![]() Early use of the term "white Southerner" from the Boston Liberator of July 1856 | |
Total population | |
---|---|
69.7 million (58.2% of the total population of the Southern US) (2020) | |
Regions with significant populations | |
Southern United States, Upland South, Appalachia, Little Dixie (Missouri), Little Dixie (Oklahoma), Americana, São Paulo, and the historical Confederate settlements in British Honduras | |
Languages | |
Predominately varieties of Southern and General American English, with minorities of Spanish, Louisiana French, other European languages, and Semitic languages. | |
Religion | |
Protestantism, minority Catholicism and Judaism [1] [2] | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Other White Americans, African-Americans, Indigenous peoples of the Southeast, White Caribbeans, White Latin Americans |
White Southerners (historically referred to as Southrons) [3] are a regional culture [4] [5] and identity [6] [7] [8] of White Americans from the Southern United States, primarily originating from the various waves of Northwestern and Southern European immigration to the region beginning in the 16th century to the British Southern colonies, French Louisiana [9] , the Spanish-American colonies; and the subsequent waves of immigration from other parts of Europe [10] [11] [12] [13] , the Caribbean [14] , Latin America [15] [16] , and the Mediterranean. [17] [18] Though overwhelmingly of European descent, many blacks in the South assimilated into the white population, resulting in about 10% of white Southerners having traceable African ancestry per some studies. [19] [20]
Evidence of Europeans in the American South can definitively be traced back to 1513 when Spaniard conquistador, Juan Ponce de León, disembarked in Florida. [21] Though despite being the earliest Europeans in what would later become the Southern United States, the Spanish were unable to establish permanent settlements beyond Florida and Texas due to Native American raids and conflict with the English.
Due to this, the majority of white Southern culture, language, religion, traditions, and folkways can be traced back to the waves of immigrants arriving from the British Isles in the 17th-18th centuries. [22] [23] [24]
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. [25] 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 concurred in 1810 that American customs seemed "entirely changed" over the Potomac River, and that Southern society resembled those of the Caribbean. [25]
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". J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's 1782 Letters from an American Farmer declared that although slavery had not been completely abolished in the Northern states, conditions in Southern slavery was "different... in every respect", emphasizing the contrasting treatment of slaves. Crèvecœur sought to portray Southerners as stuck in the social, cultural and economic remnants of colonialism, in contrast to the Northerners whom he considered to be representative of the distinctive culture of the new nation. [31]
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. [36]
Some Southern writers in the lead up to the American Civil War (1861–1865) built on the idea of a Southern nation by claiming that secession was not based on slavery but rather on "two separate nations". These writers postulated that Southerners were descended from Norman cavaliers, Huguenots, Jacobites and other supposed "Mediterranean races" linked to the Romans, while Northerners were claimed to be descended from Anglo-Saxon serfs and other Germanic immigrants who had a supposed "hereditary hatred" against the Southerners. [37] The white planter class was believed to subscribe to a code of Southern chivalry, [38] descended from that of the Virginia Cavaliers. [39] These ethnonationalist beliefs of being a "warrior race" widely disseminated among the Southern upper class, and Southerners began to use the term "Yankee" as a slur against a so-called "Yankee race" that they associated with being "calculating, money worshipping, cowardly" or even as "hordes" and "semi-barbarian". [40] Southern ideologues also used their alleged Norman ancestors to explain their attachment to the institution of slavery, as opposed to the Northerners who were denigrated as descendants of a so-called "slave race". [40] Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and German-American political scientist Francis Lieber, who condemned the Southerners' belief in their supposed distinct ancestry, attributed the Civil War's outbreak to that belief. In 1866, Edward A. Pollard, author of the first history book on the Confederacy The Lost Cause, continued insisting that the South had to "assert its well-known superiority in civilization over the people of the North." [40] 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. [41] The slaveholding elite encouraged Romantic "antimodern" narratives of Southern culture as a refuge of traditional community hospitality and chivalry to mobilize popular support from non-slaveholding White Southerners, promising to bring the South through a form of technological and economic progress without the perceived social ills of modern industrial societies. [41]
White Southerners have always composed a significant percentage of the United States military and have historically contributed many military leaders. [42] [43]
Various factors contribute to this martial tradition including; socio-economic factors, the high presence of military bases in the region, and most importantly, the culture of chivalry. Researchers have compared the Southern military tradition to other traditionally martial cultures, such as the Prussian Junkers. [44] [45]
This military tradition was a major advantage the Confederate States of America had over the United States during the American Civil War, as white Southerners had dominated the United States military prior to 1860. [46]
There is a long history of mixing between both white and black Southerners; socially, racially, and culturally. Both groups have existed in the South since the 17th century and thus share many cultural traits. For example, some researchers believe AAVE evolved out of the dialects of poor English indentured servants who worked the fields alongside African slaves and servants. [47] In addition, many white-led abolitionist groups in the decades leading up to the American Civil War were located in the Southern states, [48] [49] [50] free blacks shaped the Southern backcountry alongside their white neighbors, the majority of music traditions [51] [52] and cuisine [53] originating in the Southern US are of Afro-European origin, and the South has a long history of racially integrated labor movements. [54]
Until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865, African chattel slavery formed a crucial role in the development of white Southern cultural consciousness and was the primary cause of the formation of the Confederate States of America. [57] In the eleven-thirteen 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. [58] On March 21, 1861, Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens gave his infamous Cornerstone Speech in which he stated the following:
"The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew." Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." [59]
During the Reconstruction era, white Southern paramilitaries such as the Ku Klux Klan, Redeemers, White League, and Red Shirts, waged a guerilla war on Federal forces and newly emancipated blacks in order to reestablish Southern Democrat control. [60] [61] President Rutherford B. Hayes would go on to withdraw the last Federal troops from the South in 1877, [62] allowing for these white supremacist politicians and militias to retake control. Upon regaining power, white Southerners would once again disenfranchise and terrorize black Southerners, ushering in the Jim Crow era. Only in 1964 did the Civil Rights Act legally end Jim Crow laws which mandated the segregation of races in the Southern United States. [63] [64] [65] Upon white Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton being elected to the U.S. presidency during the late 20th century, it symbolized generations of change from an Old South to New South society. Journalist Hodding Carter and State Department spokesperson during the Carter Administration stated: "The thing about the South is that it's finally multiple rather than singular in almost every respect." The transition from President Carter to President Clinton also mirrored the social and economic evolution of the South in the mid-to-late 20th century. [66]
Sociologist William L. Smith argues that "regional identity and ethnic identity are often intertwined in a variety of interesting ways such that some scholars have viewed white southerners as an ethnic group". [67] In her book Southern Women, Caroline Matheny Dillman also documents a number of authors who posit that Southerners might constitute an ethnic group. She notes that the historian George Brown Tindall analyzed the persistence of the distinctiveness of Southern culture in The Ethnic Southerners (1976), "and referred to the South as a subculture, pointing out its ethnic and regional identity". The 1977 book The Ethnic Imperative, by Howard F. Stein and Robert F. Hill, "viewed Southerners as a special kind of white ethnicity". Dillman notes that these authors, and earlier work by John Shelton Reed, all refer to the earlier work of Lewis Killian, whose White Southerners, first published in 1970, introduced "the idea that Southerners can be viewed as an American ethnic group". [68] Killian does however note, that: "Whatever claims to ethnicity or minority status ardent 'Southernists' may have advanced, white southerners are not counted as such in official enumerations". [69]
Precursors to Killian include sociologist Erdman Beynon, who in 1938 made the observation that "there appears to be an emergent group consciousness among the southern white laborers", and economist Stuart Jamieson, who argued four years later in 1942 that Oklahomans, Arkansans and Texans who were living in the valleys of California were starting to take on the "appearance of a distinct 'ethnic group'". Beynon saw this group consciousness as deriving partly from the tendency of northerners to consider them as a homogeneous group, and Jamieson saw it as a response to the label "Okie". [70] More recently, historian Clyde N. Wilson has argued that "In the North and West, white Southerners were treated as and understood themselves to be a distinct ethnic group, referred to negatively as 'hillbillies' and 'Okies'". [71]
The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, published in 1980, includes a chapter on Southerners authored by John Shelton Reed, alongside chapters by other contributors on Appalachians and Yankees. Writing in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies , social anthropologist M. G. Smith argued that the entries do not satisfactorily indicate how these groups meet the criteria of ethnicity, and so justify inclusion in the encyclopedia. [72] Historian David L. Carlton, argues that Killian, Reed and Tindall's "ethnic approach does provide a way to understand the South as part of a vast, patchwork America, the components of which have been loath to allow their particularities to be eaten away by the corrosions of a liberal-capitalist order", nonetheless notes problems with the approach. He argues that the South is home to two ethnic communities (white and black) as well as smaller, growing ethnic groups, not just one. He argues that: "Most important, though, and most troubling, is the peculiar relationship of white southerners to the nation's history." The view of the average white Southerner, Carlton argues, is that they are quintessential Americans, and their nationalism equates "America" with the South. [73]
Poor white and Native American migrant farmers from Oklahoma and Arkansas made the trek from their home states to the Central Valley of California during the Dust Bowl, which ecologically devastated the region. These migrants would synthesize into a unique cultural group in California, creating the Bakersfield sound country music genre, the rural inland dialect of California English, and inspiring John Steinbeck's award-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath. [74] [75] [76]
The Confederados of Brazil are the descendants of some 20,000 post-Civil War Southern immigrants who left the United States due to their opposition to abolition and Reconstruction. They introduced Southern cuisine, the Southern Baptist Church, American educational methods, and improved methods of cotton farming. [77] [78]
"Many persons who, from long habit and fondly cherished theories, have become strongly attached to the institution of African slavery, fancy that in Brazil they will find an opportunity for the permanent use of that system of labor — Brazil and the Spanish possessions being the only two slaveholding communities remaining in the civilized world," - New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 1865. [79]
Descendants of Confederate immigrants form a distinct sub-group in Belize. Their ancestors had left the United States due to Reconstruction and the abolition of slavery. Well known Confederate Belizeans include Confederate politician Colin J. McRae and Joseph Benjamin, brother of Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. [80] [81]
The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States between the Union and the Confederacy, which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded from the Union. The central conflict leading to the war was a dispute over whether slavery should be permitted to expand into the nation's western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prohibited from doing so, which many believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction.
The Confederate States of America (CSA), commonly referred to as the Confederate States (C.S.), the Confederacy, or the South, was an unrecognized breakaway republic in the Southern United States that existed from February 8, 1861, to May 9, 1865. The Confederacy comprised eleven U.S. states that declared secession and warred against the United States during the American Civil War. The states were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
White trash is a derogatory term in American English for poor white people, especially in the rural areas of the southern United States. The label signifies a social class inside the white population and especially a degraded standard of living. It is used as a way to separate the "noble and hardworking" "good poor" from the lazy, "undisciplined, ungrateful and disgusting" "bad poor". The use of the term provides middle- and upper-class whites a means of distancing themselves from the poverty and powerlessness of poor whites, who cannot enjoy those privileges, as well as a way to disown their perceived behavior.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, and the promotion of the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy.
The Southern United States, sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, Dixieland, or simply the South, is a geographic and cultural region of the United States of America. It is between the Atlantic Ocean and the Western United States, with the Midwestern and Northeastern United States to its north and the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico to its south.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
The Confederate States Army, also called the Confederate Army or the Southern Army, was the military land force of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War (1861–1865), fighting against the United States forces to win the independence of the Southern states and uphold and expand the institution of slavery. On February 28, 1861, the Provisional Confederate Congress established a provisional volunteer army and gave control over military operations and authority for mustering state forces and volunteers to the newly chosen Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. Davis was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, and colonel of a volunteer regiment during the Mexican–American War. He had also been a United States senator from Mississippi and U.S. Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. On March 1, 1861, on behalf of the Confederate government, Davis assumed control of the military situation at Charleston, South Carolina, where South Carolina state militia besieged Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, held by a small U.S. Army garrison. By March 1861, the Provisional Confederate Congress expanded the provisional forces and established a more permanent Confederate States Army.
A consensus of historians who address the origins of the American Civil War agree that the preservation of the institution of slavery was the principal aim of the eleven Southern states that declared their secession from the United States and united to form the Confederate States of America. However, while historians in the 21st century agree on the centrality of slavery in the conflict, they disagree sharply on which aspects of this conflict were most important, and on the North's reasons for refusing to allow the Southern states to secede. Proponents of the pseudo-historical Lost Cause ideology have denied that slavery was the principal cause of the secession, a view that has been disproven by the overwhelming historical evidence against it, notably some of the seceding states' own secession documents.
Neo-Confederates are groups and individuals who portray the Confederate States of America and its actions during the American Civil War in a positive light. The League of the South, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other neo-Confederate organizations continue to defend the secession of the former Confederate States.
The history of the Southern United States spans back thousands of years to the first evidence of human occupation. The Paleo-Indians were the first peoples to inhabit the Americas and what would become the Southern United States. By the time Europeans arrived in the 15th century, the region was inhabited by the Mississippian people, well known for their mound-building cultures, building some of the largest cities of the Pre-Columbian United States. European history in the region would begin with the earliest days of the exploration. Spain, France, and especially England explored and claimed parts of the region.
The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is an American pseudohistorical and historical negationist myth that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery. First enunciated in 1866, it has continued to influence racism, gender roles, and religious attitudes in the Southern United States into the 21st century. Historians have dismantled many parts of the Lost Cause mythos.
The most common name for the American Civil War in modern American usage is simply "The Civil War". Although rarely used during the war, the term "War Between the States" became widespread afterward in the Southern United States. During and immediately after the war, Northern historians often used the terms "War of the Rebellion" and "Great Rebellion", and the Confederate term was "War for Southern Independence", which regained some currency in the 20th century but has again fallen out of use. The name "Slaveholders' Rebellion" was used by Frederick Douglass and appears in newspaper articles. "Freedom War" is used to celebrate the war's effect of ending slavery.
Barbara Jeanne Fields is an American historian. She is a professor of American history at Columbia University. Her focus is on the history of the American South, 19th century social history, and the transition to capitalism in the United States.
The Upland South and Upper South are two overlapping cultural and geographic subregions in the inland part of the Southern United States. They differ from the Deep South and Atlantic coastal plain by terrain, history, economics, demographics, and settlement patterns.
In the United States, Southern Unionists were white Southerners living in the Confederate States of America opposed to secession. Many fought for the Union during the Civil War. These people are also referred to as Southern Loyalists, Union Loyalists, or Lincoln's Loyalists. Pro-Confederates in the South derided them as "Tories". During Reconstruction, these terms were replaced by "scalawag", which covered all Southern whites who supported the Republican Party.
Historiography examines how the past has been viewed or interpreted. Historiographic issues about the American Civil War include the name of the war, the origins or causes of the war, and President Abraham Lincoln's views and goals regarding slavery.
Michael Hill is an American former university professor and political activist from Alabama. He is a co-founder and the president of the "Southern secession" movement the League of the South, an organization whose stated goal is to create an independent country made up of the former states of the American South.
Jews have inhabited the Southern United States since the late 1600s and have contributed to the vibrant cultural and historical legacy of the South in many ways. Although the United States' Jewish population is more often thought to be concentrated in Northern cities, such as New York, thousands of Jewish immigrants chose to settle in the more rural Southern United States forming tight-knit religious communities and creating a unique cultural identity. Jewish immigrants came to the South from various countries, backgrounds and religious traditions within Judaism. Major Jewish communities include Memphis, Tennessee; Houston, Texas; Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Wilmington, North Carolina. Jews participated in many important events in Southern history, such as the Civil War, the World Wars, and the civil rights movement.
From the late-18th to the mid-19th century, various states of the United States allowed the enslavement of human beings, most of whom had been transported from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade or were their descendants. The institution of chattel slavery was established in North America in the 16th century under Spanish colonization, British colonization, French colonization, and Dutch colonization.
Southern chivalry, or the Cavalier myth, was a popular concept describing the aristocratic honor culture of the Southern United States during the Antebellum, Civil War, and early Postbellum eras. The archetype of a Southern gentleman became popular as a chivalric ideal of the slaveowning planter class, emphasizing both familial and personal honor in addition to the ability to defend either by force if necessary. Southern chivalry is today seen as an attempt to justify the racist and patriarchal stratification of Southern society, with the goal of maintaining or legitimizing the human rights abuses of American slavery.
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