The U.S. Southern States or The South is perhaps the most distinctive region of the United States having its own unique historical prespective, customs and cuisine. There is some overlap with The Southwest and the Mid-Atlantic States.
- North Carolina
- South Carolina
- West Virginia
Like New England, the South was first settled by English Protestants. The South received the continent's largest population of enslaved Africans; in some states their descendants outnumbered people of European descent in the 19th century. Whereas New Englanders tended to stress their differences from the British, Southern whites tended to emulate them. Even so, Southerners were prominent among the leaders of the American Revolution, and four of America's first five presidents were Virginians. After 1800, however, the interests of the manufacturing North and the agrarian South began to diverge.
Especially in coastal areas, southern settlers grew wealthy by raising and selling rice, indigo, cotton, and tobacco. The most economical way to raise these crops was on large farms, called plantations, which required the work of many laborers. To supply this need, plantation owners relied on slaves brought from Africa, and slavery spread throughout the South.
Slavery was the most contentious issue dividing North and South. To many northerners it was immoral; to many southerners it was integral to their way of life. In 1860, 11 southern states left the Union intending to form a separate nation, the Confederate States of America. This rupture led to the American Civil War, the Confederacy's defeat, and the end of slavery. The scars left by the war took decades to heal, and in one instance have never healed--the war led to the permanent partition of Virginia into today's Virginia and West Virginia. The abolition of slavery failed to provide African Americans with political or economic equality: Southern towns and cities legalized and refined the practice of racial segregation.
It took a long, concerted effort by African Americans and their supporters to end segregation. In the meantime, however, the South could point with pride to a 20th-century regional outpouring of literature by, among others, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor.
As southerners, black and white, shook off the effects of slavery and racial division, a new regional pride expressed itself under the banner of "the New South" and in such events as the annual Spoleto Music Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Today the South has evolved into a manufacturing region, and high-rise buildings crowd the skylines of such cities as Atlanta, Houston and Little Rock, Arkansas. Owing to its mild weather, the South has become a mecca for retirees from other U.S. regions and from Canada.
Exceptions within the region