Native American culture The first well-dated evidence of human occupation in the south United States occurs around 9500 BC with the appearance of the earliest documented Americans, who are now referred to as
Paleo-Indians. Paleoindians were hunter-gatherers that roamed in bands and frequently hunted
megafauna. Several cultural stages, such as Archaic (–1000 BC) and the Woodland ( – AD 1000), preceded what the Europeans found at the end of the 15th centurythe
Mississippian culture. The predominant culture of the original Southern states was
English. In the 17th century, most voluntary immigrants were of English origin and settled chiefly along the eastern coast but had pushed as far inland as the
Appalachian Mountains by the 18th century. The majority of early English settlers were
indentured servants, who gained freedom after working off their passage. The wealthier men, typically members of the English
landed gentry, who paid their way received land grants known as
headrights to encourage settlement. The Spanish and French established settlements in
Florida,
Texas, and
Louisiana. The Spanish settled Florida in the 16th century, reaching a peak in the late 17th century, but the population was small because the Spaniards were relatively uninterested in agriculture, and Florida had no mineral resources. There were regional differences in the Southern colonies, with the three main regions of
Tidewater, the
Deep South, and
Appalachia. The first region to be settled was Tidewater, containing the low-lying plains of southeast
Virginia,
northeastern North Carolina, southern
Maryland and the
Chesapeake Bay. The next region to be settled was the Deep South, beginning in
Province of Carolina and later the
Province of Georgia. The last region to be settled was Appalachia, also settled by the
Scotch-Irish. King
Charles II of England granted the
Charter of Carolina in 1663 for land south of the British
Colony of Virginia and north of
Spanish Florida. He granted the land to eight
lords proprietor. Charles granted the land in return for their financial and political assistance in
restoring him to the throne in 1660. The granted lands included all or part of the present-day U.S. states of North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. In the British colonies, immigration began in 1607 and continued until the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775. Settlers cleared land, built houses and outbuildings, and on their own farms. The Southern rich owned large
plantations that dominated export agriculture and used slaves. Many were involved in the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco, the first cash crop of Virginia. Tobacco exhausted the soil quickly, requiring that farmers regularly clear new fields. They used old fields as pasture, and for crops such as corn wheat, or allowed them to grow into woodlots. In the mid-to-late-18th century, large groups of
Ulster Scots (later called the
Scotch-Irish) and people from the
Anglo-Scottish border region immigrated and settled in the back country of
Appalachia and the
Piedmont. They were the largest group of non-English immigrants from the
British Isles before the
American Revolution. In the
1980 census, 34% of Southerners reported that they were of English ancestry. Except in Louisiana, where French is predominant, English was the largest reported European ancestry in every Southern state by a large margin.
Slavery was legal in all of the
Thirteen Colonies prior to the
American Revolution in 1776. Britain had
slave island colonies in the Caribbean, including
Jamaica,
Barbados,
Nevis, and
Antigua, which provided a steady flow of profits from the slave labor that produced sugar. The
Southern Colonies differed in that the proportion of their populations that were African American slaves was much higher than in the
Middle Colonies and
New England Colonies, as shown on the map. According to
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Bondage was an answer to an economic need. The South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South." The
Barbados Slave Code of 1661 served as the basis for the slave codes adopted in the
British American colonies of the
Province of Carolina and the
Province of Georgia. In other colonies where the slaves codes were not an exact copy, such as the
Colony of Virginia and the
Province of Maryland, the influence of the Barbados Slave Code can be traced throughout various provisions.
American Revolution in
North Carolina, 1781 prompted Great Britain's surrender in North America during the
American Revolutionary War, 1781. During the
American Revolutionary War, the Southern colonies helped embrace the
Patriot cause. Virginia would provide leaders such as commander-in-chief
George Washington, and the author of the Declaration of Independence,
Thomas Jefferson. In 1780 and 1781, the British largely halted reconquest of the northern states and concentrated on the south, where they were told there was a large Loyalist population ready to leap to arms once the royal forces arrived. The British took control of Savannah and Charleston, capturing a large American army in the process, and set up a network of bases inland. Although there were
Loyalists within the Southern colonies, they were concentrated in larger coastal cities and were not great enough in number to overcome the revolutionaries. The British forces at the
Battle of Monck's Corner and the
Battle of Lenud's Ferry consisted entirely of Loyalists with the exception of the commanding officer (
Banastre Tarleton). Both white and black Loyalists fought for the British at the
Battle of Kemp's Landing in Virginia. Led by
Nathanael Greene and other generals, the Americans engaged in
Fabian tactics designed to wear down the British invasion force and to neutralize its strong points one by one. There were numerous battles large and small, with each side claiming some victories. By 1781, however, British
General Cornwallis moved north to Virginia, where an approaching army forced him to fortify and await rescue by the British Navy. The British Navy did arrive, but so did a stronger French fleet, and Cornwallis was trapped. American and French armies, led by George Washington, forced Cornwallis to surrender his entire army in
Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781, effectively winning the North American part of the war. The Revolution provided a shock to slavery in the South and other regions of the new country. Thousands of slaves took advantage of wartime disruption to find their own freedom, catalyzed by the British Governor Dunmore of Virginia's promise of freedom for service. Many others were removed by Loyalist owners and became slaves elsewhere in the British Empire. Between 1770 and 1790, there was a sharp decline in the percentage of blacks – from 61% to 44% in South Carolina and from 45% to 36% in Georgia. In addition, some slaveholders were inspired to free their slaves after the Revolution. They were moved by the principles of the Revolution, along with Quaker and Methodist preachers who worked to encourage slaveholders to free their slaves. Planters such as George Washington often freed slaves by their wills. In the
Upper South, more than 10% of all blacks were free by 1810, a significant expansion from pre-war proportions of less than 1% free.
Antebellum years on a
South Carolina plantation (
The Old Plantation, )
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. 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 Africans 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 in excess of 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. 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. meeting at
Jacksonville, Alabama, 1841 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 a 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.
Huguenots were among the first settlers in Charleston, along with the largest number of Orthodox Jews outside of New York City. Numerous Irish immigrants settled in New Orleans, establishing a distinct
ethnic enclave now known as the
Irish Channel. Germans also went to New Orleans and its environs, resulting in a large area north of the city (along the Mississippi) becoming known as the German Coast. 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. By 1840,
New Orleans was the wealthiest city in the country and the third largest in population. The success of the city was based on the growth of international trade associated with products being shipped to and from the interior of the country down the Mississippi River. New Orleans also had the largest slave market in the country, as traders brought slaves 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 other areas of the South. Because of lack of investment, however, construction of railroads to span the region lagged behind the North. People relied most heavily on river traffic for getting their crops to market and for transportation.
Native American removal Between 1830 and 1850, Native Americans were removed from their home states in the South and Eastern United States and were sent to Oklahoma.
Civil War ", and gave varying degrees of support to the Confederate cause although they remained in the Union while Kentucky and Missouri had dual competing Confederate and Unionist governments. This illustration depicts the original, trans-Allegheny borders of Virginia, and thus does not show West Virginia (which separated from Virginia in 1863) separately. Although members of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory (today part of Oklahoma) aligned themselves with the Confederacy, the region is not shaded because at the time it was a territory, not a state.|alt=map of United States with southeastern states highlighted in shades of red By 1856, the South had lost control of Congress, and was no longer able to silence calls for an end to slaverywhich came mostly from the more populated,
free states of the North. The Republican Party, founded in 1854, pledged to stop the spread of slavery beyond those states where it already existed. After Abraham Lincoln was elected the first Republican president in 1860, seven cotton states declared their secession and formed the
Confederate States of America before Lincoln was inaugurated. The United States government, both outgoing and incoming, refused to recognize the Confederacy, and when the new Confederate President
Jefferson Davis ordered his troops to open fire on
Fort Sumter in April 1861, war broke out. Only the state of
Kentucky attempted to remain neutral, and it could only do so briefly. When Lincoln called for troops to suppress what he referred to as "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary" judicial or martial means, four more states decided to secede and join the Confederacy (which then moved its capital to Richmond, Virginia). Although the Confederacy had large supplies of captured munitions and many volunteers, it was slower than the Union in dealing with the border states. While the Upland South
border states of Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, as well as the
District of Columbia, continued to permit
slavery during the Civil War, they remained with the
Union though Kentucky and Missouri both had rival Confederate governments that formed that were admitted and recognized by the Confederacy. Though early in the war, the Confederacy controlled more than half of Kentucky and the southern portion of Missouri. By March 1862, the Union largely controlled all the border state areas, had shut down all commercial traffic from all Confederate ports, had prevented European recognition of the Confederate government, and was poised to seize New Orleans. The rugged mountainous
East Tennessee region
attempted to rejoin the Union as a new state, having opposed secession and slavery compared to most of Tennessee. In the four years of war, from 1861 to 1865, the South was the primary battleground, with all but two of the major battles taking place on Southern soil. Union forces led numerous campaigns into the western Confederacy, controlling the border states in 1861, the Tennessee River, the Cumberland River and New Orleans in 1862, and the Mississippi River in 1863. In the East, however, the Confederate Army under
Robert E. Lee beat off attack after attack in its defense of the Confederate capital of Richmond. But when Lee tried to move north, he was repulsed (and nearly captured) at Sharpsburg in 1862 and Gettysburg in 1863. 's railroad roundhouse in ruins shortly after the end of the Civil War The Confederacy had the resources for a short war, but was unable to finance or supply a longer war. It reversed the traditional low-tariff policy of the South by imposing a new 15% tax on all imports from the Union. The
Union blockade stopped most commerce from entering the South, and smugglers avoided the tax, so the Confederate tariff produced too little revenue to finance the war. Inflated currency was the solution, but that created distrust of the Richmond government. Because of low investment in railroads, the Southern transportation system depended primarily on river and coastal traffic by boat; both were shut down by the
Union Navy. The small railroad system virtually collapsed, so that by 1864 internal travel was so difficult that the Confederate economy was crippled. The Confederate cause was hopeless by the time Atlanta fell and
William T. Sherman marched through Georgia in late 1864, but the rebels fought on until Lee's army surrendered in April 1865. Once the Confederate forces surrendered, the region moved into the
Reconstruction Era (1865–1877), in a partially successful attempt to rebuild the destroyed region and grant civil rights to freed slaves. Southerners who were against the Confederate cause during the Civil War were known as
Southern Unionists. They were also known as Union Loyalists or Lincoln's Loyalists. Within the eleven Confederate states, states such as Tennessee (especially
East Tennessee), Virginia (which included
West Virginia at the time), and North Carolina were home to the largest populations of Unionists. Many areas of
Southern Appalachia harbored pro-Union sentiment as well. As many as 100,000 men living in states under Confederate control would serve in the
Union Army or pro-Union guerrilla groups. Although Southern Unionists came from all classes, most differed socially, culturally, and economically from the regions dominant pre-war
planter class. The South suffered more than the North overall, as the Union strategy of attrition warfare meant that Lee could not replace his casualties, and the total war waged by Sherman, Sheridan, and other Union armies devastated the infrastructure and caused widespread poverty and distress. The Confederacy suffered military losses of 95,000 soldiers killed in action and 165,000 who died of disease, for a total of 260,000, out of a total white Southern population at the time of around 5.5 million. Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6% in the North and about 18% in the South. Northern military deaths were greater than Southern military deaths in absolute numbers, but were two-thirds smaller in terms of proportion of the population affected.
Reconstruction and Jim Crow era After the Civil War, the South was devastated in terms of 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 disenfranchised. 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, the limited infrastructure the South had was mostly destroyed by the war. At the same time, the North was rapidly industrializing. To avoid the social effects of the war, most of the Southern states initially passed
black codes. During Reconstruction, these were mostly legally nullified by federal law and anti-Confederate legislatures, which existed for a short time during Reconstruction. There were thousands of people on the move, as African Americans tried to reunite families separated by slave sales, and sometimes migrated for better opportunities in towns or other states. Other freed people moved from plantation areas to cities or towns for a chance to get different jobs. 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. '', by
Currier and Ives, 1871 With passage of the
13th Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States (which outlawed slavery), the
14th Amendment (which granted full U.S. citizenship to African Americans), and the
15th Amendment (which extended the right to vote to African American males), African Americans in the South were made free citizens and were given the right to vote. Under Federal protection, white and black
Republicans formed constitutional conventions and state governments. Among their accomplishments were 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. Some were adventurers who hoped to benefit themselves by questionable methods. They were all condemned with the pejorative term of
carpetbagger. Some Southerners would also take advantage of the disrupted environment and made money off various schemes, including bonds and financing for railroads. White Southerners who supported Reconstruction policies and efforts became known as
scalawags. Secret
vigilante organizations such as the
Ku Klux Klanan organization sworn to perpetuate
white supremacyhad arisen quickly after the war's end in the 1860s, and used
lynching, physical attacks, house burnings and other forms of intimidation to keep African Americans from exercising their political rights. Although the first Klan was disrupted by prosecution by the Federal government in the early 1870s, other groups persisted. By the mid-to-late-1870s, some upper class 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, both black and white, to remove Republicans from political office, repress and bar black voting, and restore the
Democratic Party to power. In 1876 white Democrats regained power in most of the state legislatures. They began to pass laws designed to strip African Americans and
Poor Whites from the voter registration rolls. The success of late-19th century interracial coalitions in several states inspired a reaction among some white Democrats, who worked harder to prevent both groups from voting. Despite discrimination, many blacks became property owners in areas that were still developing. For instance, 90% of the Mississippi's bottomlands were still frontier and undeveloped after the war. By the end of the century, two-thirds of the farmers in Mississippi's Delta bottomlands were black. They had cleared the land themselves and often made money in early years by selling off timber. Tens of thousands of migrants went to the Delta, both to work as laborers to clear timber for lumber companies, and many to develop their own farms. Nonetheless, the long agricultural depression, along with disenfranchisement and lack of access to credit, led to many blacks in the Delta losing their property by 1910 and becoming sharecroppers or landless workers over the following decade. More than two generations of free African Americans lost their stake in property. , 1913 Nearly all Southerners, black and white, suffered economically as a result of the Civil War. Within a few years cotton production and harvest was back to pre-war levels, but low prices through much of the 19th century hampered recovery. They encouraged immigration by
Chinese and
Italian laborers into the Mississippi Delta. While the first Chinese entered as indentured laborers from
Cuba, the majority came in the early 20th century. Neither group stayed long at rural farm labor. The Chinese became merchants and established stores in small towns throughout the Delta, establishing a place between white and black. Migrations continued in the late 19th and early 20th centuries among both blacks and whites. In the last two decades of the 19th century, about 141,000 blacks left the South, and more after 1900, totaling a loss of 537,000. After that, the movement increased in what became known as the Great Migration from 1910 to 1940, and the Second Great Migration through 1970. Even more whites left the South, some going to California for opportunities and others heading to Northern industrial cities after 1900. Between 1880 and 1910, the loss of whites totaled 1,243,000. Five million more left between 1940 and 1970. From 1890 to 1908, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, along with Oklahoma upon statehood, passed disenfranchising constitutions or amendments that introduced voter registration barrierssuch as
poll taxes, residency requirements and
literacy teststhat were hard for minorities to meet. Most African Americans, most Mexican Americans, and tens of thousands of poor whites were disenfranchised, losing the vote for decades. In some states,
grandfather clauses temporarily exempted white illiterates from literacy tests. The numbers of voters dropped drastically throughout the former Confederacy as a result. This can be seen via 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.
Democrat-controlled 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 former Confederacy and Oklahoma could not vote until 1965, after passage of the Voting Rights Act and Federal enforcement to ensure people could register. Despite increases in the eligible voting population with the inclusion of women, blacks, and those eighteen and over throughout this period, turnout in ex-Confederate states remained below the national average throughout the 20th century. 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. Historian
William Chafe has explored the defensive techniques developed inside the African American community to avoid the worst features of Jim Crow as expressed in the legal system, unbalanced economic power, and intimidation and psychological pressure. Chafe says "protective socialization by blacks themselves" was created inside the community to accommodate white-imposed sanctions while subtly encouraging challenges to those sanctions. Known as "walking the tightrope", such efforts at bringing about change were only slightly effective before the 1920s, but did build the foundation that younger African Americans deployed in their aggressive, large-scale activism during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
1880s through 1930s At the end of the 19th century, white Democrats in the South had created state constitutions that were hostile to industry and business development, with anti-industrial laws extensive from the time new constitutions were adopted in the 1890s. Banks were few and small; there was little access to credit. Traditional agriculture persisted across the region. Especially in Alabama and Florida, rural minorities held control in many state legislatures long after population had shifted to industrializing cities, and legislators resisted business and modernizing interests: Alabama refused to redistrict between 1901 and 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. 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. Strikes and labor unrest served as a reflection of increasing industry: "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 one hundred strikes, chiefly interstate strikes of telegraphers and railway workers, occurred in the year 1886." By 1890,
Dallas became the largest city in Texas, and 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 a center of other manufacturing. As an example of its ambitions, in 1907 Dallas built the
Praetorian Building, fifteen storeys tall and the first skyscraper west of the Mississippi, soon to be followed by other skyscrapers. 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 fifty thousand in population by 1920, with the major cities having three times that population. Business interests were ignored by the Southern Democrat ruling class. Nonetheless, major new industries started developing in cities such as Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; and Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, Texas. Growth began occurring at a geometric rate. Birmingham became a major steel producer and mining town, with major population growth in the early decades of the 20th century. The first major oil well in the South was drilled at
Spindletop near
Beaumont, Texas, on the morning of January 10, 1901. Other oil fields were later discovered nearby in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and under the
Gulf of Mexico. The resulting "Oil Boom" permanently transformed the economy of the West South Central states and produced the richest economic expansion after the Civil War. In the early 20th century, invasion of the
boll weevil devastated cotton crops in the South, producing an additional catalyst to African Americans' decisions to leave the South. From 1910 to 1970, more than 6.5 million African Americans left the South in the
Great Migration to Northern and Western cities, defecting from persistent
lynching, violence,
segregation, poor education, and inability to vote. Black migration transformed many Northern and Western cities, creating new cultures and music. Many African Americans, like other groups, became industrial workers; others started their own businesses within the communities. Southern whites also migrated to industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit,
Oakland, and Los Angeles, where they took jobs in the booming new auto and defense industry. family in
Walker County, Alabama, c. 1937 Later, the Southern economy was dealt additional blows by the
Great Depression and the
Dust Bowl. After the
Wall Street Crash of 1929, the economy suffered significant reversals and millions were left unemployed. Beginning in 1934 and lasting until 1939, an ecological disaster of severe wind and drought caused an exodus from Texas and Arkansas, the
Oklahoma Panhandle region, and the surrounding plains, in which over 500,000
Americans were homeless, hungry and jobless. Thousands would leave the region 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.
1940s through late 20th century World War II marked a time of dramatic change within the South from an economic standpoint, as new industries and military bases were developed by the federal government, providing much-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. During and after the war millions of hard-scrabble farmers, both white and black, left agriculture for other occupations and urban jobs. The United States began mobilizing for war in a major way in the spring of 1940. The warm weather of the South proved ideal for building 60% of the Army's new training camps and nearly half the new airfields. In all, 40% of spending on new military installations went to the South. For example, in 1940 the small town of 1500 people in
Starke, Florida, became the base of
Camp Blanding. By March 1941, 20,000 men were constructing a permanent camp for 60,000 soldiers. Money flowed freely for the war effort, as over $4 billion went into military facilities in the South, and another $5 billion into defense plants. Major shipyards were built in Virginia, in Charleston, South Carolina, and along the Gulf Coast. Huge warplane plants were opened in Dallas-Fort Worth and Georgia. The most secret and expensive operation was at
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where unlimited amounts of locally generated electricity were used to prepare uranium for the atom bomb. The number of production workers doubled during the war. Most training centers, factories and shipyards were closed in 1945, but not all, and the families that left hardscrabble farms remained to find jobs in the growing urban South. The region had finally reached the take off stage into industrial and commercial growth, although its income and wage levels lagged well behind the national average. Nevertheless, as
George B. Tindall notes, the transformation was, "The demonstration of industrial potential, new habits of mind, and a recognition that industrialization demanded community services." Per capita income jumped 140% from 1940 to 1945, compared to 100% elsewhere in the United States. Southern income rose from 59% to 65%. Dewey Grantham says the war, "brought an abrupt departure from the South's economic backwardness, poverty, and distinctive rural life, as the region moved perceptively closer to the mainstream of national economic and social life." Since 1970, the proportion of the
African American population living in the South stabilized and began slightly increasing. Farming shifted from cotton and tobacco, to include cattle, rice,
soybeans,
corn, and other foods. Industrial growth increased in the 1960s and greatly accelerated into the 1980s and 1990s. Several large urban areas in Texas, Georgia, and Florida grew to over four million people. 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. With this growth, however, has come long commute times and air pollution problems in cities such as Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, and others that rely on sprawling development and highway networks.
21st century In the 21st century, and especially after the
2010 midterm elections, the Republican Party has largely dominated the South, both at the state and federal levels. As of 2024, Republicans control both houses of the
state legislatures of 10 out of the eleven former
Confederate States, the sole exception being the
Virginia General Assembly. However, there are still some Democratic statewide officeholders in the South, such as Kentucky governor
Andy Beshear, North Carolina governor
Josh Stein, Virginia's U.S. Senators
Mark Warner and
Tim Kaine, and Georgia's U.S. Senators
Raphael Warnock and
Jon Ossoff. In 2019, Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Southern states included: Texas with 50, Virginia with 21, Florida with 18, Georgia with 17, North Carolina with 11, and Tennessee with 10. In 2022, Texas led the nation with the most Fortune 500 company headquarters with 53. This economic expansion has enabled parts of the South to report some of the lowest unemployment rates in the United States. Even with certain southern states and areas doing well economically, many southern states and areas still have high poverty rates when compared to the U.S. nationally. In 2021, nine out of the ten
states with the highest poverty rates were in the South. Also, in 2023 all five states with
the lowest GDP per capita were in the South: Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, and South Carolina. ==Modern economy==