the South

Less cumbersome and specific than ‘non-aligned’, yet carrying the same aspiration of post-colonial states to dissociate themselves from the East-West division between the United States and the USSR, ‘the South’ was adopted from the 1960s as a shorthand for all less industrialized countries, especially when acting together. See also North, Third World.

— Charles Jones

South, the
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

This article or section has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page. It needs additional references or sources for verification. Tagged since April 2008. It may be too long. Some content may need to be summarized or split. Tagged since April 2008.

Modern definition The states in dark red are almost always included in modern day definitions of the South, while those in medium red are usually included. Some sources classify Maryland and Missouri as Southern, with Delaware only rarely grouped within the region. West Virginia is often considered Southern, because it was once part of Virginia.^[1][2][3]

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 image below for post-1863 Virginia and West Virginia borders.) While Oklahoma was aligned with and controlled by the Confederacy, it is not shaded because at the time, the region was Indian Territory, and thus not a state.

The South is one of four Census Bureau Regions.

The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, Down South, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive region in the southeastern and south-central United States. Because of the region's unique cultural and historic heritage, including Native Americans; early European settlements of English, Scots-Irish, Scottish, French, and German heritage^[4]; importation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans; growth of a large proportion of African Americans in the population, reliance on slave labor, and legacy of the Confederacy after the American Civil War, the South developed its own customs, literature, musical styles, and varied cuisines, that have profoundly shaped traditional American culture.

In the last few decades, the South has become more industrialized and urban, attracting numerous internal and international migrants. The American South is among the fastest-growing areas in the United States. Despite economic growth, the South still has persistent poverty, and every Southern state with the exceptions of Virginia and Florida has a higher poverty rate than the American average.^[5] Poverty is especially prevalent in rural areas.

Contents 1 Geography 2 History 2.1 European colonization 2.2 American Revolution 2.3 Antebellum years 2.4 Civil War 2.5 Reconstruction and Jim Crow 2.6 20th century - Industrialization and Great Migration 2.7 Growth and poverty 3 Culture 4 Politics 4.1 Presidential history 4.2 Other politicians and political movements 5 Race relations 5.1 History 5.2 Civil Rights 6 Symbolism 7 Largest cities in the southern U.S. 8 Major metropolitan areas in the Southern U.S. 9 See also 10 Notes 11 References 11.1 External sources 12 Further reading 13 External links

Geography

As defined by the United States Census Bureau,^[6] the Southern region of the United States includes sixteen states and the District of Columbia (with a total 2006 estimated population of 109,083,752.) Thirty-six percent of all U.S. residents lived in the South, the nation's most populous region. The Census Bureau defined three smaller units, or divisions:

• The South Atlantic States: Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, D.C., 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: usually the original Southern colonies: Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.^[7]
• The New South: usually including the South Atlantic States.
• The Solid South: region controlled by the U.S. Democratic Party from 1877 to 1964. Includes at least all the 11 former Confederate States.
• 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.
• Southeastern United States: usually including the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida
• 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).
• The Gulf South: various definitions, usually including Gulf coasts of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama.
• The Upper South: Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.^[8]
• Dixie: various definitions, but most commonly associated with the 11 states of the Old Confederacy.
• The Mid-South: also known as the South Central United States.
• 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 such important pro-Confederate regions that they were represented by stars on the Confederate battle flag.^{[citation needed]} West Virginia was formed by western Virginians who opposed the secession of their state from the Union.

The popular definition of the "South" is more informal and is generally associated with those 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.

Biologically, the South is a vast, diverse region, having numerous climatic zones, including temperate, sub-tropical, tropical, and arid – though the South is generally regarded as being hot and humid, with long summers and short mild winters, being significantly warmer than the regions to its north (and generally exhibiting the nation's highest heat indices). Many crops grow easily in its soils and can be grown without frost for at least six months of the year. Some parts of the South, particularly the Southeast, have landscapes characterized by the presence of live oaks, magnolia trees, yellow jessamine vines, Spanish moss, cabbage palms and flowering dogwoods. Another common environment is the bayous and swampland of the Gulf Coast, especially in Louisiana and Texas. The South is a victim of kudzu, an invasive fast-growing vine which covers large amounts of land and kills indigenous plant life. Kudzu is a particularly big problem in the piedmont regions of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.^[9]

History

Main article: History of the Southern United States

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.^[10] 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.^[10]

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.^[10] 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, many of whom still reside in the South.

European colonization

The predominant culture of the South was rooted in the settlement of the region by British colonists. In the seventeenth century, most voluntary immigrants were of English origins who settled chiefly along the coastal regions of the Eastern seaboard. The majority of early British 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.^[11]

The French and Spanish established colonies in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. The Spanish colonized Florida in the 16th century, with their communities reaching a peak in the late 17th century. In the British and French colonies, most immigrants arrived after 1700. They cleared land, built houses and outbuildings, and worked on the large plantations that dominated export agriculture. Many were involved in the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco, the first cash crop of Virginia. With a decrease in the number of British willing to go to the colonies in the eighteenth century, planters began importing more enslaved Africans, who became the predominant labor force on the plantations. 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.^[12]

Also in the seventeenth century, colonists started importing African laborers. In the coastal and other settlements, early workers lived closely together in a multiracial society. Europeans married and made unions with Africans and Native Americans. The colonies gradually passed laws that hardened early conditions of indenture into lifelong racial slavery attached to African descent. Africans contributed to the economy of rice and indigo cultivation with their skilled knowledge, technology and labor, as well as to all the commodity crops; and to every aspect of culture (food, music, stories and religion).

Rice cultivation in South Carolina became another major commodity crop. Some historians have argued that slaves from the lowlands of western Africa, where rice was a basic crop, provided key skills, knowledge and technology for irrigation and construction of earthworks to support rice cultivation. The early methods and tools used in South Carolina were congruent with those in Africa. British immigrants would have had little or no familiarity with the complex process of growing rice in fields flooded by irrigation works.^[13] Africans were instrumental in the development of major earthworks for cultivating these commodities, as well as in the knowledge of technology and techniques for processing. The earthworks included extensive, elaborate systems of dams and irrigation for rice.

In the mid- to late-18th century, large groups of Scots and Ulster-Scots (later called the Scots-Irish) immigrated and settled in the back country of Appalachia and the Piedmont. They were the largest group of immigrants from the British Isles before the American Revolution.^[14] In a census taken in 2000 of Americans and their self-reported ancestries, areas where people reported 'American' ancestry were the places where, historically, many Scottish, Scotch-Irish and English Borderer Protestants settled in America: the interior as well as some of the coastal areas of the South, and especially the Appalachian region. The population with some Scots and Scots-Irish ancestry may number 47 million, as most people have multiple heritages, some of which they may not know.^[15]

The early colonists, especially the Scots-Irish in the back-country, engaged in warfare, trade, and cultural exchanges. Those living in the backcountry were more likely to join with 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 (1795) and the University of Georgia (1785).

American Revolution

The American Revolution provided a shock to slavery in the South. Tens of 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 simply escaped. Estimates are that five thousand slaves escaped from the Chesapeake Bay area, and thirteen thousand from South Carolina reached the British. "The extent of the loss to the slave owners in the lower South is indicated by the sharp decline between 1770 and 1790 in the proportion of population made up of black people (almost all of whom were slaves): from 60.5 percent to 43.8 percent in South Carolina and from 45.2 percent to 36.1 percent in Georgia."^[16]

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. 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.^[17]

Antebellum years

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.^[18]

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.^[19]

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. Numerous Irish immigrants flooded New Orleans, so much so that one of the sections of the city became 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.

Tennessee was the last state to secede from the union, and it was the first to rejoin after the war.

Civil War

By 1856, the South was losing political power to the more populated North and was locked in a series of constitutional and political battles with the North regarding states' rights and the status of slavery in the territories. President James K. Polk imposed a low-tariff regime on the country (Walker Tariff of 1846), which angered Pennsylvania industrialists, and blocked proposed federal funding of national roads and port improvements. Once the North came to power in 1861, many Southerners felt it was time to secede from the union.

Seven cotton states decided on secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 (often known as the pre-Sumter Seven). They formed the Confederate States of America. In early 1861, they were joined by four more states immediately following the firing on Fort Sumter (splinter governments from two more states, Missouri and Kentucky, would join later that year but were unable to fully participate). The United States government refused to recognize the seceding states. It continued to operate several federal military installations in the South, including Fort Sumter, which the Confederacy captured in April 1861 at the Battle of Fort Sumter, in the port of Charleston. That act triggered the Civil War. In the four years of war which followed, the South found itself as the primary battleground, with all but two of the major battles taking place on Southern soil. The Confederacy retained a low tariff regime for European imports but imposed a new tax on all imports from the North. The Union blockade stopped most commerce from entering the South, so the Confederate taxes hardly mattered. 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 Union (the name often used in referring to the United States of America during this time) eventually defeated the Confederate States of America (the formal name of the southern American states during the Civil War). The South suffered much more than the North overall, primarily because the war was fought almost entirely in the South. The economic loss and civilian toll has never been fully realized, although 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,^[20] out of a total white Southern population at the time of around 5.5 million.^[21] Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6% in the North and an extraordinary 18% in the South.^[22] However, Northern military casualties exceeded Southern casualties in absolute numbers.

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.

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 ability 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; yet 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.^[23]

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 Klan was defeated 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.^[24] 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 made white Democrats work harder to prevent both groups from voting.^[25]

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. With many freedmen wanting to work on their own account, planters needed additional labor, especially as 90% of the Mississippi Delta was yet to be cleared and developed. They encouraged immigration by Chinese and Italian laborers into the Mississippi Delta, for instance. 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.^[26] The Chinese became merchants and established stores in small towns throughout the Delta, establishing a place between white and black.^[27]

Migrations continued in the late 19th and early 20th century, among both blacks and whites. In the last two decades, 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; others heading to northern industrial cities after 1900. Between 1880 and 1910, the loss of whites totaled 1,243,000.^[28] Five million more left between 1940 and 1970.

From 1890 to 1908, ten of the eleven 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.^[29][30] 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.

Despite discrimination, many blacks became property owners in areas that were still developing. For instance, ninety percent 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.^[31]

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. 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.^[32]

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.

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."^[33]

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.^[34] 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.^[35]

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.

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.^[36] 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.

In the last two generations, the South has changed dramatically. In recent decades it has seen a boom in its service economy, manufacturing base, high technology industries, and the financial sector. Examples of this include the surge in tourism in Florida and along the Gulf Coast; numerous new automobile production plants such as Mercedes-Benz in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Hyundai in Montgomery, Alabama; the BMW production plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina; the GM manufacturing plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee; and the Nissan North American headquarters in Franklin, Tennessee; the two largest research parks in the country: Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (the world's largest) and the Cummings Research Park in Huntsville, Alabama (the world's fourth largest); and the corporate headquarters of major banking corporations Bank of America and Wachovia in Charlotte; Regions Financial Corporation, AmSouth Bancorporation, and BBVA Compass in Birmingham; SunTrust Banks and the district headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta; and BB&T in Winston-Salem; and several Atlanta-based corporate headquarters and 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 boast of some of the lowest unemployment rates in the United States.^[37]

Growth and poverty

The South's early cash crops of tobacco, indigo and rice created enormous wealth for many planters in the coastal areas. While city development was limited, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah and others developed a sophisticated society. The wealthiest planters sent their sons to college in England and later to the best schools in the South, and sometimes the North. They imported furniture and furnishings from Europe, as well as employing the best colonial craftsmen. For many it was a mostly rural society, but by the 19th century, some families moved back and forth between plantations and town houses. The planter class controlled the state legislatures and kept taxes low. Their wealth went mostly for private purposes. They invested in no system of public education and little infrastructure.

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.^[38] 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.^[39]

After the Civil War, nearly the entire economic infrastructure of the region was in ruins. As agriculture had been the foundation of the Southern economy, disruption of slavery by the Civil War meant that planters had to learn to deal with free labor, a challenge as freedmen wanted most to take care of their own crops and land. Additionally, since there were few industrial businesses located in the south, there were not many other possible sources of income. Textile mills in the Piedmont of Georgia rebuilt rapidly, but it was not until the 20th century that the region dominated the industry. Some areas rapidly rebuilt—Atlanta, for example—through railroads.

After World War II, with the development of the Interstate Highway System, household air conditioning and later, passage of civil rights bills, the South was successful in attracting industry and business from other parts of the country. Industry from the Rust Belt region of the Northeast and the Great Lakes moved into the region because of lower labor costs and less unionization. Poverty rates and unemployment declined as a result of new job growth. Federal programs such as the Appalachian Regional Commission also contributed to economic growth.

While the Southern United States has advanced considerably since World War II, significant poverty still persists in the more isolated and rural areas. Areas like the Black Belt, the eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia areas in Appalachia, the Mexican border area along the Rio Grande in Texas, and the Deltas of Mississippi and Arkansas suffer the most poverty in the South today.

Culture

Main article: Culture of the Southern United States

The predominant culture of the South has its origins with the settlement of the region by British colonists in the 17th century, large groups of Scots and Ulster-Scots (later called the Scots-Irish) who settled in Appalachia and the Piedmont in the 18th century, 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 (see Great Migration (African American)) the majority of the black population remains concentrated in the southern states, and have heavily contributed to the cultural blend (the charismatic brand of Christianity, foods, art, music [see "Spiritual (music)", blues, jazz and rock and roll]) that characterize Southern culture today.

Politics

Main article: Politics of the Southern United States

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.

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.

Increasing support for civil rights legislation by the national Democratic Party beginning in the 1940s caused conservative Southern Democrats to take notice. Until the passage of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, conservative Southern Democrats ("Dixiecrats") argued 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, southern legislators developed the Southern Manifesto. It was issued in March 1956, by 101 southern congressmen (19 senators, 82 House members). It 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 blue-collar electorate.

The Democratic Party's national 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. Some Republicans began to develop their Southern strategy to attract conservative white Southerners. Southern Democrats took notice that 1964 Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act. In the presidential election of 1964, Goldwater's only electoral victories outside his home state of Arizona were in the states of the Deep South.

The transition to a Republican stronghold in the South took decades. First, the states started voting Republican in presidential elections, except for favorite 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. In addition to the middle class and business base, Republicans cultivated the religious right and attracted strong majorities from the evangelical Christian vote, which had not been a distinct political demographic prior to 1980.

The region's resistance to giving African Americans basic citizens' rights of voting and integration in public places broke out in renewed violence and murders during the 1960s, and major resistance to desegregation extending into the 1970s.

The political realignment of conservatives aligning with the Republicans has created partisan reasons for challenging voter registration and elections. African Americans in the South mostly have strongly supported Democratic Party candidates, since this is the party that helped secure their active citizenship.

Presidential history

The South has produced the first winning presidential candidates for all but two major political parties in the history of the United States. The following is a list of presidents who represent their party's first candidate to reach the country's highest office:

• Democratic-Republicans: Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, in 1800.
• Democrats: Andrew Jackson, of Tennessee, in 1828.
• Whigs: William Henry Harrison, of Virginia, in 1840.

The exceptions are the Federalist Party which claimed its first (and only) presidential victory with John Adams of Massachusetts in 1796, and the Republican Party whose first victory was Abraham Lincoln in 1860. While Lincoln was born in the Southern state of Kentucky, his formative years were spent in Illinois.

(Note: The first President, George Washington, of Virginia, was unaffiliated with any political party.)

Additionally, the South produced most of the U.S. Presidents prior to the Civil War. Memories of the war made it impossible for a Southerner to become President unless he either moved North (like Woodrow Wilson) or was a vice president who moved up (like Lyndon B. Johnson). In 1976, Jimmy Carter defied this trend and became the first Southerner to break the pattern since Zachary Taylor in 1848.

Two recent American Presidents, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were residents of southern states when elected president: William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton is the only one of the two who is a native southerner. Clinton was Governor of Arkansas when elected. Clinton moved to New York City following the end of his administration (1993-2001). George W. Bush was Governor of Texas when elected. George W. Bush is a native of Connecticut and moved with his family to the Permian Basin region of West Texas after World War II, while still a toddler.

George H. W. Bush was once a resident of Texas and an American Congressional Representative from Texas. He is a native of Massachusetts, but moved to the Permian Basin of West Texas after World War II. However, George H.W. Bush was a resident of Maine, since the 1970s, when elected American President in 1988, throughout his administration, 1989-93, and since. His state of origin as American President was his state of residence when elected: Officially Maine.

Other politicians and political movements

The South has produced numerous other well-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.

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. Gingrich became Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in 1995, but was forced to resign. Tom DeLay was the most powerful Republican leader in Congress until he was indicted under criminal charges in 2005. Most recent Republican Senate leaders are from the South, including Howard Baker of Tennessee, Trent Lott of Mississippi, Bill Frist of Tennessee, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Race relations

Main article: Racism in the United States

History

De Batz, 1735, watercolor paintings of southeastern and northern Indians and a non-slave African descendant child.

Native Americans, who had lived in the south for nearly 12,000 years, had an enormously complex impact on southern history and racial relations. In 1540 CE, the first racial strife was with Spainard Hernando de Soto's expedition who enslaved and murdered many New World communities. In the early 1700s, the English had enslaved nearly 800 Choctaws.^[40] After the creation of the United States, the idea of Indian removal gained momentum. However, some Native Americans chose to remain in their ancient Deep South homeland where they were subjected to racist institutions. The Choctaws describe their situation in 1849, "we have had our habitations torn down and burned, our fences destroyed, cattle turned into our fields and we ourselves have been scourged, manacled, fettered and otherwise personally abused, until by such treatment some of our best men have died."^[41] Joseph B. Cobb, who moved to Mississippi from Georgia, described Choctaws as having "no nobility or virtue at all, and in some respect he found blacks, especially native Africans, more interesting and admirable, the red man's superior in every way. The Choctaw and Chickasaw, the tribes he knew best, were beneath contempt, that is, even worse than black slaves."^[42]

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans. Prior to the passage of the act, nearly two-thirds of Native Americans were already U.S. citizens.^[43] The earliest recorded date of Native Americans becoming U.S. citizens was in 1831 when the Mississippi Choctaw became citizens after the United States Congress ratified the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Under article XIV of that treaty, any Choctaw who elected not to move to Native American Territory could become an American citizen when he registered and if he stayed on designated lands for five years after treaty ratification. Citizenship could also be obtained by:

1. Treaty Provision (as with the Mississippi Choctaw)
2. Allotment under the Act of February 8, 1887
3. Issuance of Patent in Fee Simple
4. Adopting Habits of Civilized Life
5. Minor Children
6. Citizenship by Birth
7. Becoming Soldiers and Sailors in the U.S. Armed Forces
8. Marriage
9. Special Act of Congress.

“	Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all noncitizen Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided, That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Native American to tribal or other property.	”
—-Indian Citizenship Act of 1924

Members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma around 1877. Notice the European and African ancestry members. The Creek were originally from the Alabama region.

Before removal, some Southern Native American tribes owned black slaves. The Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw were known to have had slaves. Just as they adopted Western culture (Christianity, yeoman farming techniques, and educational institutions), they also adopted slavery.^{[citation needed]} But unlike the United States before Emancipation, African Americans (and European Americans) were allowed to become citizens of their respective Native American nations; however, it was rare for African Americans to become citizens of Native American nations. For example, a small number of "Free People of Color" lived in many Native American nations as Cherokee, Choctaw, or Creek citizens.^[44]

African Americans have a long history in the South, when they accompanied some of the earliest European settlers to the region. Beginning in the early 17th century, planters imported Africans for labor. Some were purchased as slaves; many others served terms as indentured servants and could earn their freedom. Slave traders handled transportation from Africa or the Caribbean, where large plantations had already been established. As economic conditions in England improved, there were fewer people who wanted to emigrate as indentured servants to the colonies. With the rise of tobacco as a lucrative, if labor-intensive, cash crop in the Chesapeake Bay Colony, planters needed more labor and increased their importation of enslaved Africans. Most slaves arrived in the 1700–1750 period. At the same time, the colony hardened the lines between slavery and other forms of labor, passing legislation that associated slavery with race and passed on through the mother.

Further information: History of slavery in the United States

After the American Civil War, Congress and the states passed constitutional amendments that ended slavery, and granted full citizenship and suffrage to African Americans. During the Reconstruction period that followed, African Americans saw advancements in the civil rights and political power in the South, against a background of wholesale violence and attacks on them. However, as Reconstruction ended, Southern Redeemers moved to prevent freedpeople from holding power, using fraud, voter intimidation and violence to secure majorities at the polls.

From 1890 to 1908, white Democrats in legislatures passed new disfranchising constitutions that completed provisions for making voter registration and voting more difficult. Most blacks and many poor whites were disfranchised, a condition which the state legislatures maintained for six decades into the 20th century. The leading white demagogue was Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, who proudly proclaimed in 1900, "We have done our level best [to prevent blacks from voting]... we have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it."^[45]

Without the ability to vote and no representation in government, blacks had virtually no formal recourse as white Democrats passed Jim Crow laws, creating a system of legal segregation and discrimination in all public facilities. Blacks were given separate schools (in which all students, teachers and administrators were black). Most hotels and restaurants served only whites. Movie theaters had separate seating; railroads had separate cars; buses were divided forward and rear. Neighborhoods were segregated as well. Blacks and whites did shop in the same stores, but there were separate water fountains and restrooms, and blacks were not allowed to try on clothes at the stores. Those who could not vote could not sit on juries. As some Supreme Court decisions began to strike down constitutional provisions that disfranchised blacks, the state Democratic parties began to use all-white primaries. The few black voters who managed to register were not allowed to vote in the only contest in which there was competition.^{[citation needed]}

Civil Rights

In response to this treatment, 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 racism and lack of opportunities in the South and settled in northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston, where they found work in factories and other sectors of the economy. (Katzman, 1996) However, Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the north. This migration produced a new sense of independence in the Black community and contributed to the vibrant black urban culture seen during the Harlem Renaissance.

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.^[46] 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 fify largest cities, with Memphis at number six.^[47] Southern states tend to have a low disparity in incarceration rates between blacks and whites relative to the rest of the country.^[48]

Symbolism

The "Confederate Flag", This pattern is the one most often thought of as the "Confederate Flag" today. Originally, it was used as the Battle Flag of the Army of Tennessee, and as the Confederate Naval Jack

The Battle Flag of the Confederacy has become a highly controversial image throughout the United States because of its use as a symbol of defiance by many in the South who opposed the Civil Rights Movement. Although it and other reminders of the Old South can be found on automobile bumper stickers, on tee shirts, and flown from homes, restrictions (notably on public buildings) have been imposed. As a result, groups such as the League of the South continue to promote secession from the United States, citing a desire to protect and defend the heritage of the South.^[49] On the other side of this issue are groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which believe that the League of the South is a hate group. However, many Southerners use the flag to identify themselves with the South, states' rights and Southern tradition.

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

Largest cities in the southern U.S.

Rank	City	State(s) and/or Territory	July 1, 2008 Population Estimate
1	Houston	Texas	2,242,193
2	San Antonio	Texas	1,351,305
3	Dallas	Texas	1,279,910
4	Jacksonville	Florida	807,815
5	Austin	Texas	757,688
6	Fort Worth	Texas	703,073
7	Charlotte	North Carolina	687,456
8	Memphis	Tennessee	671,588
9	El Paso	Texas	613,190
10	Nashville*	Tennessee	596,462

*Counts only the balance of the city.

Major metropolitan areas in the Southern U.S.

Rank	Metropolitan Statistical Area	State(s) and/or Territory	July 1, 2008 Population Estimate
1	Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington	TX	6,300,006
2	Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown	TX	5,728,143
3	Miami–Fort Lauderdale–West Palm Beach	FL	5,414,772
4	Atlanta–Sandy Springs–Marietta	GA	5,376,285
5	Washington–Arlington–Alexandria	DC–VA–MD–WV	5,358,130
6	Tampa–St. Petersburg–Clearwater	FL	2,733,761
7	Baltimore–Towson	MD	2,667,117
8	Orlando-Kissimmee	FL	2,054,574
9	San Antonio	TX	2,031,445
10	Charlotte–Gastonia–Concord	NC–SC	1,701,799
11	Virginia Beach–Norfolk–Newport News	VA–NC	1,658,292
12	Austin–Round Rock	TX	1,652,602
13	Nashville-Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin	TN	1,550,733
14	Jacksonville	FL	1,313,228
15	Memphis	TN–MS–AR	1,285,732
16	Louisville–Jefferson County	KY–IN	1,244,696
17	Richmond	VA	1,225,626
18	Oklahoma City	OK	1,206,142
19	New Orleans–Metairie–Kenner	LA	1,134,029
20	Birmingham–Hoover	AL	1,117,608
21	Raleigh–Cary	NC	1,088,765
22	Tulsa	OK	916,079
23	Baton Rouge	LA	774,327
24	El Paso	TX	742,062
25	Columbia	SC	728,063

See also

Bible Belt Black Belt (U.S. region) Bootleggers and Baptists Confederate States of America Cuisine of the Southern United States Deep South Dixie Dixie Mafia List of films set in the Southern United States List of historically black colleges and universities

Mason–Dixon Line New South Old South Southern American English Southern art Southern hospitality Southern literature Southernization (U.S.) Southwestern United States Women's colleges in the Southern United States

Notes

1. ^ Charles & William Ferris Encyclopedia of Southern Culture ISBN 9780807818237; Univ. of Pennsylvania Telsur Project Telsur Map of Southern Dialect
2. ^ Vance, Rupert Bayless, Regionalism and the South, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982, pg. 166 "West Virginia is found to have its closest attachment to the Southeast on the basis of agriculture and population."
3. ^ David Williamson (June 2, 1999). "UNC-CH surveys reveal where the ‘real’ South lies". http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/jun99/reed16.htm. Retrieved 22 Feb 2007. 
4. ^ http://www.dalhousielodge.org/Thesis/scotstonc.htm
5. ^ http://www.statemaster.com/graph/eco_per_bel_pov_lev-economy-percent-below-poverty-level
6. ^ U.S. Census Bureau: Official Map.
7. ^ Johnston, Mary. "Pioneers of the Old South, A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings." Accessed 19 May 2007.
8. ^ "United States: The Upper South." Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
9. ^ 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 2008-05-03 
10. ^ ^{a b c} Prentice, Guy. "NATIVE AMERICAN ARCHEOLOGY AND CULTURE HISTORY". http://www.nps.gov/history/seac/SoutheastChronicles/NISI/NISI%20Cultural%20Overview.htm. Retrieved 11 February 2008. 
11. ^ "Indentured Servitude in Colonial America"
12. ^ Isaac, Rhys (1982). The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790. University of North Carolina Press. pp. 22–23. ISBN 0-8078-4814-X. 
13. ^ Meinig, D.W. (1986). The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 1: Atlantic America, 1492-1800. Yale University Press. pp. 175–176. ISBN 0-300-03548-9. 
14. ^ David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp.361-368
15. ^ "Population by Selected Ancestry Group and Region: 2005". http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/population/ancestry_language_spoken_at_home.html. Retrieved 22 Aug 2006. 
16. ^ Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619-1877, New York: Hill and Wang, 1994, p. 73
17. ^ Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619-1877, New York: Hill and Wang, 1994, p. 81
18. ^ "The Peculiar Institution of American Slavery". http://home.earthlink.net/~gfeldmeth/lec.slavery.html. Retrieved 11 June 2008. 
19. ^ Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp.5 and 215
20. ^ "Nineteenth Century Death Tolls: American Civil War". http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wars19c.htm#ACW. Retrieved 22 Aug 2006. 
21. ^ American Civil War, Those Confederate States
22. ^ The Deadliest War
23. ^ Carpetbaggers
24. ^ Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, New York: Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2002, pp.70-75
25. ^ Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol.17, 2000,, p. 27, accessed 10 Mar 2008
26. ^ "Italians in Mississippi", Mississippi History Now, accessed 28 Nov 2007
27. ^ Vivian Wong, "Somewhere Between White and Black: The Chinese in Mississippi", Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, accessed 15 Nov 2007
28. ^ 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
29. ^ Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol.17, 2000,, pp.12-13, accessed 10 Mar 2008
30. ^ Glenn Feldman, The Disfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004
31. ^ John Solomon Otto, The Final Frontiers, 1880-1930: Settling the Southern Bottomlands, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999
32. ^ Dr. Michael McDonald, US Elections Project: Alabama Redistricting Summary, George Mason University, accessed 6 Apr 2008
33. ^ "Strikes", Texas Handbook On-Line, accessed 6 Apr 2008
34. ^ Jackie McElhaney and Michael V. Hazel, "Dallas", Handbook of Texas Online, accessed 6 Apr 2008
35. ^ David G. McComb, "Urbanization", Handbook of Texas Online, accessed 6 Apr 2008
36. ^ "First Measured Century: Interview: James Gregory". http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/gregory.htm. Retrieved 22 Aug 2006. 
37. ^ "State jobless rate below US average". The Decatur Daily. August 19, 2005. http://www.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/050819/jobless.shtml. Retrieved 2007-02-12. 
38. ^ Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave , Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 2-7
39. ^ John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.
40. ^ Brescia, William (Bill). "Chapter 2, French-Choctaw Contact, 1680s-1763". Tribal Government, A New Era. Philadelphia, Mississippi: Choctaw Heritage Press. p. 8. 
41. ^ Walter, Williams. "Three Efforts at Development among the Choctaws of Mississippi". Southeastern Indians: Since the Removal Era. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. 
42. ^ Hudson, Charles. "The Ante-Bellum Elite". Red, White, and Black; Symposium on Indians in the Old South. University of Georgia Press. p. 80. SBN 820303089. 
43. ^ Kappler, Charles (1904). "Indian affairs: laws and treaties Vol. IV, Treaties". Government Printing Office. http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/vol4/html_files/v4p1165.html. Retrieved 2008-10-14. 
44. ^ We-sa ( The Cat ). "Cherokee by Blood". http://www.cherokeebyblood.com/blackindians.htm. Retrieved 2009-03-11. 
45. ^ Rayford Logan (1997). The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. New York: Da Capo Press. pp. 91. ISBN 0-306-80758-0. 
46. ^ "Tracking New Trends in Race Migration". NPR. 2006-03-14. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5261746. Retrieved 2008-04-04. 
47. ^ "Study shows Memphis among most integrated cities". Memphis Business Journal. January 13, 2003. http://memphis.bizjournals.com/memphis/stories/2003/01/13/daily9.html. 
48. ^ http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_stateratesofincbyraceandethnicity.pdf
49. ^ "League of the South Core Beliefs Statement". League of the South. June 1994. http://dixienet.org/New%20Site/corebeliefs.shtml. Retrieved 2008-06-12. 

References

• Cash, Wilbur J. The Mind of the South (1941),
• Richard N. Current, et al. (1987). American History: A Survey 7th ed.. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-31549-9. 
• 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. 
• Grady McWhiney. In Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (1988)
• Mary Odem "Global Lives, Local Struggles: Latin American Immigrants in Atlanta'" Southern Spaces 2006
• 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. 
• George Sanchez "Latinos, the American South, and the Future of U.S. Race Relations" Southern Spaces 2007
• Robert W. Twyman. and David C. Roller, ed., ed (1979). Encyclopedia of Southern History. LSU Press. ISBN 0-8071-0575-9. 
• Winders, Jamie. "Latino Migration and Nashville, Tennessee," Southern Spaces 2004.
• Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, ed., ed (1989). Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-1823-2. 

External sources

• "US Census Bureau region map" (PDF). http://www.census.gov/const/regionmap.pdf. Retrieved 9 April 2006. 
• "US Census Bureau metropolitan area statistics, table 3a". http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/phc-t29.html. Retrieved 9 April 2006. 

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. 
• Michael Kreyling (1998). Inventing Southern Literature. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-57806-045-1. 
• Heather A. Haveman (2004). "Antebellum literary culture and the evolution of American magazines" (^{[dead link]} – ^{Scholar search}). Poetics 32: 5–28. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2003.12.002. http://www.columbia.edu/~hah15/H_2004_Poetics.pdf. 
• Eugene D. Genovese (1976). Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-394-71652-3. 
• Lawrence W. Levine (1978). Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-502374-9. 
• Peter J. Parish (1989). Slavery: History and Historians. Westview Press. ISBN 0-06-430182-6. 
• 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. 
• C. Vann Woodward (1955). The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514690-5. 
• Richard Wright (1945). Black Boy. Harper & Brothers.  a novel.
• Gavin Wright (1996). Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War. LSU Press. ISBN 0-8071-2098-7. 
• Michael Andrew Grissom (1989). Southern by the Grace of God. Pelican. ISBN 0-88289-761-6. 

External links

• DocSouth: Documenting the American South - numerous online text, image, and audio collections
• Center for the Study of the American South - an academic center devoted to the study of "southern history, literature, and culture as well as ongoing social, political, and economic issues"
• Dixie's dead, long live the South
• Southern Arts Federation
• Southern Spaces-- an open-access peer-reviewed scholarly journal examining the spaces and places of the American South.

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