SOUTH

A southern migration, commencing during the American Revolution and producing six states (Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri) by 1821, led to great changes in the westernmost parts of the southern United States. The result was the growth of not one South, but a set of discrete subregions.

climate, topography, soil, and crops

"Let us begin by discussing the weather," wrote the eminent southern historian, Ulrich B. Phillips, as the first words of the best-known book on the South, "for that has been the chief agency in making the South distinctive." Certainly, the South's sultry climate has always set it apart from the rest of the nation. Lying roughly between thirty-nine and thirty degrees north latitude (thus covering some five hundred miles from north to south) aside from Florida, the summer temperatures in much of the South stay consistently over ninety degrees during the summer months, with nearly 90 percent relative humidity in the Lower South states. While the border area receives nearly the same amount of precipitation—twenty-four inches—as the southern Piedmont during the warm seasons, it receives between ten and fifteen inches less precipitation, so vital to most staple crops, than do most of the Deep South states in their warm seasons. Conversely, the South's winters vary more widely in degree: while the Upper South has at best two hundred frost-free growing days per year (even less west of the Appalachians, which shelters Virginia and Maryland from the driving cold fronts that chill the Middle Border subregion), the Deep South boasts some forty or fifty more than that, allowing the Deep South states an extra six growing weeks or more between the last killing frosts in spring and first killing frosts in the fall. The average minimum temperature in the Upper South is as much as thirty degrees colder than in much of the Lower South (even more than in the coastal Sea Islands area and Florida), meaning nearly twenty more inches of frost penetration into the soil. Although western migrants who began moving to the border states as early as the 1770s may have attempted to replicate or even better the society of their former homes, the distinctive climate of the Upper South forced adaptations upon the social landscape.

The South's topography varies as widely as its climate, and it influenced migratory patterns that resulted in distinct intraregional cultures. The Appalachian Mountains slash southward through the easternmost southern states, forming a barrier of sorts between the Atlantic seaboard and the country further west that influenced migratory patterns. Settlers who moved westward from the Upper Chesapeake along with those from the mid-Atlantic states most often used the Ohio River for westward transportation, settling predominantly in the border regions of Kentucky and Missouri and creating a cultural admixture of northern and southern influences. Settlers from southwestern Virginia and North Carolina more often traveled through the Cumberland Gap, settling Tennessee and central and southern Kentucky, while settlers from South Carolina and Georgia avoided the mountains completely by migrating to the Gulf States. The Appalachians themselves, along with the Ozarks, became a destination for later settlers, often Scots-Irish, who set up distinctive and often isolated communities separated by mountain valleys. The Lower Mississippi Valley was a place apart from the rest of the South, largely as a result of its French and Spanish heritage (the area did not become a part of the United States until 1803), but this Latin South had a slave population that was far more Africanized in the nineteenth century than in other parts of the South.

The South's soils vary widely as well: rich loess in the Missouri and Ohio River valleys; rich alluvial soil in the Mississippi Delta; flinty limestone in the Appalachian and Ozark Mountain highlands; sandy loam in the Tidewater and coastal lowlands; and distinctive red clay in the Appalachian Piedmont. While soil did not in itself influence the resulting economy as much as did climate, the thin soils of the mountain and sand-hill areas proved less capable of producing the staple crops that characterized large subregions of the South. Those crops, in many historians' estimation, and more specifically the cultures that evolved from their prolonged production, gave the South its most distinctive character. Tobacco, colonial North America's first export crop, dominated in southern Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri, ultimately sharing preeminence there with hemp as well as wheat, the latter of which by the 1820s had replaced tobacco as the subregion's largest export crop. Farther south, rice dominated the South Carolina and Georgia low country, while sugar reigned over much of lower Louisiana. Cotton, which became the South's signature cash crop after 1810, extended through the Piedmont plantation belt and between the too-cool tobacco belt and the too-wet rice and sugar belts, extending westward by 1830 into the Old Southwest. Needing 180 growing days, and with cultivation periods that complemented those for food crops such as corn (thus maximizing labor efficiency), cotton had by the 1820s already become the nation's leading export, earning it the designation King Cotton. Remarkably, the output of cotton doubled every decade after 1800, the largest growth rate of any agricultural commodity in the nation; by 1830, southern cotton constituted two-thirds of the value of the nation's exported commodities.

manufacturing and cities

Though more agricultural in nature than much of the North, the South developed its own manufacturing base, one that illustrated the stark differences between the Border and Upper Souths on the one hand and the Lower South on the other. Eighty percent of the South's manufacturing capacity lay in the Border South. The industrial growth of the Border South drove urbanization and stimulated the growth of the area's population. By 1830, three of the South's five largest cities—Baltimore, St. Louis, and Richmond—lay in the Border and Upper Souths, their populations eclipsing all other southern cities save New Orleans and Charleston. Their trade networks extended northward and eastward by rail lines far more than by any traditional river or ocean links with the Lower South and Europe. Some 45 percent of the South's population lived in the Border States alone.

religion

The South's religious heritage profoundly influenced its distinctive culture away from the cultures that characterized the northern states. Nowhere was this more evident than in the intense revivals that erupted throughout the region, especially in the Border and Upper Souths, at the outset of the nineteenth century, reshaping these subregions' religious contours and helping to develop their unique character. Where the Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century had introduced a class-based evangelicalism that emplaced the Baptist and Methodist sects as egalitarian alternatives to the elitism of the Anglican church in Virginia, the Revolutionary era and its aftermath empowered them (along with Presbyterians) as denominations throughout the South. The rapid rise of the western states and the proliferation of a slavebased, staple crop economy soon brought on personal uncertainties about material advancement just as rampant secularism caused church attendance to decline precipitously. Initially suspect, itinerant ministers soon softened their condemnations of such "declension" as they sought communicants. Meanwhile, western settlers, and especially women, were seeking relief from the burdens and vicissitudes of frontier life. What resulted was a series of revivals that swept the Border and Upper Souths over several decades, the largest of which occurred at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1801, when some twenty thousand persons assembled for an immense outdoor, interdenominational camp meeting marked by emotional preaching and mass conversions. This religious fervor soon spread and swelled the congregations of the evangelical churches throughout the entire South as they eagerly reached out to black and white, male and female converts. Ironically, evangelical religion set down the rhythms of southern religious culture just as it linked the new subregions of the South with the older seaboard states and helped to distinguish all of them from the culture of the North.

slavery

Above all other regional aspects, and in tandem with the development of the staple crop economy, slavery shaped the South's distinctiveness from other regions of the country. Yet the "peculiar institution" also magnified the South's intraregional variances. Between 1790 and 1830, as the South's overall white population nearly tripled from 1.3 million to 3.7 million, its slave population kept pace, increasing from 675,000 to more than two million. As the Border and Upper Souths' transition from staple crops to food crops and industry changed their economic bases, so the population density of slaves shifted southward. Where in 1790 slaves comprised onethird of the Upper and Border Souths' populations (including the District of Columbia), by 1830 that figure had fallen to 30 percent; meanwhile, the Lower South's slave population increased from 41 percent of the subregion's whole to more than 47 percent. The proportion was lowest in the Border and mountain Souths, where but 14 percent and less than 5 percent of their overall populations, respectively, were bondpeople. Though it boasted only a quarter of the South's white population in 1830, slaves in the Lower South comprised 47 percent of its states' populations; in some coastal areas, slaves constituted as much as 90 percent of the residents. Facilitated by the internal slave trade, which would move some half-million slaves southwestward from the Border and Upper Souths, and the economic transitions underway in those subregions, the South was fast becoming a region comprised of white belts and black belts, with the blackest belts in the Lower South, the Mississippi Valley, and the Tidewater area of Virginia (where slavery had begun in the early seventeenth century).

Subregional variation. Although slaves labored in the South's factories, on its docks, and in its fashionable homes, agricultural labor chained some 90 percent of its bondspeople to the southern countryside. The Lower, Upper, and Border Souths had remarkably different slave cultures, depending on their staple crops. The dependency on slavery varied greatly, distinguishing the regions, as the historian Ira Berlin has argued, as being either slave societies or a societies with slaves. The Lower South was clearly a slave society. Its plantations often encompassed thousands of acres and held as many as a hundred slaves each, often working in gangs (especially on cotton plantations) and living apart from their owners' homes in discrete, concentrated slave quarters. Conversely, in the Upper and Border Souths, plantations and farms (as they were invariably referred to west of the mountains) were often smaller and boasted far fewer slaves, who commonly worked side by side with masters and hired white workers in the fields, even living in their masters' homesteads.

Slavery and power. Slaveholding created a unique culture of power in the South. Planters, or those who owned substantial holdings of land and slaves, dominated the economy and the society of the region. Many were sons and grandsons of men in the colonial era who had made substantial beginnings on the family position and fortunes by way of staple production as well as, especially in the Upper South, mercantile and banking activities. Always few in number, such planters held disproportionate shares of political and economic influence, especially in the Lower South and the Tidewater, and zealously protected them through intermarriage with other gentry families and by largesse offered to the white lower classes. Below the planters were the yeomanry, independent landholders and small slaveholders who sought upward mobility but who clung doggedly to their hard-won freehold status, even above slave ownership. Most numerous among the populations of the Upper and Border Souths, these yeomen acceded to the local planters' political dominance in part for the economic advantages the latter afforded them in return, but more as a check against those below them in their respective subregions, namely restless and landless poor whites and black slaves. Indeed, the South's most notorious (and by the 1830s regionally distinct) cultural ritual—the duel—not only reflected all of these social constructs of power (patriarchy, class status, masculinity, personal honor, clannishness, and violence) but was itself dying out in all but the Lower South.

After the colonial period, few class upheavals occurred in the South, in contrast to the North, where they grew more common. Historians generally explain this phenomenon as a product of the South's "herrenvolk democracy," which guaranteed white men equal access to political participation (especially after the decline of property requirements in the 1820s) while excluding African Americans, free and slave, from the rights of full citizenship. This entire social system, based upon deference, patriarchy, reciprocal rights, obligations, coercive violence, and perhaps above all racial hierarchy and chattel slavery, sustained the South uncomfortably as it matured in the years of the early Republic.

sectionalism

The last decade of the early national period witnessed the emergence of national and even intraregional divisions that would soon come to be characterized as "sectionalism." As the nation reeled from its first national economic downturn beginning in 1819 (and felt particularly by cotton-growing states like South Carolina, where the Panic of 1919 severely depressed cotton prices), the congressional debate of 1819–1820 over Missouri statehood revealed that national politics had begun to sectionalize over the issue of slavery. In 1822 South Carolina was shocked by the discovery of a widespread rebellion planned by Charleston slaves and led by a literate free black named Denmark Vesey. The plot was aborted and during subsequent trials, testimony implicated northern antislavery politicians as having influenced Vesey by way of printed speeches. An "Old Republican" states' rights political stance was articulated by leading Virginians such as John Randolph. They sought to curb the nationalizing tendencies of the Virginia Dynasty—presidents from Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe as well as Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall)—which had strengthened the power of the national government, presumably at the expense of the states and, more specifically, the southern states. Like the members of that dynasty, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee and Henry Clay of Kentucky stood as conflicting symbols to southerners. They were at once large slaveholders and "southern" leaders, but they were also principled advocates of a nationalism that seemed to ignore states' rights principles. The Tariff of 1816, decried by southerners as favoring northern industries at the expense of southern exporters, provided a powerful and enduring symbol for southern anger. In 1828, when Congress raised the tariff to its highest level yet (earning for it the southern epithet "Tariff of Abominations"), John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Jackson's vice president, secretly authored a sectional response. His South Carolina Exposition and Protest reinvigorated the doctrine of states' rights (originally articulated by Jefferson and Madison in their Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions [1798]) by offering a mechanism through which a state could check federal power: conventions that would "nullify" within their states' borders any harmful actions by the federal government. Although white southerners had not yet fashioned strong polemical defenses of slavery such as those that would emerge immediately after 1830, political and social events during the last decade of the early national period shaped the emerging proslavery ideology that would ultimately most characterize the South as a distinct region.

See alsoAgriculture: Overview; Northwest and Southwest Ordinances; Proslavery Thought; Religion: Overview; Revivals and Revivalism; Sectionalism and Disunion; Slavery: Overview; States' Rights .

bibliography

Abernethy, Thomas P. The South in the New Nation, 1789–1819. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961.

Aron, Stephen. How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Boles, John B. The South Through Time: A History of an American Region. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Cashin, Joan E. A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Cooper, William J., Jr., and Thomas E. Terrill. The American South: A History. New York: Knopf, 1991.

Phillips, Ulrich B. Life and Labor in the Old South. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1929; repr., 1963.

Christopher Phillips