United States - Southern Culture, History, Economy (2024)

By far the largest of the three original Anglo-American culture areas, the South is also the most idiosyncratic with respect to national norms—or slowest to accept them. The South was once so distinct from the non-South in almost every observable or quantifiable feature and so fiercely proud of its peculiarities that for some years the question of whether it could maintain political and social unity with the non-South was in serious doubt. These differences are still observable in almost every realm of human activity, including rural economy, dialect, diet, costume, folklore, politics, architecture, social customs, and recreation. Only during the 20th century can an argument be made that it has achieved a decisive convergence with the rest of the nation, at least in terms of economic behaviour and material culture.

A persistent deviation from the national mainstream probably began in the first years of settlement. The first settlers of the South were almost purely British, not outwardly different from those who flocked to New England or the Midland, but almost certainly distinct in terms of motives and social values and more conservative in retaining the rurality and the family and social structure of premodern Europe. The vast importation of enslaved Africans was also a major factor, as was a degree of contact with the Indians that was less pronounced farther north. In addition, the unusual pattern of economy (much different from that of northwestern Europe), settlement, and social organization, which were in part an adaptation to a starkly unfamiliar physical habitat, accentuated the South’s deviation from other culture areas.

In both origin and spatial structure, the South has been characterized by diffuseness. In the search for a single cultural hearth, the most plausible choice is the Chesapeake Bay area and the northeastern corner of North Carolina, the earliest area of recognizably Southern character. Early components of Southern population and culture also arrived from other sources. A narrow coastal strip from North Carolina to the Georgia–Florida border and including the Sea Islands is decidedly Southern in character, yet it stands apart self-consciously from other parts of the South. Though colonized directly from Great Britain, it had also significant connections with the West Indies, in which relation the African cultural contribution was strongest and purest. Charleston and Savannah, which nurtured their own distinctive civilizations, dominated this subregion. Similarly, French Louisiana received elements of culture and population—to be stirred into the special Creole mixture—not only, putatively, from the Chesapeake Bay hearth area but also indirectly from France, French Nova Scotia, the French West Indies, and Africa. In south-central Texas, the Germanic and Hispanic influx was so heavy that a special subregion can be designated.

It would seem, then, that the Southern culture area may be an example of convergent, or parallel, evolution of a variety of elements arriving along several paths but subject to some single general process that could mold one larger regional consciousness and way of life.

Because of its slowness in joining the national technological mainstream, the South can be subdivided into a much greater number of subregions than is possible for any of the other older traditional regions. Those described above are of lesser order than the two principal Souths, variously called Upper and Lower (or Deep) South, Upland and Lowland South, or Yeoman and Plantation South.

The Upland South, which comprises the southern Appalachians, the upper Appalachian Piedmont, the Cumberland and other low interior plateaus, and the Ozarks and Ouachitas, was colonized culturally and demographically from the Chesapeake Bay hearth area and the Midland; it is most emphatically white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) in character. The latter area, which contains a large Black population, includes the greater part of the South Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and the lower Appalachian Piedmont. Its early major influences came from the Chesapeake Bay area, with only minor elements from the coastal Carolina–Georgia belt, Louisiana, and elsewhere. The division between the two subregions remains distinct from Virginia to Texas, but each region can be further subdivided. Within the Upland South, the Ozark region might legitimately be detached from the Appalachian; and, within the latter, the proud and prosperous Kentucky Bluegrass, with its emphasis on tobacco and Thoroughbreds, certainly merits special recognition.

Toward the margins of the South, the difficulties in delimiting subregions become greater. The outer limits themselves are a topic of special interest. There seems to be more than an accidental relation between these limits and various climatic factors. The fuzzy northern boundary, definitely not associated with the conventional Mason and Dixon Line or the Ohio River, seems most closely associated with length of frost-free season or with temperature during the winter. As the Southern cultural complex was carried to the West, it not only retained its strength but became more intense, in contrast to the influence of New England and the Midland. But the South finally fades away as one approaches the 100th meridian, with its critical decline in annual precipitation. The apparent correlation between the cultural South and a humid subtropical climatic regime is in many ways valid.

The Texas subregion is so large, distinctive, vigorous, and self-assertive that it presents some vexing classificatory questions. Is Texas simply a subregion of the Greater South, or has it acquired so strong and divergent an identity that it can be regarded as a major region in its own right? It is likely that a major region has been born in a frontier zone in which several distinct cultural communities confront one another and in which the mixture has bred the vigorous, extroverted, aggressive Texas personality so widely celebrated in song and story. Similarly, peninsular Florida may be considered either within or juxtaposed to the South but not necessarily part of it. In the case of Florida, an almost empty territory began to receive significant settlement only after about 1890, and if, like Texas, most of it came from the older South, there were also vigorous infusions from elsewhere.

The Midland

The significance of this region has not been less than that of New England or the South, but its characteristics are the least conspicuous to outsiders as well as to its own residents—reflecting, perhaps, its centrality in the course of U.S. development. The Midland (a term not to be confused with Midwest) comprises portions of Middle Atlantic and Upper Southern states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Serious European settlement of the Midland began a generation or more after that of the other major cultural centres and after several earlier, relatively ineffectual trials by the Dutch, Swedes, Finns, and British. But once begun late in the 17th century by William Penn and his associates, the colonization of the area was a success. Within southeastern Pennsylvania this culture area first assumed its distinctive character: a prosperous, sober, industrious agricultural society that quickly became a mixed economy as mercantile and later industrial functions came to the fore. By the mid-18th century much of the region had acquired a markedly urban character, resembling in many ways the more advanced portions of the North Sea countries. In this respect, at least, the Midland was well ahead of neighbouring areas to the north and south.

It differed also in its polyglot ethnicity. From almost the beginning, the various ethnic and religious groups of the British Isles were joined by immigrants from the European mainland. This diversity has grown and is likely to continue. The mosaic of colonial ethnic groups has persisted in much of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, as has the remarkable variety of nationalities and churches in coalfields, company towns, cities, and many rural areas. Much of the same ethnic heterogeneity can be seen in New England, the Midwest, and a few other areas, but the Midland stands out as perhaps the most polyglot region of the nation. The Germanic element has always been notably strong, if irregularly distributed, in the Midland, accounting for more than 70 percent of the population of many towns. Had the Anglo-American culture not triumphed, the area might well have been designated Pennsylvania German.

Physiography and migration carried the Midland culture area into the Maryland Piedmont. Although its width tapers quickly below the Potomac, it reaches into parts of Virginia and West Virginia, with traces legible far down the Appalachian zone and into the South.

The northern half of the greater Midland region (the New York subregion, or New England Extended) cannot be assigned unequivocally to either New England or this Midland. Essentially it is a hybrid formed mainly from two regional strains of almost equal strength: New England and the post-1660 British element moving up the Hudson valley and beyond. There has also been a persistent, if slight, residue of early Dutch culture and some subtle filtering northward of Pennsylvanian influences. Apparently within the New York subregion occurred the first major fusion of American regional cultures, especially within the early 19th-century “Burned-Over District,” around the Finger Lakes and Genesee areas of central and western New York. This locality, the seedbed for a number of important social innovations, was a major staging area for westward migration and possibly a major source for the people and notions that were to build the Midwestern culture area.

Toward the west the Midland retains its integrity for only a short distance—certainly no further than eastern Ohio—as it becomes submerged within the Midwest. Still, its significance in the genesis of the Midwest and the national culture should not be minimized. Its success in projecting its image upon so much of the country may have drawn attention away from the source area. As both name and location suggest, the Midland is intermediate in character in many respects, lying between New England and the South. Its residents are much less concerned with, or conscious of, a strong regional identity (excepting the Pennsylvania Dutch caricatures) than is true for the other regions, and, in addition, the Midland lacks their strong political and literary traditions, though it is unmistakable in its distinctive townscapes and farmsteads.