, that is the original southern states. Their modern boundaries differ from the boundaries when a part of the
Thirteen Colonies. The borders are shown on the map. , used as a symbol of White Southerners The politics and economy of the South were historically dominated by a small rural elite. When looked at broadly, studies have shown that Southerners tend to be more
conservative than most non-Southerners, with
liberalism being mostly predominant in places with a
Black majority or urban areas in the South.
Origins The predominant culture of the original Southern states was
English, particularly from
South East England,
South West England and the
West Midlands. The wealthier men, typically members of the English
landed gentry, who paid their way received land grants known as
headrights to encourage settlement.
Landed gentry '' () by
Thomas Gainsborough, a couple from the landed gentry, a marriage alliance between two local landowning families – one
gentry, one
trade.
National Gallery, London. During the colonial era, the British upper classes consisted of two sometimes overlapping entities, the
peerage and landed gentry. In the British peerage,
only the senior family member (typically the eldest son) inherited a substantive title (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron); these are referred to as peers or lords. The rest of the nobility form part of the landed gentry (abbreviated "gentry"). The landed gentry was a traditional British
social class consisting of
gentlemen in the original sense; that is, those who owned land in the form of
country estates to such an extent that they were not required to actively work, except in an administrative capacity on their own lands. The estates were often (but not always) worked by
tenant farmers, in which case the gentleman could live entirely off
rent income. Gentlemen, ranking above
yeomen, formed the lowest rank of British nobility.
William Berkeley, who served as the
governor of Virginia from 1660 to 1677, instituted a "Second Sons" policy, in which younger sons of the British nobility were recruited to emigrate to Virginia. Berkeley also emphasized the
headright system, the offering of large tracts of land to those arriving in the colony. This early immigration by an elite contributed to the development of an aristocratic political and social structure in the South. According to historian
G. E. Mingay, the gentry were landowners whose wealth "made possible a certain kind of education, a standard of comfort, and a degree of leisure and a common interest in ways of spending it". Leisure distinguished gentry from businessmen who gained their wealth through work. From the late 16th-century, the gentry emerged as the class most closely involved in politics, the military and law.
Instituting slavery in 1770, showing the number and proportion of slaves in each colony 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." Between one-half and two-thirds of European immigrants to the
Thirteen Colonies between the 1630s and the
American Revolution came as
indentured servants. However, while more than half the European immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies were indentured servants, at any one time they were outnumbered by workers who had never been indentured, or whose indenture had expired. Thus free wage labor was the most prevalent for Europeans in the colonies. Indentured servitude began its decline after
Bacon's Rebellion (1676-1677), a servant uprising against the government of Colonial Virginia. This was due to multiple factors, such as the treatment of servants, support of native tribes in the surrounding area, a refusal to expand the amount of land an indentured servant could work by the colonial government, and inequality between the upper and lower class in colonial society. In the Chesapeake and
Province of North Carolina,
tobacco constituted a major percentage of the total agricultural output. The
Barbados Slave Code of 1661 was used as a model to control and terrorize the African American slave population. The first European colonists in the
Province of Carolina, before it was split, introduced African slavery into the colony in 1670, the year the colony was founded.
Charleston, South Carolina ultimately became the busiest slave port in North America.
Cultural differences In 1765, London philanthropist Dr.
John Fothergill remarked on the cultural differences of the British American colonies southward from Maryland and those to the north, suggesting that the Southerners were marked by "idleness and extravagance". Fothergill suggested that Southerners were more similar to the people of the Caribbean than to the colonies to the north. Early in United States history, the contrasting characteristics of Southern states were acknowledged in a discussion between
Thomas Jefferson and
François-Jean de Chastellux. Jefferson ascribed the Southerners' "unsteady", "generous", "candid" traits to their climate, while De Chastellux claimed that Southerners' "indelible character which every nation acquires at the moment of its origin" would "always be aristocratic" not only because of slavery but also "vanity and sloth". A visiting French dignitary in 1810 contrasted the "bold and enterprising" residents of the northern states with the "heedless and lazy" people of the South and observed that American customs seemed "entirely changed" over the
Potomac River, with Southern society resembling those of the Caribbean. Northern popular press and literature in this early period of US history often used a "we"-versus-"they" dichotomy when discussing Southerners, and looked upon Southern customs as backward and a threat to progress. For instance, a 1791 article in the
New York Magazine warned that the spread of Southern
cockfighting was tantamount to being "assaulted" by "the enemy within" and would "rob" the nation's "honor".
Religion in
Charleston, South Carolina Most of the Southern United States is known as the "
Bible Belt", because of the prevalence of
evangelical Protestantism. Except in
Acadiana in Louisiana, Catholicism is almost entirely absent among White Southerners. During the colonial period (1607–1776), the South was a stronghold of the
Anglican church. Its transition to a stronghold of evangelical Protestantism occurred gradually over the next century as a series of religious revival movements, many associated with the Baptist denomination, gained great popularity in the region. In the colonial period and early 19th century, the
First Great Awakening and the
Second Great Awakening transformed Southern religion. The evangelical religion was spread by religious revivals led by local lay Baptist ministers or itinerant Methodist ministers. They fashioned the nation's "Bible Belt." In 1845, the
Southern Baptist Convention separated from other regions. By the beginning of the Civil War, the
Baptist and
Methodist churches had attracted the most members in the South, and their churches were most numerous in the region.
Latino influence Texas was once
part of Mexico, and Florida was once
part of Spain. Both became states of the United States in part to protect slavery. • Specifically, Mexico conditionally abolished slavery in Texas, so Texas declared and won independence
to keep slavery legal in the state. • Florida was a refuge for escaped slaves, who were protected by the
Seminole people. To stop the Seminole based in
East Florida from raiding Georgia settlements and offering havens for runaway slaves, the U.S. Army led increasingly frequent incursions into Spanish territory, which are known as the
Seminole Wars. At the time of the
American Civil War, Florida and Texas were sparsely populated and not fully settled, with Florida and Texas being the least-populated and third least-populated of the 11 Confederate states per the
1860 United States census, respectively. African slavery was practiced in parts of Latin America. Two
Latin American countries,
Brazil and
Cuba, did not abolish slavery until the 1880s, and to this day have significant
Black populations. • Brazil passively supported the Confederacy, and some former Confederate officials fled to Brazil, and are known as
Confederados. • Cuba is near Florida, and remained part of Spain until the
Spanish-American War. It had covertly trafficked slaves to the Confederacy before the Civil War, and also passively supported the Confederacy.
Antebellum era The
War of 1812 brought increasing awareness to the differences between Northerners and Southerners, who had opposed and supported the war respectively. The
Panic of 1819 and the
1820 admission of Missouri as a slave state also exacerbated the North–South divide. In 1823, New York activist
Gerrit Smith commented that there was an almost "national difference of character between the people of the Northern and the people of the Southern states." Similarly, a 1822 commentary in the
North American Review suggested that Southerners were "a different race of men", "highminded and vainglorious" people who lived on the plantations. Political disputes surrounding foreign policy, slavery and tariffs weakened the notion of an all-Union ideological identity which Southern writers had been promoting for the first thirty years after independence. Due to migration in the South itself, the notion of the South as a unified, distinctive political-economic entity began to replace the more specific local divisions between Easterners and Westerners/plantation-versus-backwoods in the years following the War of 1812, culminating in the Southern literature of
William Gilmore Simms. It was only in this generation's youth that the United States as a whole began shifting to a postcolonial society with new vehicles for collective identity; in their adulthood they helped define and historicize the South.
Civil War and Reconstruction With
secession and the creation of the
Confederacy, Southern writers argued that it represented a new Southern nationality. New Orleans publisher
J. D. B. De Bow wrote that secession was not based on slavery, but rather on "two separate nations" that were racially distinct, Southerners being descended from Norman cavaliers, Huguenots, Jacobites and other "Mediterranean races" linked to the Romans, while Northerners were descended from Anglo-Saxon serfs and other Germanic immigrants. The term "Yankee" described a race "calculating, money worshipping, cowardly" or even as "hordes" and "semi-barbarian." This Norman ancestry explained their attachment to the institution of slavery, as opposed to the Northerners who were descendants of a "slave race". Another writer said that Yankees were descended from Puritans who "were in their hearts tyrants" and were "bigoted, intolerant and persecuting", while the Southerners had "Norman roots." A history book on the Confederacy said that the South had to "assert its well-known superiority in civilization over the people of the North." Union Secretary of the Navy
Gideon Welles and German-American political scientist
Francis Lieber, who condemned the Southerners' belief in their distinct ancestry, attributed the Civil War's outbreak to that belief. Southerners developed their ideas on nationalism on influences from the nationalist movements growing in Europe (such as the works of
Johann Gottfried Herder and the constructed north–south divide between Germanic peoples and Italians). Southern ideologues, fearful of mass politics, sought to adopt the ethnic themes of the
revolutions of 1848 while distancing themselves from the revolutionaries' radical liberal ideas. While Confederate Secretary of State
Judah P. Benjamin declared that "the North must exterminate us or agree to separation", Southern nationality did not survive the end of the war. Rather than be a conquered people, Southerners quickly resumed their old allegiance. :
James Longstreet, who had fought at
Gettysburg, was appointed U.S. Surveyor of Customs in New Orleans in 1868. :
Henry S. Foote, who had served in the Confederate Congress, was appointed superintendent of the United States mint in New Orleans in 1878. :
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar had been the Confederate envoy to Russia in 1863, but returned to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1873, became Secretary of the Interior in 1885 and was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1887. Benjamin himself fled to England and never returned. In the eleven states that seceded from the United States in 1860–61 to form the
Confederacy, 31% of families held at least one African American in
slavery, which includes the territory that split from Virginia to become
West Virginia. The four
border states that did not secede also permitted slavery.
Poor Whites , an icon of 20th century United States, was born into a Poor White family in
Tupelo, Mississippi. Slavery was less common in the
Upland South, comprising the areas in the South outside the
Atlantic Plain, which remains heavily white to this day.
Northern English,
Scots lowlanders and
Ulster-Scots (later called the
Scotch-Irish) settled in
Appalachia in the 18th century, and eventually spread westward into the
Ozarks and
Texas Hill Country. The early settlers of the
Ohio Valley were mainly Upland Southerners. As independent small farmers living on the harsh
American frontier, poor whites had starkly different interests than those of White Southerners that lived on commercial
plantations or in large cities. Poor whites were often isolated from the rest of Southern society and civilization during the
Antebellum South, with few owning slaves, and many were more likely to be critical of slavery. During the
American Civil War, some regions of the Upland South such as
West Virginia and
East Tennessee remained
loyal to the Union. East Tennessee's Republican leanings are rooted in its antebellum
Whig sentiments, with historian O.P. Temple tracing this sentiment back to the anti-aristocratic
Covenanters of Scotland. During the
nadir of American race relations at the turn of the 20th century, intense violence and
white supremacy flourished in a region suffering from a lack of public education and competition for resources. Southern politicians of the day built on conflict between poor whites and African Americans in a form of
political opportunism. As John T. Campbell summarizes in
The Broad Ax in 1906, the Civil War also caused poor whites to experience intense dire economic conditions and were brought into poverty along with enslaved African-Americans. ==Recent studies==