Southern United States

• 1. Introduction

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  The Southern United States goes by many names. Dixie, Dixieland, the Southland, the American South, or simply the South. It is one of the four census regions defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, sitting between the Atlantic Ocean and the Western United States. To its north lie the Midwest and Northeast. To its south are the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico. Yet geography alone never settled what the South actually is. California sits in the country's southwest, but it is not the South. Georgia, in the southeast, certainly is. The boundaries have been argued over for generations. So have the subregions: the Deep South, the Upper South, the Tidewater, Appalachia. What forces shaped a region distinct enough that scholars debate whether white Southerners form an ethnic group? Why did one institution define its economy, its politics, and its conscience for two and a half centuries? And how did a place once defined by agricultural backwardness become, in the 21st century, the fastest-growing region in the country?

• 2. Drawing The Lines

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  Sixteen states and the District of Columbia make up the South as the Census Bureau defines it. As of 2010, an estimated 114,555,744 people lived there, about thirty-seven percent of all U.S. residents, making it the nation's most populous region. The Bureau splits it into three divisions. The South Atlantic group runs from Delaware down through Florida and includes Maryland, the Carolinas, Virginia and West Virginia. The East South Central group holds Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The West South Central group covers Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.

  Maryland, Delaware, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia complicate the picture. They have grown more aligned with the Northeast in culture, economics, and politics, and are sometimes counted as Mid-Atlantic instead. The Census Bureau still files all four as Southern. Scholars chasing cultural truth rather than state lines have offered narrower maps. A 2010 survey by social geographers picked thirteen states as the cultural South, dropping Maryland, Delaware, the District, and Texas from the formal list. The Council of State Governments kept those same thirteen but added Texas and Missouri.

  The vocabulary multiplies from there. The Old South can mean the southern colonies among the original thirteen, or every slave state before 1860. The Deep South usually gathers Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Dixie most often points to the eleven former Confederate States. The Border States were slave states near the Confederacy that never seceded: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware. Two U.S. territories southeast of Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, are sometimes folded in too. The Federal Aviation Administration counts them as part of the South, as do the Agricultural Research Service and the National Park Service.

• 3. Mounds And First Peoples

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  Around 9500 BC, the first well-dated human occupation appears in the southern United States, left by hunter-gatherers now called Paleo-Indians who roamed in bands and hunted megafauna. The Archaic stage followed, then the Woodland, and finally the culture Europeans encountered in decline: the Mississippian. This was a complex, mound-building society that flourished across the Southeast from roughly 800 AD to 1500 AD. Its people maintained long trading routes that linked ceremonial centers through river valleys, stretching from the East Coast to the Great Lakes.

  Pánfilo de Narváez described it in 1528, Hernando de Soto in 1540, and Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville in 1699, each meeting a world already fading. The descendants of the mound-builders still live in the South. They include the Alabama, Apalachee, Caddo, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Guale, Hitchiti, Houma, and Seminole peoples. The Catawba and Powhatan were also present before the European incursion, though their links to the Mississippians are less clear. The arrival of European settlers brought a massive population decline, driven by diseases the natives had no immunity to, violent conflicts, and forced relocation. Between 1830 and 1850, Native Americans were removed from their home states and sent to Oklahoma along the route remembered as the Trail of Tears.

• 4. An Answer To Economic Need

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  "Bondage was an answer to an economic need," wrote historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown. "The South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South." That sentence captures the institution that shaped the region from the early 1600s to the mid-1800s. Slavery was legal in all of the Thirteen Colonies before the American Revolution of 1776, but the Southern Colonies held a far higher proportion of enslaved African Americans than the Middle or New England Colonies.

  The Barbados Slave Code of 1661 supplied the model. It became the basis for the slave codes adopted in the Province of Carolina and the Province of Georgia. In Virginia and Maryland, where the codes were not exact copies, its influence still runs through the provisions. The economy it served grew first on tobacco, Virginia's first cash crop, which exhausted the soil so quickly that farmers had to keep clearing new fields. After 1800, cotton took over the lower South. The invention of the cotton gin let short staple cotton spread across the frontier uplands of Georgia and Alabama and the riverfront of the Mississippi Delta.

  That boom demanded more labor. From the 1820s through the 1850s, more than one million enslaved Africans were carried into the Deep South in a forced migration, two-thirds of them moved by slave traders. Planters in the Upper South sold off enslaved people beyond their needs, and many families were broken apart because buyers preferred strong males for field work. By 1840, New Orleans was the wealthiest city in the country and the third largest in population. It also held the largest slave market in the nation, where traders sold people brought by ship and overland to planters across the Deep South.

• 5. Secession And The Battleground

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  By 1856, the South had lost control of Congress and could no longer silence the growing demand to end slavery. The Republican Party, founded in 1854, pledged to stop slavery's spread beyond the states where it already existed. After Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, seven cotton states declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America before he was even inaugurated. When Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered fire on Fort Sumter in April 1861, war broke out. Four more states then seceded, and the Confederacy moved its capital to Richmond, Virginia.

  For four years, from 1861 to 1865, the South was the primary battleground. All but two of the major battles took place on Southern soil. Union forces took the border states in 1861, the Tennessee, Cumberland and Mississippi rivers and New Orleans across 1862 and 1863. In the East, Robert E. Lee beat back attack after attack defending Richmond, but was repulsed at Sharpsburg in 1862 and Gettysburg in 1863. The Confederacy could finance a short war, not a long one. It abandoned the South's traditional low tariffs for a new 15% tax on Union imports, but the Union blockade and smugglers left it nearly worthless.

  Not every Southerner backed the Confederacy. As many as 100,000 men in Confederate-controlled states served in the Union Army or pro-Union guerrilla groups. They were known as Southern Unionists, and their largest populations sat in Tennessee, especially East Tennessee, in Virginia, and in North Carolina. The human cost fell hardest on the South. The Confederacy lost 95,000 soldiers killed in action and 165,000 to disease, a total of 260,000 out of a white Southern population near 5.5 million. Based on 1860 figures, about 18% of white Southern males aged 13 to 43 died, compared with 6% in the North.

• 6. The Long Disenfranchisement

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  In 1832, South Carolina passed an ordinance of nullification, declaring it could repeal a federal tariff law within its borders. A naval flotilla was sent to Charleston harbor and the threat of ground troops forced the tariffs to be collected. The compromise lowered the tariffs gradually, but the argument over states' rights kept escalating toward secession. After the war that argument took a new shape, in the long campaign to strip African Americans of the vote.

  The Ku Klux Klan rose quickly after the war's end in the 1860s, sworn to perpetuate white supremacy and using lynching, beatings and house burnings to keep African Americans from their political rights. When the first Klan was broken by federal prosecution in the early 1870s, other groups took its place. The White League in Louisiana in 1874 and the Red Shirts in Mississippi in 1875 used organized violence to drive Republicans from office. By 1876, white Democrats had regained power in most state legislatures and began stripping African Americans and poor whites from the voter rolls.

  From 1890 to 1908, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, plus Oklahoma at statehood, passed disenfranchising constitutions or amendments. Poll taxes, residency requirements and literacy tests locked out most African Americans, most Mexican Americans, and tens of thousands of poor whites. Grandfather clauses temporarily spared white illiterates. Alabama, which had granted universal white suffrage in 1819, sharply cut voting by poor whites. Scholars have called pockets of the South authoritarian enclaves lasting from Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The voting bloc this produced, controlled by the Democratic Party from 1877 to 1964, became known as the Solid South. Most Black Americans in the former Confederacy could not vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

• 7. From Backwardness To Boom

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  The first major oil well in the South was drilled at Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas, on the morning of the 10th of January 1901. The Oil Boom that followed permanently transformed the West South Central economy and produced the richest expansion since the Civil War. It arrived in a region that white Democrats had deliberately kept hostile to industry, writing anti-industrial constitutions in the 1890s and starving cities of services. Alabama refused to redistrict between 1901 and 1972, even as Birmingham generated most of the state's revenue and got little back.

  World War II broke the pattern. The South's warm weather made it ideal for 60% of the Army's new training camps and nearly half its new airfields, and 40% of new military installation spending went there. Over $4 billion went into Southern military facilities and another $5 billion into defense plants. The town of Starke, Florida, home to 1,500 people in 1940, became Camp Blanding, where by March 1941 some 20,000 men were building a permanent camp for 60,000 soldiers. Per capita income jumped 140% from 1940 to 1945, against 100% elsewhere. As historian Dewey Grantham put it, the war "brought an abrupt departure from the South's economic backwardness, poverty, and distinctive rural life."

  Growth accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s into autos, telecommunications, textiles, technology, banking and aviation. By the 2000 census the South led the nation in population growth. In 2019, Texas alone held 50 Fortune 500 headquarters, rising to 53 by 2022. The two largest research parks in the country sit here, the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and Cummings Research Park in Huntsville, Alabama. The growth was uneven. In 2021, nine of the ten states with the highest poverty rates were Southern, and in 2023 all five states with the lowest GDP per capita were in the South: Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, and South Carolina.

• 8. A Culture Of Its Own

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  The American South is known for its distinctive dialect and accent, rooted in settlement by groups from across England, including the West Midlands, southwest England, and southeast England. The city of Birmingham, Alabama, takes its name from Birmingham in the West Midlands. Later came Northern English, Scots lowlanders and the Ulster-Scots, the largest group of non-English immigrants from the British Isles before the Revolution, who settled Appalachia and the Upland South. Alongside them came the African people brought as slaves, whose descendants accounted for 12.1% of the total U.S. population in the 2000 census.

  This blend produced the music that defines Southern culture: spiritual, blues, jazz, R&B, soul, country, zydeco, bluegrass and rock and roll. It also produced an idea of the planter as gentleman. The Southern planter class traced itself to the early modern English landed gentry, landowners who, in historian G. E. Mingay's words, had wealth that "made possible a certain kind of education, a standard of comfort, and a degree of leisure." The gentry did not work; their income came from rents paid by tenant farmers. Out of the rank of Gentleman grew the chivalric ideal of the white planter, imagined as descended from medieval knights and Cavaliers.

  Outsiders noticed the difference early. In 1765, London philanthropist Dr. John Fothergill said Southerners below Maryland were marked by "idleness and extravagance" and resembled the people of the Caribbean more than the northern colonies. The South also became the most religious region in the country. Evangelical Protestantism dominated from the early 1800s, the fruit of the Second Great Awakening, and by 1900 the Southern Baptist Convention was the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. That high church attendance gives the region its name as the Bible Belt. In the 21st century the cultural lines have blurred, as millions of Northerners, Westerners and Hispanic migrants arrive, and the South's largest city, Houston, keeps growing.