The history of the United States southern states reaches back to the very earliest days of the exploration and colonization of North America. Spain, France, and England eventually explored and claimed parts of the U.S. South, and the cultural influences of each can still be seen in the region today. In addition, many Native American tribes once inhabited the region, and their histories are inextricably intertwined with those of the early European settlers.
The Pre-Columbian South
In Pre-Columbian times (before Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492), the only inhabitants of what is now the Southern United States were the Native American tribes. The more notable tribes that developed in the area included what are known as "the five civilized tribes": the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole.
These people were for the most part hunters and farmers. They often built villages surrounded with fortification, as there were frequent wars between tribes, though some were nomadic. In some villages, a central meeting house was the focal point and was used for ceremonial purposes, or for religious worship. Some built mounds to honor their dead. Women made pottery from clay and decorated it with depictions of people and animals. Some tribes had a caste system in which chiefs and their families were honored and a kind of nobility existed.
European colonization
Spanish exploration
After Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, Spain made frequent exploratory trips to the New World. Rumors of natives being decorated with gold and stories of a Fountain of Youth helped hold the interest of many Spanish explorers, and colonization followed eventually. Among the first European settlements in North America were Spanish settlements in what would later become the state of Florida. Spain also colonized parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
French colonization
The French primarily established colonies in Canada. They found the New World to be a fruitful land for fur trapping and trading. The French fur traders expanded their hunting lands by traveling down the Mississippi River, where they found animals such as beaver, mink, and fox. France quickly claimed these fertile regions for themselves and several French settlements were established. Two very notable French colonies were New Orleans and Bienville, which would be later renamed Mobile. The French called their territory Louisiana, in honor of their King Louis.
American Colonial Era (1607-1790)
After the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the exploration of the new world opened to other European Countries, most notably England. Walter Raleigh established a settlement on Roanoke Island, North Carolina in 1585, though the colony failed to prosper. The colonists were retrieved the following year by English supply ships. In 1587 Raleigh again set out with a group of colonists to Roanoke. From this colony, the first recorded European birth in North America, a child named Virginia Dare, was reported. That group of colonists disappeared and is known as the Lost Colony. Many people theorize that they were either killed or taken in by local tribes.
Like New England, the South was originally settled by English Protestants, later becoming a melting pot of religions as with other parts of the country. While the earlier attempt at colonization had failed on Roanoke Island in 1587, the English established their first permanent colony at the mouth of the James River in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.
Settlement of the Chesapeake Bay was driven by desire to obtain precious metal resources, specifically gold. The colony was also technically still within Spanish territorial claims (and hopefully the gold reportedly within that territory), yet far enough from most Spanish settlements as to avoid colonial clashes. As the "Anchor of the South", the region includes the Delmarva Peninsula and much of coastal Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware.
Early in the history of the colony, it became clear that the claims of gold deposits were vastly exaggerated. Referred to as the "Starving Time" of the Jamestown colony, the years from the time of landing in 1607 until 1609 were rife with starvation and instability. However, Native American support in addition to reinforcements from Britain sustained the colony.
Due to continued political and economic instability, however, the Colony of Virginia charter was revoked in 1624. Primary in this revocation was the revelation that thousands of settlers were "gone" and presumed starved after investigations following a 1622 attack by Native American tribes led by Opchanacanough. A royal charter was established for Virginia, yet the House of Burgesses, formed in 1619, was allowed to continue as political leadership for the colony in conjunction with a royal governor.
Important for the Virginia Colony and Southern political and cultural development was Governor William Berkeley and his rule over Virginia from 1645 until 1675. His desire for an elite immigration to Virginia led to the "Second Sons" policy, which recruited the younger sons of the English planter elite to emigrate to Virginia. Also, Berkeley emphasized the "headright system", giving large tracts of land to those arriving in the colony. Much of this early immigration would lead to the aristocratic nature of the political and social structure of the South.
Despite the early failures, English colonists continued to arrive along the southern Atlantic coast. Virginia became a prosperous English colony. The area now known as Georgia, was also settled, though its beginnings were as a penal colony similar to what was established by the English in Australia.
Rise of tobacco culture and slavery in the colonial South
See main article Slavery in Colonial America
From the 1613 introduction of tobacco, its cultivation began to form the basis of the early Southern economy. Only later technological developments, especially the Whitney Cotton gin of 1794, allowed greater cotton cultivation. However, until that point, most cotton was farmed in large plantations in the Province of Carolina, and small-scale farming of tobacco was the dominant cash crop export of the South throughout the Middle Atlantic States.
The earliest form of slavery in the colonies emerged from the first introduction of slaves in 1619 aboard a Dutch slave ship , until approximately the 1660s when slaves became a better economic labor force than indentured servants. During this period, often life expectancy was low and indentured servants came from overpopulated European areas. With the lower price of servants compared to slaves, and the high mortality of the servants, planters often found it much more economical to use servants.
Because of this, slavery in the early colonial period differed greatly in the American colonies from that in the Caribbean. Often Caribbean slaves were worked literally to death on large sugar and rice plantations, while American slaves maintained higher life expectancy and attained a level of natural reproduction. This natural reproduction was important for the continuation for slavery after the prohibition on slave importation in 1808 by Congress.
Much of the slave trade was conducted on the basis of the "Triangular Trade", an exchange of slaves, rum, and sugar. Southern planters purchased slaves using rum, made in New England from cane sugar, which was in turn grown in the Caribbean. This slave trade was generally able to fulfill labor needs in the South from the cultivation of tobacco after the decline of indentured servants.
At approximately the point when tobacco labor needs began to increase, the mortality of the colonies decreased. By the late 1600s and early 1700s, slaves became economically viable sources of labor for the growing tobacco culture. Also, further South than the Mid-Atlantic, Southern settlers grew wealthy by raising and selling rice, indigo, and cotton. These plantations of South Carolina often became modelled on Caribbean plantations, yet never attained similar size.
The growth of the Southern colonies
For details on each specific colony, see Province of Georgia, Province of Maryland, Province of North Carolina, Province of South Carolina, and Virginia Colony.
By the end of the 17th century, the number of colonists was growing. The large population centers were still in the northeastern and middle colonies, leaving the southern colonies of Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, North and South Carolina a rural frontier land. The economies of these colonies were tied to agriculture. During this time the great plantations were formed by wealthy colonists who saw great opportunity in the new country. Tobacco and cotton were the main cash crops of the areas and were readily accepted by English buyers. Rice and indigo were also grown in the area and exported to Europe. The plantation owners built a vast aristocratic life and accumulated a great deal of wealth from their land. They supported slavery as a means of working their land and tended to keep close ties with the European cultural circles.
On the other side of the agricultural coin were the small yeoman farmers. They did not have the capability or wealth to create large plantations. Instead, they worked small tracts of land and developed a political activism in response to the growing oligarchy of the plantation owners. Many politicians from this era were yeoman farmers speaking out to protect their rights as free men.
Charleston became a booming trade town for the southern colonies. The abundance of pine trees in the area provided raw materials for shipyards to develop and the harbor provided a safe port for English ships bringing in imported goods. The colonists exported tobacco, cotton and textiles and imported tea, sugar and slaves. The fact that these colonies maintained an independent trade relation with England and the rest of Europe became a major factor later on as tension mounted leading up to the Civil War.
Divergence of the North and South
After the late 1600s, the interests of the manufacturing North and the agrarian South began to diverge, especially in coastal areas. The Southern emphasis on export production contrasted sharply with the Northern emphasis on food production, while bearing marked differences between the two in government, education, and religion. Characterized by an elite hierarchical system, the South began to emphasize a rural system of government.
By the mid-1700s, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia had formed as colonies of Britain, along with the later Southern state of Louisiana as a colony of France. For the upper colonies, that is, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and portions of North Carolina, the tobacco culture prevailed. However, in the lower colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, cultivation focused further on cotton and rice.
Louisiana, in contrast, centered around the port city of New Orleans, was economically separate from the British colonies. Also, New Orleans produced a large population of "octaroons", or persons defined as having 1/8 black heritage. Often, these people appeared caucasian, yet were relegated to a lower level of society by the hierarchy of the colony. However, it was possible for free blacks to own slaves, and the city of New Orleans contained many black slaveholders compared to the British colonies.
The South in the American Revolution
For main article, see American Revolution: War in the South
At the start of the Revolutionary War, the focus was in the Northeast, but a stalemate quickly developed causing the British to rethink their strategy. A plan was made that involved capturing the Southern colonies and sweeping north, effectively choking off the resistance. There was a sizable population of British sympathizers in the Carolinas and though the populations of these colonies had surpassed some of their northern counterparts, the region was still mostly rural wilderness. Lord Cornwallis, the British commander of the Southern theater, was put in charge of executing the plans.
Whereas New Englanders tended to stress their differences from the British, Southerners tended to emulate them. Much of this derived from the origins of many Southern immigrants. Much of New England had been populated by East Anglia emigrants, while the more rural and aristocratic western England had supplied settlers for the South. Much of the activity of the Revolution in the lower South surrounded the British belief that Loyalist support would emerge in the South, thereby turning the tide of war in the colonies.
However, due to interior non-slave owners and farmers, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia emerged in support of the Patriot cause. In fact, Southerners were prominent among the leaders of the American Revolution and the Continental Congress, and four of the first five Presidents of the United States were from the Southern state of Virginia.
In 1778, British forces swept into the South, taking Savannah, Georgia. From there, the troops moved north, capturing the important port city of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1780. Later that year, in a devastating blow to the Patriot forces, Cornwallis’ troops took Camden, South Carolina. It seemed that the campaign was a success and Cornwallis was ready to start moving north for the second part of the plan.
In late 1780, the British army and its Loyalist corps began to encounter better-organized Patriot militias in the Carolinas. Cornwallis sent troops to quell the growing Patriot resistance in the area, but the British troops met defeat after defeat. The most significant of these defeats was the Cowpens in January of 1781. Nathaniel Greene, the commander of the patriot forces in the South, then encountered Cornwallis’ troops in March 1781 at Guilford Courthouse. Cornwallis won this battle, but lost more than a third of his troops in the process.
Patriot forces advanced on the British fort Ninety-Six but did never laid siege. British forces moved in to help defend the fort, causing Patriot forces to abandon their efforts. However, British forces did eventually abandon the fort and moved back to the coast. The British campaign in the South was over, and six months later Cornwallis surrendered, ending the war.
Antebellum Era (1781-1860)
After the upheaval of the American Revolution effectively ended in 1781 at the Battle of Yorktown, the South became a major political force in the development of the United States. With the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, the South found political stability, with little federal interference in state affairs. However, with this stability came weakness by design, and the inability of the Confederation to maintain economic viability eventually forced the creation of the United States Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787. Importantly, Southerners of 1861 often believed their secessionist efforts and the Civil War paralleled the American Revolution, as a military and ideological "replay" of the latter.
Southern interests retained great control during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, forcing the inclusion of the "fugitive slave clause" and the "Three-Fifths Compromise". Importantly, there was no explicit anti-slavery position in the Constitution at the time of its ratification. In spite of this, Congress retained the power to regulate slave importation 20 years after the ratification of the Constitution, and this resulted in an expected prohibition on slave imports by the Congress, effective January 1, 1808. While the two groups, both North and South, initially thought each other in agreement, they also held deeply rooted differences. After the convention, two emerging understandings of American republicanism came to loggerheads.
For the North, a Puritanical republicanism predominated, with leaders such as Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. In the South, Agrarian republicanism formed the basis of political culture. While both attempted to preserve their "way of life" in order to preserve the Union, their methods of this preservation were quite different. While Northern republicans aimed to make better people and thus ensure the survival of democracy, Southerners focused on making better conditions. Led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the Agrarian republican position is characterized by the epitaph on the grave of Jefferson. While including his "condition bettering" roles in the foundation of the University of Virginia, and the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statutes on Religious Freedom , absent was his role in the federal government as president of the United States. Southern development of political thought thus focused on the ideal of the yeoman farmer; i.e., those who are tied to the land also have a vested interest in the stability and survival of the government.
Antebellum slavery
See also, History of slavery in the United States
Although slavery was legal in many Northern states before the advent of "free states" in the decades following the American Revolutionary War, slavery in the South continued. While large plantations with dozens or hundreds of slaves were rare, and usually found in the Deep South, the vast majority of Southerners never owned slaves. Most were independent yeoman farmers much like their counterparts in the North, and slavery was not part of everyday life for ordinary Southern citizens. Though some in the North felt that slavery was a moral issue, many Northerners felt that the abolition of slavery would be detrimental to economic interests; especially in later decades, a decrease of cotton cultivation could damage the emerging Northern textile industry. In spite of this, the slave system representated the basis of the Southern social and economic system, and thus even non-slave owners often virulently defended it against abolitionism or gradual emancipation .
Nullification crisis, political representation, and rising sectionalism
See also, Nullification and Nullification crisis
The election of federalist John Adams in the Election of 1796 came in tandem with escalating tensions with France. In 1798, the XYZ Affair brought these tensions to the fore, and Adams became concerned about French power in America, fearing internal sabotage and malcontent brought on by French agents. Due to this and repeated attacks on Adams by Democratic-Republican publishers, Adams allowed the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Enforcement of the acts resulted in the jailing of "seditious" Republican editors throughout the North and South, and prompted Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to author the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, later known as the "Principles of '98" by nullification leaders.
These "Principles of '98" called upon state legislatures to act against unlawful acts of the federal Congress by threat of nullification. While primarily a propaganda document with no legal force, South Carolina leaders of the late 1820s used its premise to support actual nullification. This Nullification crisis came as a result of 1828 tariffs passed as protectionary measures for Northern industry. While Congress agreed to lower the tariff of 1828 in 1832, in that same year the legislature of South Carolina nullified the entire "Tariff of Abominations", prompting a stand-off between the state and President Andrew Jackson, only resolved by the actions of Jackson and a Congressional Force Bill. Later of great importance for the development of secessionist thought, the nullification crisis became a watershed moment in Southern political history.
As the population in the North grew from an influx of European immigrants, Northern representation in Congress also grew to a number that made Southern political leadership increasingly uncomfortable. Southerners became concerned that they would soon find themselves at the mercy of a federal government in which they no longer had an effective voice. By the late 1840s, Senator Jefferson Davis from Mississippi stated that this new Northern majority in the Congress would make the government of the United States "an engine of Northern aggrandizement" and that Northern leaders had an agenda to "promote the industry of the United States at the expense of the people of the South."
An additional factor that led to Southern sectionalism was the proliferation of cultural and literary magazines such as the Southern Literary Messenger and DeBow's Review. Reference:[1]
Civil War (1860-1865)
For details, see main article American Civil War.
The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 devastated the Old South socially and economically. Before the war, the South was the wealthiest part of the United States. After the war, during the Reconstruction period, the South struggled to rise from poverty and worked to establish a successful economy from the ashes. Richmond, Virginia, the former Capital of the Confederacy, grew quickly mostly due to its railroads, canals, and cutting edge electric trolley system, and later its Federal Reserve Bank.
Election of 1860, Secession, and Lincoln's response
Fears of a Northern Republican presidential victory became reality after the Election of 1860. With the election of Abraham Lincoln by 40% of the popular vote and without the electoral votes of any Southern state, Southerners viewed their political survival in doubt. Indeed, only 2 of the 996 counties of the South voted for Lincoln. Reference:U.S. presidential election, 1860
Members of the South Carolina legislature had previously sworn to secede from the Union if Lincoln was elected, thus prompting the secession of that state on December 20, 1860. Following South Carolina, the Mississippi legislature voted for secession on January 9, 1861, with Florida on the 10th. Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed within the next month. The sitting "lame duck" President, James Buchanan, felt himself powerless to act. Throughout the South, authorities occupied federal arsenals and fortifications without resistance. In the four months between Lincoln's election and his inauguration, the South strengthened its position unmolested.
Once in office, Lincoln was initially unwilling to compel the Southern states back into the Union, deciding to allow Southern aggression to promote Northern support for forcible compulsion. When a supply ship was dispatched to federal-held Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, secessionists felt obliged to act. To forestall the resupply of the fort, Rebel coastal artillery batteries opened fire at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, forcing rapid capitulation of the fort. In response to the attack on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln immediately called upon the states to supply 75,000 troops to serve for ninety days against “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” as a result of this call by the widely unsupported Lincoln for troops to invade another Southern state, Virginia, Arkansas, and Tennessee promptly seceded.
Formation of the Confederacy
The eleven Southern states that left the Union formed a separate nation, the Confederate States of America. The war that broke out was called the American Civil War in the North, but it was called the "War for Southern Independence," "The War Between the States," and "The War of Northern Aggression" in the South. The variations are indicative of the differing perceptions of the war in the South. The war was fought mostly on Southern lands, which prompts many contemporary Southerners to quip, "There was nothing civil about it."
During the war, the pro-Union northwestern region of Confederate Virginia seceded to become the new Union state of West Virginia. Several other Southern states also had areas with strong Union sympathies; generally these were upland areas where plantation-style agriculture and hence widespread slavery had never been feasible. Likewise, many Northern states had regions with Southern sympathies, especially in the border states.
Out-gunned, out-manned, and out-financed, defeat loomed over the head of the Confederacy after four years of fighting. Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, advocated resorting to guerrilla warfare to extend the struggle for an even longer time, but his generals, notably Robert E. Lee, felt the honorable thing to do was to end the war and begin reconciliation with the North.
Reconstruction (1865-1877)
Abolition of slavery
At the outbreak of the war, slavery was legal in the Northern States of Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. Slavery was also legal in Washington D.C. and remained legal in the new Union State of West Virginia. On January 1, 1863, as the third year of the war approached, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in US states not under Federal control. This had several effects to include augmenting the ranks of the Union Army with black soldiers, as well as transforming the character of the war into a crusade for freedom. The Emancipation Proclamation was, however, limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. Most importantly, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory. In 1864, a year before the war came to an end, the Southern States of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana abolished slavery.
Contrary to common belief, the end of the war did not equate to the end of slavery. Slavery still existed in some states until the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution passed in December 1865, eight months after General Lee's surrender.
The abolition of slavery failed to provide Africans with political or economic equality: Southern states, towns, and cities legalized and refined the practice of racial segregation. For a long period thereafter, well into the 20th century, the South enforced regional white supremacy through Jim Crow laws, segregation, sharecropping, and disenfranchisement. Domestic terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan also plagued African-Americans in both the North and the South.
Military occupation
After the war, the South was divided into five occupation zones:
About 200,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in the U.S. Southern states to oversee the process of Reconstruction. Governments that had been established under Abraham Lincoln's plan were abolished; the first Reconstruction Act stated that "no legal State governments or adequate protection for life or property now exist in the rebel States."
Development and evolution of the "New South" (1877-Present)
Sometime after World War II, the old agrarian Southern economy evolved into the "New South" – a manufacturing region with strong roots in Northern-style financial capitalism. High-rise buildings now crowd the skylines of Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Dallas, Nashville, and Little Rock. In the 20th century, the South saw an impressive regional outpouring of literature by William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Andrew Nelson Lytle , Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, among others.
Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 tried to end racial discrimination in the U.S. South, segregation was still common, especially in schools. Between the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and the enactment of the Civil Rights Act a decade later, less than 1 percent of Southern schools were integrated. Many school systems had a difficult time enforcing desegregation (Duval County in Florida, for example, had many open protests when their school system, one of the biggest in the South, was integrated in 1967).
By the dawn of the 1970s, while the area was becoming more progressive, many areas still had separate facilities for both white and black students. When the higher courts threatened to withhold funding from the public schools that did not wish to comply with federal law, the systems started to integrate. Most Southern schools were integrated by the mid-1970s, with very few exceptions, such as Escambia High School in Pensacola, Florida. The riots against integration by the student body there sparked much bloodshed when the proposed desegregation plan was announced in 1975.
See also
References
-
- Bertram Wyatt-Brown (1990). Honor and Violence in the Old South. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 0-19-504242-5.
- Peter Kolchin (1993). American Slavery: 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 0-8090-1630-3.
- William C. Davis (2003). Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-684-86585-8.
External links
