White Southerners

The politics and economy of the South were historically dominated by a small rural elite.^[10] When looked at broadly, studies have shown that Southerners tend to be more conservative than most non-Southerners, with liberalism being mostly predominant in places with a Black majority or urban areas in the South.^[11][12]

The predominant culture of the original Southern states was English, particularly from South East England, South West England and the West Midlands.^[13] In the 17th century, most voluntary immigrants were of English origin and settled chiefly along the eastern coast, but had pushed as far inland as the Appalachian Mountains by the 18th century. The majority of early English settlers were indentured servants, who gained freedom after working off their passage.^[14] The wealthier men, typically members of the English landed gentry, who paid their way received land grants known as headrights to encourage settlement.^[13]

 

During the colonial era, the British upper classes consisted of two sometimes overlapping entities, the peerage and landed gentry. In the British peerage, only the senior family member (typically the eldest son) inherited a substantive title (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron); these are referred to as peers or lords. The rest of the nobility form part of the landed gentry (abbreviated "gentry").^[16]

The term landed gentry, although originally used to mean nobility, came to be used for the lesser nobility in England around 1540.^[17] The landed gentry was a traditional British social class consisting of gentlemen in the original sense; that is, those who owned land in the form of country estates to such an extent that they were not required to actively work, except in an administrative capacity on their own lands. The estates were often (but not always) worked by tenant farmers, in which case the gentleman could live entirely off rent income. Gentlemen, ranking above yeomen, formed the lowest rank of British nobility.^[18]

William Berkeley, who served as the governor of Virginia from 1660 to 1677, instituted a "Second Sons" policy, in which younger sons of the British nobility were recruited to emigrate to Virginia.^[19] Berkeley also emphasized the headright system, the offering of large tracts of land to those arriving in the colony. This early immigration by an elite contributed to the development of an aristocratic political and social structure in the South.^[20]

According to historian G. E. Mingay, the gentry were landowners whose wealth "made possible a certain kind of education, a standard of comfort, and a degree of leisure and a common interest in ways of spending it". Leisure distinguished gentry from businessmen who gained their wealth through work. From the late 16th-century, the gentry emerged as the class most closely involved in politics, the military and law.^[21]

 

According to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Bondage was an answer to an economic need. The South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South."^[23] Between one-half and two-thirds of European immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies between the 1630s and the American Revolution came as indentured servants.^[24] However, while more than half the European immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies were indentured servants, at any one time they were outnumbered by workers who had never been indentured, or whose indenture had expired. Thus free wage labor was the most prevalent for Europeans in the colonies.^[25]

Indentured servitude began its decline after Bacon's Rebellion (1676-1677), a servant uprising against the government of Colonial Virginia.^[26] This was due to multiple factors, such as the treatment of servants, support of native tribes in the surrounding area, a refusal to expand the amount of land an indentured servant could work by the colonial government, and inequality between the upper and lower class in colonial society.^[26] Edmund S. Morgan's 1975 classic, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, connected the threat of Bacon's Rebellion, namely the potential for lower-class revolt, with the Colony of Virginia's transition over to slavery, saying, "But for those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. Virginians did not immediately grasp it. It would sink in as time went on."^[27] In the Chesapeake and Province of North Carolina, tobacco constituted a major percentage of the total agricultural output.^[28]

The Deep South was dominated by cotton and rice plantations, originating with the colony of South Carolina, which was settled by a planter class who initially migrated from the British Caribbean island of Barbados.^[29] The Barbados Slave Code of 1661 was used as a model to control and terrorize the African American slave population.^[30] The first European colonists in the Province of Carolina, before it was split, introduced African slavery into the colony in 1670, the year the colony was founded. Charleston, South Carolina ultimately became the busiest slave port in North America.^[31]

 

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.^[32] J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's 1782 Letters from an American Farmer described Charleston, South Carolina slaveholders as having "all that life affords most bewitching and pleasurable, without labour, without fatigue, hardly subjected to the trouble of wishing." 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.^[32] All of the states north of Maryland passed laws to gradually or immediately abolish slavery between 1777 and 1804.^[33]

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 in 1810 contrasted the "bold and enterprising" residents of the northern states with the "heedless and lazy" people of the South and observed that American customs seemed "entirely changed" over the Potomac River, with Southern society resembling those of the Caribbean.^[32]

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".^[34]

 

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.^[35] Political disputes surrounding foreign policy, slavery and tariffs weakened the notion of an all-Union ideological identity which Southern writers had been promoting for the first thirty years after independence. Due to migration in the South itself, the notion of the South as a unified, distinctive political-economic entity began to replace the more specific local divisions between Easterners and Westerners/plantation-versus-backwoods in the years following the War of 1812, culminating in the Southern literature of William Gilmore Simms. It was only in this generation's youth that the United States as a whole began shifting to a postcolonial society with new vehicles for collective identity; in their adulthood they helped define and historicize the South.^[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] 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".^[38] 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".^[38] 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."^[38] 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.^[39] The slaveholding elite encouraged Romantic "antimodern" narratives of Southern culture as a refuge of traditional community hospitality and chivalry to mobilise 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.^[39]

In the eleven 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, which includes the territory that split from Virginia to become West Virginia.^[40] The four border states that did not secede also permitted slavery.

 

Slavery was less common in the Upland South, comprising the areas in the South outside the Atlantic Plain, which remains heavily white to this day.^[42] Northern English, Scots lowlanders and Ulster-Scots (later called the Scotch-Irish) settled in Appalachia in the 18th century,^[43] and eventually spread westward into the Ozarks and Texas Hill Country. The early settlers of the Ohio Valley were mainly Upland Southerners.^[44]

As independent small farmers living on the harsh American frontier, poor whites had starkly different interests than those of white Southerners that lived on commercial plantations or in large cities. Poor whites were often isolated from the rest of Southern society and civilization during the Antebellum South, with few owning slaves, and many were more likely to be critical of slavery.^[45]

During the American Civil War, some regions of the Upland South such as West Virginia and East Tennessee remained loyal to the Union.^[46] East Tennessee's Republican leanings are rooted in its antebellum Whig sentiments, with historian O.P. Temple tracing this sentiment back to the anti-aristocratic Covenanters of Scotland.^[47]

During the nadir of American race relations at the turn of the 20th century, intense violence and white supremacy flourished in a region suffering from a lack of public education and competition for resources.^[48] Southern politicians of the day built on conflict between poor whites and African Americans in a form of political opportunism.^[49] As John T. Campbell summarizes in The Broad Ax in 1906, the Civil War also caused poor whites to experience intense dire economic conditions and were brought into poverty along with enslaved African-Americans.^[50]

In the past, white men have hated white men quite as much as some of them hate the Negro, and have vented their hatred with as much savagery as they ever have against the Negro. The best educated people have the least race prejudice. In the United States the poor white were encouraged to hate the Negroes because they could then be used to help hold the Negroes in slavery. The Negroes were taught to show contempt for the poor white because this would increase the hatred between them and each side could be used by the master to control the other. The real interest of the poor whites and the Negroes were the same, that of resisting the oppression of the master class. But ignorance stood in the way. This race hatred was at first used to perpetuate white supremacy in politics in the South. The poor whites are almost injured by it as are the Negroes.^[50]

 

According to a 2014 study, about 10% of self-identified White Southerners have >1% African ancestry, compared to 3.5% of White Americans in general.^[53][54]

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".^[55] 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".^[56] 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".^[57]

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".^[58] 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'".^[59]

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.^[60] 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.^[61]

• Mountain white
• Poor White, a sociocultural group
• Black Southerners
• Redneck
• Hillbilly
• History of the Southern United States
• White Americans in Texas
• Jews in the Southern United States
• Cajuns
• Cracker (term)
• French Louisianians
• Country (identity)
• White Americans in Louisiana
• White Americans in Maryland
• History of Italians in Arkansas
• History of Italians in Mississippi
• Floridanos
• White trash

• Griffin, Larry J.; Evenson, Ranae Jo; Thompson, Ashley B. (2005). "Southerners, All?". Southern Cultures. 11 (1): 6–25. doi:10.1353/scu.2005.0005. S2CID 201776159.
• Lind, Michael (5 February 2013). "The white South's last defeat". Salon. Retrieved 24 June 2015.
• Moltke-Hansen, David (2003). "The Rise of Southern Ethnicity". Historically Speaking. 4 (5): 36–38. doi:10.1353/hsp.2003.0034. S2CID 161847511.
• Reed, John Shelton (1980). "Southerners". In Thernstrom, Stephan; Orlov, Ann; Handlin, Oscar (eds.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. pp. 944–948. ISBN 0674375122. OCLC 1038430174.
• Tindall, George B. (1974). "Beyond the Mainstream: The Ethnic Southerners". The Journal of Southern History. 40 (1): 3–18. doi:10.2307/2206054. JSTOR 2206054.