2 were Republicans) in 1956 denounced the Brown decisions as a "clear abuse of judicial power [that] climaxes a trend in the federal judiciary undertaking to legislate in derogation of the authority of Congress and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the states and the people." The manifesto lauded "those states which have declared the intention to resist enforced integration by any lawful means." It was signed by all Southern senators except Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, and Tennessee senators Albert Gore, Sr. and Estes Kefauver. Virginia closed schools in Warren County, Prince Edward County, Charlottesville, and Norfolk rather than integrate, but no other state followed suit. Democratic governors Orval Faubus of Arkansas, Ross Barnett of Mississippi, Lester Maddox of Georgia, and, especially, George Wallace of Alabama resisted integration and appealed to a rural and blue-collar electorate.^[78]

President Johnson signs the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The northern Democrats' support of civil rights issues culminated when Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which ended legal segregation and provided federal enforcement of voting rights for blacks. In the presidential election of 1964, Barry Goldwater's only electoral victories outside his home state of Arizona were in the states of the Deep South where few blacks could vote before the 1965 Voting Rights Act.^[79]

Pockets of resistance to integration in public places broke out in violence during the 1960s by the shadowy Ku Klux Klan, which caused a backlash among moderates.^[80] Major resistance to school busing extending into the 1970s.^[81]

National Republicans such as Richard Nixon began to develop their Southern strategy to attract conservative white Southerners, especially the middle class and suburban voters, in addition to traditional GOP pockets (such as Appalachia) and migrants from the North. The transition to a Republican stronghold in the South took decades. First, the states started voting Republican in presidential elections, except for native sons Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Then the states began electing Republican senators and finally governors. Georgia was the last state to do so, with Sonny Perdue taking the governorship in 2002.^[82] In addition to its middle class and business base, Republicans cultivated the religious right and attracted strong majorities from the evangelical or Fundamentalist vote, mostly Southern Baptists, which had not been a distinct political force prior to 1980.^[83]

Other politicians and political movements

The South has produced various nationally-known politicians and political movements.

In 1948, a group of Democratic congressmen, led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, split from the Democrats in reaction to an anti-segregation speech given by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. They founded the States Rights Democratic or Dixiecrat Party. During that year's Presidential election, the party ran Thurmond as its candidate, but he was unsuccessful.^{[citation needed]}

In the 1968 Presidential election, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace ran for President on the American Independent Party ticket. Wallace ran a "law and order" campaign similar to that of Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. Nixon's Southern Strategy of gaining electoral votes downplayed race issues and focused on culturally conservative values, such as family issues, patriotism, and cultural issues that appealed to Southern Baptists.

In 1994, another Southern politician, Newt Gingrich, ushered in 12 years of GOP control of the House.^{[citation needed]} Gingrich became Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in 1995 and served until his resignation in 1999. Tom DeLay was the most powerful Republican leader in Congress^{[citation needed]} until he was indicted under criminal charges in 2005 and was forced to step aside by Republican rules.^{[citation needed]} Apart from Bob Dole of Kansas (1985–96), the recent Republican Senate leaders have been Southerners: Howard Baker (1981–85) of Tennessee, Trent Lott (1996–2003) of Mississippi, Bill Frist (2003–2006) of Tennessee, and Mitch McConnell (2007–present) of Kentucky.

The Republicans candidates for President have won the South in elections since 1972, except for 1976. However, the region is not entirely monolithic, and every successful Democratic candidate since 1976 has claimed at least three Southern states.

Race relations

Main article: Racism in the United States

Native Americans

Native Americans had lived in the south for nearly 12,000 years. They were defeated by settlers in a series of wars ending in the War of 1812 and the Seminole Wars, and most were removed west to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma and Kansas). However large numbers of Native Americans managed to stay behind by blending into the surrounding society. This was especially true of the wives of Euro-American merchants and miners.

Civil rights

Racial segregation was commonplace in the South until the 1960s

The South witnessed two major events in the lives of 20th century African Americans: the Great Migration and the American Civil Rights Movement.

The Great Migration began during World War I, hitting its high point during World War II. During this migration, blacks left the South to find work in Northern factories and other sectors of the economy.^[84]

The migration also empowered the growing Civil Rights Movement. While the movement existed in all parts of the United States, its focus was against disfranchisement and the Jim Crow laws in the South. Most of the major events in the movement occurred in the South, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the March on Selma, Alabama, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.. In addition, some of the most important writings to come out of the movement were written in the South, such as King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Most of the civil rights landmarks can be found around the South. The Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta includes a museum that chronicles the American Civil Rights Movement as well as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s boyhood home on Auburn Avenue. Additionally, Ebenezer Baptist Church is located in the Sweet Auburn district as is the King Center, location of Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King's gravesites.

As a result of the Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow laws across the South were dropped. A second migration appears to be underway, with African Americans from the North moving to the South in record numbers.^[85] While race relations are still a contentious issue in the South, the region surpasses the rest of the country in many areas of integration and racial equality. According to 2003 report by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Virginia Beach, Charlotte, Nashville-Davidson, and Jacksonville were the four most integrated of the nation's fifty largest cities, with Memphis at number six.^[86] Southern states tend to have a low disparity in incarceration rates between blacks and whites relative to the rest of the country.^[87]

Symbolism

While this "Confederate Flag" pattern is the one most often thought of as the "Confederate Flag" today, it was actually just one of many used by the Confederate armed forces. Variations of this design served as the Battle Flag of the Armies of Northern Virginia and Tennessee, and as the Confederate Naval Jack.

Some Southerners use the Confederate flag to identify themselves with the South, states' rights and Southern tradition. Groups, such as the League of the South, promote secession from the United States, citing a desire to protect and defend Southern heritage.^[88]

Other symbols of the Antebellum South include the Bonnie Blue Flag, magnolia trees, and the song "Dixie".

Major metropolitan areas

The South was heavily rural as late as the 1940s, but now the population is increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas, including central cities and their suburbs.

Rank	Metropolitan Statistical Area	State(s)	Population [89]
1	Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington	TX	6,371,773
2	Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown	TX	5,946,800
3	Washington–Arlington–Alexandria	DC–VA– MD–WV	5,582,170
4	Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach	FL	5,564,635
5	Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta	GA	5,268,860
6	Tampa–St. Petersburg–Clearwater	FL	2,783,243
7	Baltimore–Towson	MD	2,710,489
8	San Antonio	TX	2,142,508
9	Orlando-Kissimmee	FL	2,134,411
10	Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky	OH-IN-KY	2,130,151
11	Charlotte–Gastonia–Concord	NC–SC	1,758,038
12	Austin–Round Rock-San Marcos	TX	1,716,289
13	Virginia Beach–Norfolk–Newport News	VA–NC	1,671,683
14	Nashville-Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin	TN	1,589,934
15	Jacksonville	FL	1,345,596
16	Memphis	TN–MS–AR	1,316,100
17	Louisville–Jefferson County	KY–IN	1,307,647
18	Richmond	VA	1,258,251
19	Oklahoma City	OK	1,252,987
20	New Orleans–Metairie–Kenner	LA	1,167,764
21	Raleigh–Cary	NC	1,130,490
22	Birmingham–Hoover	AL	1,128,047
23	Tulsa	OK	937,478
24	Baton Rouge	LA	802,484
25	El Paso	TX	800,647

See also

• Bible Belt
• Black Belt (U.S. region)
• Confederate States of America
• Cuisine of the Southern United States
• Culture of honor (Southern United States)
• Deep South
• Dixie
• List of plantations in the United States
• New South
• Old South
• Southern American English
• Southern art
• Southern hospitality
• Southern literature

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} U.S. Census Bureau: Official Map.
2. ^ Bethune, Lawrence E. "Scots to Colonial North Carolina Before 1775". Lawrence E. Bethune's M.U.S.I.C.s Project. http://www.dalhousielodge.org/Thesis/scotstonc.htm. 
3. ^ "Percent below poverty level (most recent) by state". StateMaster.com. 2004. http://www.statemaster.com/graph/eco_per_bel_pov_lev-economy-percent-below-poverty-level. 
4. ^ ^{a b} Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts, "Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South," Social Forces Volume 88, Number 3, (March 2010): 1083–1101
5. ^ ^{a b} Tom W. Rice, William P. McLean and Amy J. Larsen, "Southern Distinctiveness over Time: 1972–2000," American Review of Politics 23 (Fall 2002):193–220
6. ^ Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts, "Defining Dixie: A State-Level Measure of the Modern Political South", American Review of Politics 25 (Spring 2004):25–39
7. ^ John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (Louisiana State U. P., 1982) p. 3
8. ^ ^{a b c} Ancestry of the Population by State: 1980 – Table 3
9. ^ ^{a b} Table 3a. Persons Who Reported a Single Ancestry Group for Regions, Divisions and States: 1980
10. ^ ^{a b} Table 1. Type of Ancestry Response for Regions, Divisions and States: 1980
11. ^ Wilson, Charles Reagan. Ferris, William R. Encyclopedia of Southern culture, page 556
12. ^ Marc Egnal, Divergent paths: how culture and institutions have shaped North American growth (1996) p 170
13. ^ Rebecca Mark and Robert C. Vaughan, The South (2004) p. 147
14. ^ Cooper and Knotts, "Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South," p. 1084
15. ^ Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts, eds. The New Politics of North Carolina (2008)
16. ^ Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (2005) p. 46
17. ^ Michael Hirsh (April 25, 2008). "How the South Won (This) Civil War", Newsweek, accessed 2008-11-22
18. ^ Howard W. Odum, Southern regions of the United States (1936)
19. ^ Rebecca Mark, and Rob Vaughan, The South: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures (2004)
20. ^ http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-01.pdf
21. ^ Mary Johnston, Pioneers of the Old South, A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings (1918)
22. ^ James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom : An Interpretation of the Old South (1998)
23. ^ C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951)
24. ^ George Brown Tindall, The Disruption Of The Solid South (1972)
25. ^ Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell, eds. (2006)
26. ^ Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers
27. ^ Neal R. Peirce, The Deep South States of America;: People, politics, and power in the seven Deep South States (1974)
28. ^ "United States: The Upper South." Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
29. ^ http://www.census.gov/geo/www/us_regdiv.pdf
30. ^ "GOP eyes potential for picking up U.S. House seats in Mid-South", Memphis Commercial Appeal
31. ^ GAO Report: "resource allocations to medical centers in the Mid South"
32. ^ The Mid-South: a regional profile of social, economic and health characteristics
33. ^ The Tchula period in the mid-South and lower Mississippi Valley
34. ^ see Conclusion: The Civil War in West Virginia
35. ^ Britton, Kerry O.; Orr, David; Sun, Jianghua (2002). "Kudzu". In Van Driesche, R.. Biological Control of Invasive Plants in the Eastern United States. USDA Forest Service. FHTET-2002-04. http://www.invasive.org/eastern/biocontrol/25Kudzu.html. Retrieved May 3, 2008. 
36. ^ ^{a b c} Prentice, Guy. "Native american archeology and culture history". http://www.nps.gov/history/seac/SoutheastChronicles/NISI/NISI%20Cultural%20Overview.htm. Retrieved February 11, 2008. 
37. ^ Cook, Noble David. Born To Die, pp. 1–11.
38. ^ "Indentured Servitude in Colonial America"
39. ^ Isaac, Rhys (1982). The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790. University of North Carolina Press. pp. 22–23. ISBN 0-8078-4814-X. 
40. ^ David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.361–368
41. ^ Henry Lumpkin, From Savannah to Yorktown: The American Revolution in the South (2000)
42. ^ Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877, (Hill and Wang, 1994), p. 73
43. ^ Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877, p. 81
44. ^ "The Peculiar Institution of American Slavery". http://home.earthlink.net/~gfeldmeth/lec.slavery.html. Retrieved June 11, 2008. 
45. ^ Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp.5 and 215
46. ^ "Nineteenth Century Death Tolls: American Civil War". http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wars19c.htm#ACW. Retrieved August 22, 2006. 
47. ^ American Civil War, Those Confederate States^{[dead link]}
48. ^ "Toward a social history of the American Civil War: exploratory essays". Maris Vinovskis (1990). Cambridge University Press. p.7.
49. ^ "Chapter 3: AN EASY ADJUSTMENT TO THE POST WAR NATION: PENSACOLA BETWEEN 1865 AND 1870". fsu.edu. December 4, 2010. http://etd.lib.fsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04102005-230201/unrestricted/J_ThesisChapter3.pdf. 
50. ^ Carpetbaggers^{[dead link]}
51. ^ Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, New York: Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2002, pp.70–75
52. ^ Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol.17, 2000,, p. 27, accessed 2008-03-10
53. ^ John Solomon Otto, The Final Frontiers, 1880–1930: Settling the Southern Bottomlands, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999
54. ^ "Italians in Mississippi", Mississippi History Now, accessed 2007-11-28
55. ^ Vivian Wong, "Somewhere Between White and Black: The Chinese in Mississippi", Organization of American Historians Magazine of History^{[dead link]}, accessed 2007-11-15
56. ^ Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; 15th Anniversary Edition (pbk), 2007, p.24
57. ^ Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol.17, 2000,, pp.12–13, accessed 2008-03-10
58. ^ Glenn Feldman, The Disfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004
59. ^ Dr. Michael McDonald, US Elections Project: Alabama Redistricting Summary, George Mason University^{[dead link]}, accessed April 6, 2008 Archived October 17, 2007 at the Wayback Machine^{[dead link]}
60. ^ "Strikes", Texas Handbook On-Line, accessed 2008-04-06
61. ^ Jackie McElhaney and Michael V. Hazel, "Dallas", Handbook of Texas Online, accessed 2008-04-06
62. ^ David G. McComb, "Urbanization", Handbook of Texas Online, accessed 2008-04-06
63. ^ "First Measured Century: Interview: James Gregory". http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/gregory.htm. Retrieved August 22, 2006. 
64. ^ Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave , Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 2–7
65. ^ John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.
66. ^ "State jobless rate below US average". The Decatur Daily. August 19, 2005. http://www.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/050819/jobless.shtml. Retrieved February 12, 2007. 
67. ^ Milwaukee now fourth poorest city in nation JSOnline, September 28, 2010
68. ^ America’s Poorest States – 24/7 Wall St
69. ^ Matus, Ron, (March 6, 2005). "Schools still rank near the bottom". St. Petersburg Times. http://www.sptimes.com/2005/03/06/State/Schools_still_rank_ne.shtml. Retrieved September 5, 2007. 
70. ^ US Department of Education retrieved 2008-06-14
71. ^ David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.633–639
72. ^ Samuel S. Hill, Charles H. Lippy, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds. Encyclopedia of Religion in the South (2005)
73. ^ Baird, Joel Banner (June 30, 2010). "Study:Vermont among least obese states". Burlington, Vermont: Burlington Free Press. pp. 1A, 4A. http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20100630/NEWS02/100629009/-1/EVENT08/Study-Vermont-among-least-obese-states. ^{[dead link]}
74. ^ [1]
75. ^ "State Disparities in Teenage Birth Rates in the United States". Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. October 2010. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db46.pdf. 
76. ^ Michael Perman, Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South (2009)
77. ^ V. O. Key and Alexander Heard, Southern Politics State and Nation (1984)
78. ^ Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980 (1995) pp 455–70
79. ^ Bernard Cosman, Five States for Goldwater Continuity and Change in Southern Presidential voting Patterns (1966)
80. ^ David M. Chalmers, Backfire: how the Ku Klux Klan helped the civil rights movement (2003)
81. ^ Bartley, The New South pp 408–11
82. ^ Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (2003)
83. ^ William C. Martin, With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (2005)
84. ^ Katzman, 1996
85. ^ "Tracking New Trends in Race Migration". News & Notes. National Public Radio. March 14, 2006. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5261746. Retrieved April 4, 2008. 
86. ^ "Study shows Memphis among most integrated cities". Memphis Business Journal. January 13, 2003. http://memphis.bizjournals.com/memphis/stories/2003/01/13/daily9.html. 
87. ^ Mauer, Marc; Ryan S. King (July 2007). "Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration By Race and Ethnicity" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: The Sentencing Project. p. 16. http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_stateratesofincbyraceandethnicity.pdf. Retrieved April 20, 2010.  (Report.)
88. ^ "League of the South Core Beliefs Statement". League of the South. June 1994. http://dixienet.org/New%20Site/corebeliefs.shtml. Retrieved June 12, 2008. 
89. ^ "Population and Housing Occupancy Status: 2010 – United States – Metropolitan Statistical Area; and for Puerto Rico more information 2010 Census National Summary File of Redistricting Data.". 2010 United States Census. United States Census Bureau, Population Division.. http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=DEC_10_NSRD_GCTPL2.US24PR&prodType=table. Retrieved April 14, 2011. 

References

• Ayers, Edward L. What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (2005)
• Cash, Wilbur J. The Mind of the South (1941),
• Cooper, Christopher A. and H. Gibbs Knotts, eds. The New Politics of North Carolina (U. of North Carolina Press, 2008) ISBN 978-0-8078-5876-9
• Flynt, J. Wayne Dixie's Forgotten People: The South's Poor Whites (1979). deals with 20th century.
• David M. Katzman. "Black Migration". The Reader's Companion to American History. Houghton Mifflin Company. 
• James Grossman (1996). "Chicago and the 'Great Migration'". Illinois History Teacher 3 (2). http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/1996/iht329633.html. 
• McWhiney, Grady. In Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (1988)
• John O. Allen and Clayton E. Jewett (2004). Slavery in the South: A State-by-State History. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-32019-5. 
• Rayford Logan (1997). The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80758-0. 
• William B. Hesseltine (1936). A History of the South, 1607–1936. Prentice-Hall. 
• Mark, Rebecca, and Rob Vaughan. The South: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures (2004)
• Robert W. Twyman. and David C. Roller, ed., ed. (1979). Encyclopedia of Southern History. LSU Press. ISBN 0-8071-0575-9. 
• Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, ed., ed. (1989). Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-1823-2. 

Further reading

• Edward L. Ayers (1993). The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-508548-5. 
• Monroe Lee Billington (1975). The Political South in the 20th Century. Scribner. ISBN 0-684-13983-9. 
• Earl Black and Merle Black (2002). The Rise of Southern Republicans. Belknap press. ISBN 0-674-01248-8. 
• W. J. Cash (1935). The Mind of the South. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-73647-6. 
• Pete Daniel (2000). Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-4848-4. 
• Davis, Donald, and Mark R. Stoll. Southern United States: An Environmental History (2006)
• Edwards, Laura F. “Southern History as U.S. History,” Journal of Southern History, 75 (Aug. 2009), 533–64.
• Michael Kreyling (1998). Inventing Southern Literature. University Press of Mississippi. p. 66. ISBN 1-57806-045-1. 
• Heather A. Haveman (2004). "Antebellum literary culture and the evolution of American magazines" (—^{Scholar search}). Poetics 32: 5–28. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2003.12.002. http://www.columbia.edu/~hah15/H_2004_Poetics.pdf. ^{[dead link]}
• Eugene D. Genovese (1976). Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books. p. 41. ISBN 0-394-71652-3. 
• Morris, Christopher, “A More Southern Environmental History”, Journal of Southern History, 75 (Aug. 2009), 581–98.
• Howard N. Rabinowitz (September 1976). "From Exclusion to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865–1890". Journal of American History 43: 325–50. 
• Nicol C. Rae (1994). Southern Democrats. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-508709-7. 
• Jeffrey A. Raffel (1998). Historical Dictionary of School Segregation and Desegregation: The American Experience. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29502-6. 
• * Virts, Nancy, “Change in the Plantation System: American South, 1910–1945,” Explorations in Economic History, 43 (Jan. 2006), 153–76.
• Wells, Jonathan Daniel. "The Southern Middle Class," Journal of Southern History, Volume: 75#3 2009. pp 651+.
• C. Vann Woodward (1955). The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514690-5. 
• Gavin Wright (1996). Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War. LSU Press. ISBN 0-8071-2098-7. 

External links

• DocSouth: Documenting the American South — multimedia collections from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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