White Southerners


White Southerners, historically called White Confederates or Southrons, are White Americans from the Southern United States, originating from the various waves of Northwestern European immigration to the region beginning in the 17th century. A uniform sense of identity among White Southerners emerged as part of a common Southern culture.
Academic John Shelton Reed argues that "Southerners' differences from the American mainstream have been similar in kind, if not degree, to those of the immigrant ethnic groups". Reed states that Southerners, as other ethnic groups, are marked by differences from the national norm, noting that they tend to be poorer, less educated, more rural, and specialize in job occupation. He argues that they tended to differ in cultural and political terms, and that their accents serve as an ethnic marker.
Upon white Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton being elected to the U.S. presidency during the late 20th century, it symbolized generations of change from an Old South to New South society. Journalist Hodding Carter and State Department spokesperson during the Carter administration stated: "The thing about the South is that it's finally multiple rather than singular in almost every respect." The transition from President Carter to President Clinton also mirrored the social and economic evolution of the South in the mid-to-late 20th century.
White Southern diaspora populations exist in Brazil and Belize, known respectively as the Confederados and Confederate Belizeans.

History

The Spanish were the first Europeans to explore the Southern United States and to contact Native Americans in the region. Juan Ponce de León discovered Florida. Hernando de Soto explored Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas.
Before European colonization, The Southern United States was originally inhabited by various Native American tribes. Europeans had wiped out their population by giving them diseases. During the early 1800s, Native Americans were forcibly displaced as part of a brutal initiative aimed at clearing land for white settlers. The introduction of Spanish and French explorers in the 1500s marked the onset of European influences and the marked the beginning of white settlement in the South, and subsequently, the establishment of the United States of America placed Native Americans in direct opposition to an increasing number of white settlers. By the early 1800s, the Indian Removal Act presented a harrowing dilemma for most tribes: either assimilate into white culture or migrate westward into an uncertain future. Under the leadership of president Andrew Jackson, the notorious Trail of Tears resulted in the forced removal of thousands of Native Americans from the South to Indian Territory, which is now known as Oklahoma.
The Plantations of Ireland took place before and during the earliest British colonization of the Americas, and a group known as the West Country Men were involved in both Irish and American colonization.
Spain, England and France colonized the region.

Southern states

The Southern United States is not a geographical monolith. The South consists of several geographical regions, including the Deep South, the Upland South, and the Border states. Texas and Florida also have significant Hispanic influence, from being formerly part of Mexico and Spain, respectively.
In particular, the border states of the Upper South have geographic, social, political, and economic connections to both the North and South. They are still considered to delineate the cultural border between the North and South, with the Ohio River being an important boundary between them.

Historical identity

The politics and economy of the South were historically dominated by a small rural elite. 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.

Origins

The predominant culture of the original Southern states was English, particularly from South East England, South West England and the West Midlands. 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. The wealthier men, typically members of the English landed gentry, who paid their way received land grants known as headrights to encourage settlement.

Landed gentry

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 inherited a substantive title ; these are referred to as peers or lords. The rest of the nobility form part of the landed gentry.
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 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.
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. 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.
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.

Instituting slavery

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." Between one-half and two-thirds of European immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies between the 1630s and the American Revolution came as indentured servants. 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.
Indentured servitude began its decline after Bacon's Rebellion, a servant uprising against the government of Colonial Virginia. 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. 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." In the Chesapeake and Province of North Carolina, tobacco constituted a major percentage of the total agricultural output.
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. The Barbados Slave Code of 1661 was used as a model to control and terrorize the African American slave population. 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.

Cultural differences

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. 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. All of the states north of Maryland passed laws to gradually or immediately abolish slavery between 1777 and 1804.
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.
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".