the South

SOUTH, THE, a large area of the United States which pre sents certain distinctive characteristics.

The south-eastern quarter of the country includes 6 of the original 13 States, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, and it States added since the forma tion of the Union, viz., Kentucky (1792), Tennessee (1796), Louisiana (1812), Mississippi (1817), Alabama (1819), Missouri (1821), Arkansas (1836), Florida Texas (1845), West Virginia (1863) and Oklahoma (1907). Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri which lie next to the North ern States are often referred to as "border" States, and because of their location the differences which distinguish the South from the North are in them less defined. During the Civil War, for instance, the border States, although slave-holding States, did not secede from the Union. Delaware, since the Civil War, generally considers itself a Northern State, while Missouri has become definitely mid-western. Texas and Oklahoma also share many of the Western characteristics. Because they were settled by Southerners, however, and were slave States they are considered historically as part of the South.

Historical Development.

At the time of the first census in 1790 the populations of the two major divisions of the country then existing, the North and the South, were practically equal (1,967,197 and 1,962,428 respectively), and their influence in the control of the Federal Government was about evenly divided. In the decade 1790 to i800 the population increase in the North (36.5%) was slightly more than in the South (33.7%)• In each succeeding decade up to 186o the growth of the North was greater, and that of the South less, than its increment in the initial decade until, in 186o, the numbers were 20,309,960 and 11,133,361 respec tively. Because of its proportional loss in population, the South was forced to wage an increasingly desperate struggle to retain its former influence in the Federal Government, and thus to pro tect its peculiar interests, the chief of which was the institution of slavery. Slavery, which had in colonial times become rooted in Virginia and Maryland in connection with the raising of tobacco and along the Carolina coast in connection with the raising of cotton, spread rapidly after the introduction of the cotton gin about 1800. The gin made profitable the raising of a kind of cot ton containing many seeds which grew in the upland Piedmont regions and in the interior, where the cotton with fewer seeds would not grow. Under this stimulus plantations grew rapidly in the fresher lands of the newer Gulf States to the west, while the tobacco industry also found fresh ground in Kentucky and Ten nessee. Slavery also assisted agriculture.

Despite the difference in population the number of Slave States and free States remained equal until the admission of California as a free State in 185o, and because of this the South kept its influ ence in the Senate unshaken until that date. The decreasing power was evident long before, however, and the South was led to the adoption and development of the doctrine of State sovereignty to protect its interests. This doctrine was resorted to in 1832 to defend itself against a tariff imposed by Northern interests which the South believed to bear heavily upon itself, but the matter was smoothed over for the time being by a compromise tariff. Com promises upon the slavery question were also made in 182o and in 185o, but neither was permanent, and by the very nature of the institution it seemed a permanent compromise was impossible. Finally, in defence of slavery, the Southern States carried their doctrine of State sovereignty to its ultimate conclusion and seceded from the Union, forming a union of their own, known as the Con federate States of America. After four years of bitter Civil War the South was left beaten and exhausted.

There followed a long period of both economic and spiritual depression in the South which was felt not only by the generation of adults then living, but by the next generation as well. The re covery might have been more rapid had President Lincoln's wise and humane plan of reconstruction been carried through, but Lin coln's assassination and his successor's unfortunate quarrel with the dominant Republican Congress proved a disaster for the South. By the Reconstruction Act of 1867 the seceded States, except Ten nessee, were divided into five military districts, each under the command of a Northern army general. The defeated States were not to be readmitted into the Union until they had met a pro gramme of requirements, which was not done by any of them until 1869 and 187o. In the meantime control of the governments in most of the States had been in the hands of ignorant negroes or newcomers from the North, generally stigmatized as "carpet bag gers," and it was not until a decade after the close of the war that the Southern whites again gained control. Only then was economic habilitation able to go forward on a firm basis. It was a generation before education and allied cultural developments gathered momentum enough to again move forward.