South: History
The Spanish and French had begun to build settlements throughout the South as early as the 1520s. However, by the early seventeenth century the British had pushed them back to what are now Florida and Louisiana, and steered the region toward a role as supplier of raw materials to its cotton mills and tobacco factories. Both climate and soil favored staple agriculture, and massive labor-intensive plantations started to spring up. No self-respecting European would cross the Atlantic to pick cotton on a plantation, so the big landowners turned to slavery as the most profitable source of labor. Millions of blacks were brought into the country, primarily through the port of Charleston.As the South became increasingly set in its ways, with little incentive to diversify, the Northern states surged ahead in both agriculture and industry. By the early nineteenth century the Southern economy was clearly subservient to that of the North: the South grew the crops, but Northern factories monopolized the more lucrative manufacturing of finished goods. Southern politicians and plantation-owners accused the North of political and economic aggression, and felt that unless slavery continued to spread into the territories and even the free states, they would progressively lose all say in the future of the nation. The election as president in late 1860 of Abraham Lincoln , a longtime critic of slavery, brought the crisis to a head, and in February 1861 six Southern states broke away to form the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy on February 18, 1861 - an occasion on which his vice president proudly proclaimed that this government was "the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical and moral truth … that the Negro is not equal to the white man." Secession radically upped the stakes in the controversy. Most Northerners had been indifferent to the issue of slavery - even Lincoln, as late as mid-1861, said "I have no purpose … to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists" - but the potential destruction of the Union was seen as a far more serious, and treacherous, threat.
During the resultant Civil War , the South was outgunned and ultimately overwhelmed by the vast resources of the North. The Confederates fired the first shots and scored the first victory in April 1861, when the Union garrison at Fort Sumter (outside Charleston, South Carolina) surrendered. The Union was on the military defensive until mid-1862, when its navy blockaded the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas and occupied several key ports. Then Union forces in the west, under generals Grant and Sherman, swept through Tennessee, and by the end of 1863 the North had taken Vicksburg, the final Confederate-held port on the Mississippi, as well as the strategic mountain-locked town of Chattanooga on the Tennessee-Georgia border. Grant proceeded north to Virginia, while Sherman captured the transportation nexus of Atlanta and began a bloody and ruthless march to the coast, burning everything in his way. With 228,000 men dead (a quarter of the South's adult white male population), the Confederacy's defeat was total, and General Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox in Virginia.
The war was followed by a period of Reconstruction , when the South was occupied by Union troops. The political administrations imposed and run by Northern Republicans ("carpetbaggers" or "scalawags") were characterized by corruption, but what galled Southerners most was that blacks were also involved in government. When this probationary era came to an end in the mid-1870s, the Southern states returned to Democratic Party control. Black politicians were intimidated out of office, in particular by the Ku Klux Klan , which was started in 1865 by ex-Confederate officers. " Jim Crow " segregation laws were imposed, and poll taxes, literacy tests and property qualifications disenfranchised virtually all blacks (and many poor whites).
The war left the South in chaos. Along with the devastating death toll, two-thirds of Southern wealth had been destroyed. From controlling thirty percent of the nation's assets in 1860, the South was down to twelve percent in 1870, while the spur the war gave to industrialization meant that the North was booming. With the abolition of slavery, the plantations were no longer viable. Instead, the Southern economy turned to sharecropping , a crude barter system under which landowners provided their tenants with land, housing and even food and implements, the cost of which was later deducted (along with a high rate of interest) from the sale of crops. Most farms, however, were too small to be economical. As a result, the freed slaves benefited little from the abolition of what southern states called their "peculiar institution": thousands were forced into debt, and there were mass migrations to cities like Memphis and Atlanta, as well as to the North.
After the uncertainties of Reconstruction, industrial growth accelerated (the impetus coming, ironically enough, from Northern investors, who took advantage of the cheap land and labor), but even by the 1929 stock market crash the South still lagged well behind the North. During the Great Depression , the region was especially hard hit because so many of its people were poor to begin with. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program, particularly the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority and road-building projects, helped to alleviate immediate hardships and lay down an infrastructure to aid economic recovery. The war effort during the early Forties stimulated industrial growth. Since the Sixties, foreign companies, particularly from Japan, have opened thousands of new factories in the South, attracted by the anti-union "Right to Work" statutes upheld by most states. Also, the warm climate - the South is a large component of the US " Sun Belt " - has attracted many companies from the East and Midwest. Nonetheless, the overall lack of agricultural and industrial diversification still means that huge parts of the South remain disturbingly poor.
The political revolution wrought by Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s included a more liberal trend in federal law-making. A groundbreaking 1954 Supreme Court ruling outlawed segregation in schools, but individual Southern states were at best very slow to effect the required changes. The civil rights movement , which began when blacks campaigned for desegregation in education, soon expanded to encompass demonstrations and protests - such as the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-in - against racial barriers in other areas of life. Before civil rights legislation was finally imposed in the late Sixties, some southern whites, encouraged by firebrand politicians, put up a bloody resistance to change, and left behind a catalog of murder, attacks and harassment - particularly in Mississippi and Alabama. Modern travelers can follow in the footsteps of Dr Martin Luther King Jr throughout the South, from his birthplace in Atlanta, through his church in Montgomery, to the site of his assassination in Memphis, commemorated (some think rather inappropriately) by the National Civil Rights Museum.
The civil rights years had a marked effect on party politics in the South. Since the Civil War the region had voted almost en bloc for the Democrats , but as that party became more identified with liberal reforms, greater government intervention and, especially, racial integration, there was a marked shift toward the Republican Party, especially in presidential elections. Right-wing politicians have been forced to search for a party political home. Dinosaur Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and the equally vitriolic George Wallace campaigned for the US presidency under the banners of small segregationist parties. More recently, Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott has added to the traditional Southern demagoguery typified by fellow GOP Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Meanwhile, many unreconstructed backwoodsmen still fight for white supremacy under the umbrella of the Democratic Party.
The dispossession of the Native Americans is often the forgotten chapter of Southern history. Colonial powers at best tolerated the Indians, for the most part peaceful agrarian tribes, and used them as allies in their imperialist wars with each other. However, after the Revolution, pressure from plantation owners and small farmers led to the forced removal in the 1830s of the "five civilized tribes" - the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole - to malarial Oklahoma. Today only a few thousand Native Americans live in the South.
Copyright Rough Guides Ltd as trustee for its authors. Published by Rough Guides. All rights reserved. The Rough Guides name is a trademark of Rough Guides Ltd.
Copyright © 2006 United States.biz
