Southern

[David Bergdahl]

James Landau wrote
"First, the 'South' is those 13 states which had stars on the Confederate
battle flag (the one with the St. Andrew's cross).  Hence the South includes
Maryland, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Texas but excludes the slave states of
Missouri and Delaware.
"What do these 13 states have in common?  They were dominated, politically
and culturally, by the socio-economic class that included the large-scale
slaveowners and those economically associated with them (including the
slaves).  In most of these states the politically dominating areas were
those in which the major form of agriculture was the slave-run plantations."

Carver has a number of things to say in addition: the South has the highest
average rainfall, the fewest number of foreign-born citizens, &c.  Culture
and language often go together: in Germany the area south of the Danube
cattle-farms while north of the river they pig-farm; the Catholic/prot split
seems to work there as well.  In the U.S. we all recognize the confederacy
does not define what, for us, is considered The South.  West Virginia,
Kentucky and parts of Tennessee were border states after the civil war but
have become southern.  Landau continues:

"How to classify West Virginia?  It is not Southern.  It broke off from
Virginia because, although part of Virginia, it was a region with few slaves
and therefore not part of the standard Southern socio-economic model.  It
must be either Northeast or Midwest, but it does not border the Atlantic
like a Northeast state nor was it settled from the Northeast like the rest
of the Midwest."

"It is not Southern" but a good part of it has become southern, just as
southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois have, by migration and by cultural
identification.  In language PEAS recognizes the Kanahwa R. as the boundary
between the Penn and MD-like northern panhandle and the Kentuckian
coalfields to the south and west.  I remember slow and fast diphthongs as
being one of the defining features (book is at work).

History and geography may have been crucial in the formation of the dialect,
but migration carries the population to other areas not so defined--the
Inland Northern area does not resemble the geography of upper Conn R valley
that created its distinctive features (loss of ENE rounded vowel in "cot,"
of the contrast between "road" and "rode," retention of postvocalic R &c.).
Upstate NY is better suited for farming than W New England but light
manufacturing was continued and heavier manufacturing was introduced along
the barge canal and on the great lakes.

"The South is defined by its culture, which descended from its practice of
owning slaves, yet one must remember that slave-owning flourished where it
did, and failed to flourish in the north, for reasons of geography."

The north abandoned slave-owning, possibly because of cheap immigrant labor
(the old "wage-slave" vs. "chattel-slave" argument), possibly because
northerners fertilized their lands, or because their cash crops did not
exhaust the soil as did tobacco and cotton.  After Clay's "American Plan" we
can recognize a tripartite division of the country into manufacturing north,
"breadbasket" midwest connected to the east by rivers, roads and canals, and
a south of large farms which exported their raw material to the north and to
Brittain.  Slave-owning may have diminished in the north as the result of
cultural factors as well: England's early rejection of slavery, the
influence of organized religion, &c.  Africans certainly were as well suited
to light and heavy industry as to farming: many freedmen and escaped slaves
were employed in industry in the north as they had been in the south .  I
think we're on a stronger basis when we differentiate north, south and
midwest by the dominant industry rather than on the basis of slavery.
Culture, not geography.  Think of the water-power potential of the Piedmont
stretching from Virginia to Carolina: small industry could have developed to
rival farming; cotton and lumber mills did in fact prosper there.  Why,
then, the over-reliance upon large-scale agriculture?  Landau states that
the large landowners dominated (see first quotation above).  Culture.

___________________
David Bergdahl