White Southerners

White Southerners, Southrons

Notable white Southerners from various ethno-cultural communities. Robert E. Lee (Anglo-American) Adina Emilia de Zavala (Tejano) Brett Favre (Louisiana Creole) Helen Keller (Swiss-American) James Ben Ali Haggin (Turkish-American)
Total population
69.7 million (58.2% of the total population of the Southern US) (2020)
Regions with significant populations
Southern United States, Upland South, Appalachia, Little Dixie (Missouri), Little Dixie (Oklahoma), Americana, São Paulo, and the historical Confederate settlements in British Honduras
Languages
Predominately varieties of Southern and General American English, with minorities of Spanish, Louisiana French, other European languages, and Semitic languages.
Religion
Protestantism, minority Catholicism and Judaism
Related ethnic groups
Other White Americans, African-Americans, Indigenous peoples of the Southeast, White Caribbeans, White Bermudians, Rhodesians, and Afrikaners

Early use of white southerner

White Southerners are a subculture of White Americans from the Southern United States, primarily originating from the various waves of Northwestern and Southern European immigration to the region beginning in the 16th century to the British Southern colonies, French Louisiana, the Spanish-American colonies; and the subsequent waves of immigration from Northwestern Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Levant. Though overwhelmingly of European descent, many free blacks in the South assimilated into the white population, resulting in about 10% of white Southerners having traceable African ancestry.

White Southerners developed a semi-uniform identity based on white supremacist, segregationist, pro-slavery, agrarian, Neo-Confederate, and nativist beliefs, though many have gradually shifted away from these roots in recent history. After the end of Jim Crow with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many white Southerners sought to expunge the racist elements that permeated throughout white Southern culture for hundreds of years. Nowadays, many white Southerners define their identity through shared cultural values, racial reconciliation, regional dialects, folklore, musical traditions, American football, and the South's traditionally agrarian society.

History

The first Europeans

Evidence of Europeans in the American South can definitively be traced back to 1513 when Spaniard conquistador, Juan Ponce de León, disembarked in Florida. Though despite being the earliest Europeans in what would later become the Southern United States, the Spanish were unable to establish permanent settlements beyond Florida and Texas due to Native American raids and conflict with the English.

Due to this, the majority of white Southern culture, language, religion, traditions, and folkways can be traced back to the waves of immigrants arriving from the British Isles in the 17th-18th centuries.

Early cultural observations

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. 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 concurred in 1810 that American customs seemed "entirely changed" over the Potomac River, and that Southern society resembled those of the Caribbean.

Scottish author, Sir Walter Scott, who's writings, per Mark Twain, were instrumental in the development of white Southern nationalism in the 19th century.

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". J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's 1782 Letters from an American Farmer declared that although slavery had not been completely abolished in the Northern states, conditions in Southern slavery was "different... in every respect", emphasizing the contrasting treatment of slaves. 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.

Development of Anglo-American nationalism in the Southern states

Further information: Anglo-Saxonism in the 19th century, George Fitzhugh, and Southern Agrarians

James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow, a Fire-Eater publisher, wrote various articles in his magazine, De Bow's Review, on the supposed racial differences between white Southerners and white Northerners. His writings claimed that white Southerners were members of the "noble" Latin race and white Northerners, the "barbaric" Germanic race. De Bow also associated this so-called Southern civilization as being akin to ancient Rome, Greece, and India and believed white Southerners to be the descendants of the Norman conquerors of England.

The War of 1812 brought increasing awareness to the differences between Northerners and Southerners, who had opposed and supported the war respectively. The Panic of 1819 and the 1820 admission of Missouri as a slave state also exacerbated the North–South divide. In 1823, New York activist Gerrit Smith commented that there was an almost "national difference of character between the people of the Northern and the people of the Southern states." Similarly, a 1822 commentary in the North American Review suggested that Southerners were "a different race of men", "highminded and vainglorious" people who lived on the plantations.

Some Southern writers in the lead up to the American Civil War (1861–1865) built on the idea of a Southern nation by claiming that secession was not based on slavery but rather on "two separate nations". These writers postulated that Southerners were descended from Norman cavaliers, Huguenots, Jacobites and other supposed "Mediterranean races" linked to the Romans, while Northerners were claimed to be descended from Anglo-Saxon serfs and other Germanic immigrants who had a supposed "hereditary hatred" against the Southerners. The white planter class was believed to subscribe to a code of Southern chivalry, descended from that of the Virginia Cavaliers. These ethnonationalist beliefs of being a "warrior race" widely disseminated among the Southern upper class, and Southerners began to use the term "Yankee" as a slur against a so-called "Yankee race" that they associated with being "calculating, money worshipping, cowardly" or even as "hordes" and "semi-barbarian". Southern ideologues also used their alleged Norman ancestors to explain their attachment to the institution of slavery, as opposed to the Northerners who were denigrated as descendants of a so-called "slave race". Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and German-American political scientist Francis Lieber, who condemned the Southerners' belief in their supposed distinct ancestry, attributed the Civil War's outbreak to that belief. In 1866, Edward A. Pollard, author of the first history book on the Confederacy The Lost Cause, continued insisting that the South had to "assert its well-known superiority in civilization over the people of the North." Southerners developed their ideas on nationalism on influences from the nationalist movements growing in Europe (such as the works of Johann Gottfried Herder and the constructed north–south divide between Germanic peoples and Italians). Southern ideologues, fearful of mass politics, sought to adopt the ethnic themes of the revolutions of 1848 while distancing themselves from the revolutionaries' radical liberal ideas. The slaveholding elite encouraged Romantic "antimodern" narratives of Southern culture as a refuge of traditional community hospitality and chivalry to mobilize popular support from non-slaveholding White Southerners, promising to bring the South through a form of technological and economic progress without the perceived social ills of modern industrial societies.

White supremacism and slavery

Further information: Slavery in the United States, Nadir of American race relations, and Lost Cause of the Confederacy

The "Stainless Banner", also known as the "White Man's flag" served as the national flag of the Confederate States of America from 1863-1865. On April 23, 1863, the Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson published an editorial which stated what the white portion of the flag represented: "As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."

White supremacism has played a major role in the history of white Southerners, though it's development was gradual and the product of British colonialism in North America. For the vast majority of Southern history, the black majority has been oppressed by the white majority. Beginning in 1619 with the arrival of the first African slaves in the Colony of Virginia, racial attitudes and laws restricting the rights of black Southerners gradually increased over the course of the Antebellum era. Until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865, African chattel slavery formed a crucial role in the development of white Southern cultural consciousness and was the primary cause of the formation of the Confederate States of America. In the eleven-thirteen states that seceded from the United States in 1860–61 to form the Confederacy, 31% of families held at least one African American in slavery. On March 21, 1861, Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens gave his infamous Cornerstone Speech in which he stated the following:

"The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew." Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

Fire-Eater, Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia slaveholder, intellectual, and soldier who shot himself at the end of the Civil War. In his final journal entry he wrote: "And now with my latest writing and utterance, and with what will [be] near to my latest breath, I here repeat, & would willingly proclaim, my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, & to the perfidious, malignant, & vile Yankee race."

During the Reconstruction era, white Southern paramilitaries such as the Ku Klux Klan, Redeemers, White League, and Red Shirts, waged a guerilla war on Federal forces and newly emancipated blacks in order to reestablish Southern Democrat control. President Rutherford B. Hayes would go on to withdraw the last Federal troops from the South in 1877, allowing for these white supremacist politicians and militias to retake control. Upon regaining power, white Southerners would once again disenfranchise and terrorize black Southerners, ushering in the Jim Crow era. Only in 1964 did the Civil Rights Act legally end Jim Crow laws which mandated the segregation of races in the Southern United States. 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.

The One-drop rule

The one drop rule is a legal principle that defines any person with "one drop" of African blood to be legally black.

The racial caste system of the American South did not initially consider anyone of African descent to be legally black. The rule was, in fact, contested several times throughout history and was not uniform across the entirety of the American South. However, most Southern states had implemented one drop laws during the Jim Crow era to prevent race-mixing and to further enforce the white supremacist status quo.

One opponent of the rule was South Carolina politician, George D. Tillman, who stated in a 1895 discussion that:

"It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. Every member has in him a certain mixture of ... colored blood ... It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation, of scandal, horror, feud, and bloodshed to undertake to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood. The doors would be open to scandal, malice, and greed."

During the Antebellum era, a person was legally white if they had less than 1/8th African ancestry or less than 1/4th in Virginia. Many mixed-race people were absorbed into the majority culture based simply on appearance, associations and carrying out community responsibilities. These and community acceptance were the more important factors if a person's racial status were questioned, not their documented ancestry.

West Indian origins of Southern slavery

The British West Indies, specifically Barbados, had a massive impact on the development of Anglo-Southern slavery. Bajan plantations served as a model for Southern plantations, specifically in South Carolina, where white Bajans were recruited to help jumpstart the colony's slave economy in the 17th century. Several waves of white Bajan settlement also occurred during the British colonial period, specifically in Virginia and the Carolinas, where a significant portion of the enslaved African population were of Bajan origin.

White Haitians and creoles also contributed greatly to the slave economy of Louisiana. Having fled the Haitian Revolution and subsequent slaughter of whites by black revolutionaries, around 10,000 white and creole settlers sought refuge in Louisiana, a slave state with a significant Francophone community.

Impact on the development of modern Fascism

The ideology of the Confederate States of America and Jim Crow were sources of inspiration for several prominent Nazis during the early-mid 20th century, including dictator Adolf Hitler.

George Fitzhugh, a Fire-Eater writer and sociologist, is believed to have had a role in the development of a unique Southern form of proto-fascism. Fitzhugh wrote scathing articles attacking democracy, racial equality, and the French Revolution. He also believed that the Southern plantation was the only pure example of Communism and that white Northerners should be enslaved.

Anti-racism and abolitionism

Further information: Cassius Marcellus Clay (politician), P. G. T. Beauregard, and Lowry War

White anti-racism and pro-abolitionism in the American South has existed since the 18th century.

In the 1770s, Quaker and Moravian abolitionists helped persuade numerous slaveholders in the Upper South to free their slaves. Manumissions increased for nearly two decades. Many individual acts by slaveholders freed thousands of slaves. Slaveholders freed slaves in such numbers that the percentage of free black people in the Upper South increased from 1 to 10 percent, with most of that increase in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. By 1810 three-quarters of blacks in Delaware were free. The most notable of men offering freedom was Robert Carter III of Virginia, who freed more than 450 people by "Deed of Gift", filed in 1791. This number was more slaves than any single American had freed before or after. Often slaveholders came to their decisions by their own struggles in the Revolution; their wills and deeds frequently cited language about the equality of men supporting the decision to set slaves free. The era's changing economy also encouraged slaveholders to release slaves. Planters were shifting from labor-intensive tobacco to mixed-crop cultivation and needed fewer slaves.

Former Confederate general, P.G.T Beauregard, became a civil rights activist during the Reconstruction era.

By 1860, 91.7% of the blacks in Delaware and 49.7% of those in Maryland were free. Such early free families often formed the core of artisans, professionals, preachers, and teachers in future generations. However, this did not signal racial equality. Though free from slavery, blacks still faced immense discrimination. For example, Delaware affirmed and reaffirmed black disenfranchisement several times throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries. Delaware's General Assembly enacted harsh black codes throughout the 19th century that restricted travel, property ownership, expression, and socialization for African Americans.

Confederate deserter, Newton Knight, organized the self-proclaimed Free State of Jones during the Civil War in Mississippi. His militia band composed of fellow Confederate deserters, Unionists, and freed slaves would launch raids on Confederate forces in the region.

Albert Parsons, a Confederate veteran turned Radical Republican civil rights activist and politician, was forced to flee Texas due to threats from the Ku Klux Klan and marriage to his mixed-race wife, Lucy. In his 1886 autobiography, Parsons stated:

"I became a Republican, & of course, had to go into politics. I incurred thereby the hate & contumely of many of my former army comrades, neighbors & the Ku Klux Klan. My political career was full of excitement & danger. I took the stump to vindicate my convictions. The lately enfranchised slaves over a large section of country came to know & idolize me as their friend & defender while on the other hand I was regarded as a political heretic & traitor by many of my former associates."

The Young Patriots Organization was a poor white Southern cultural nationalist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist organization allied with the Black Panthers in Chicago in the 1970s.

"The Burning of Jamestown" (1905) by Howard Pyle. During Bacon's Rebellion in colonial Virginia, white and black rebels took part in the uprising.

Influence of African-Americans and Native Americans

Further information: Cuisine of the Southern United States, Bacon's Rebellion, and Banjo

While all white Southerners are commonly stereotyped as being racist and harboring extremely negative attitudes towards African-Americans, there is a long history of mixing between both groups; socially, racially, and culturally. Both groups have existed in the South since the 17th century and thus share many cultural traits. For example, some researchers believe AAVE evolved out of the dialects of poor English indentured servants who worked the fields alongside African slaves and servants. In addition, many white-led abolitionist groups in the decades leading up to the American Civil War were located in the Southern states, free blacks shaped the Southern backcountry alongside their white neighbors, the majority of music traditions and cuisine originating in the Southern US are of Afro-European origin, and the South has a long history of racially integrated labor movements.

Despite the existence of the Cherokee great-grandmother myth in the Southern United States, whites in some regions do have various degrees of indigenous ancestry, though mostly not Cherokee. It is believed that indigenous ancestry among Southern whites is highest in the state of Louisiana. Whites and Native Americans in the South did frequently intermarry, mostly due to white trade with local tribes. Most of the Southeastern Woodlands tribes are heavily intermixed with European ancestry due to these unions. Many white spouses of indigenous women also became full citizens of their spouse's nation, whilst others were made members via adoption and assimilation, such as Sam Houston.

Native Americans had a massive impact on white Southern culinary traditions.

Ethnographic and sociological research

White Southerners as a unique ethnic group

Sociologist William L. Smith argues that "regional identity and ethnic identity are often intertwined in a variety of interesting ways such that some scholars have viewed white southerners as an ethnic group". In her book Southern Women, Caroline Matheny Dillman also documents a number of authors who posit that Southerners might constitute an ethnic group. She notes that the historian George Brown Tindall analyzed the persistence of the distinctiveness of Southern culture in The Ethnic Southerners (1976), "and referred to the South as a subculture, pointing out its ethnic and regional identity". The 1977 book The Ethnic Imperative, by Howard F. Stein and Robert F. Hill, "viewed Southerners as a special kind of white ethnicity". Dillman notes that these authors, and earlier work by John Shelton Reed, all refer to the earlier work of Lewis Killian, whose White Southerners, first published in 1970, introduced "the idea that Southerners can be viewed as an American ethnic group". Killian does however note, that: "Whatever claims to ethnicity or minority status ardent 'Southernists' may have advanced, white southerners are not counted as such in official enumerations".

Two white Southern youths in the poor white Southern neighborhood of Uptown, Chicago, Illinois. (August 1974)

Precursors to Killian include sociologist Erdman Beynon, who in 1938 made the observation that "there appears to be an emergent group consciousness among the southern white laborers", and economist Stuart Jamieson, who argued four years later in 1942 that Oklahomans, Arkansans and Texans who were living in the valleys of California were starting to take on the "appearance of a distinct 'ethnic group'". Beynon saw this group consciousness as deriving partly from the tendency of northerners to consider them as a homogeneous group, and Jamieson saw it as a response to the label "Okie". More recently, historian Clyde N. Wilson has argued that "In the North and West, white Southerners were treated as and understood themselves to be a distinct ethnic group, referred to negatively as 'hillbillies' and 'Okies'".

The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, published in 1980, includes a chapter on Southerners authored by John Shelton Reed, alongside chapters by other contributors on Appalachians and Yankees. Writing in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, social anthropologist M. G. Smith argued that the entries do not satisfactorily indicate how these groups meet the criteria of ethnicity, and so justify inclusion in the encyclopedia. Historian David L. Carlton, argues that Killian, Reed and Tindall's "ethnic approach does provide a way to understand the South as part of a vast, patchwork America, the components of which have been loath to allow their particularities to be eaten away by the corrosions of a liberal-capitalist order", nonetheless notes problems with the approach. He argues that the South is home to two ethnic communities (white and black) as well as smaller, growing ethnic groups, not just one. He argues that: "Most important, though, and most troubling, is the peculiar relationship of white southerners to the nation's history." The view of the average white Southerner, Carlton argues, is that they are quintessential Americans, and their nationalism equates "America" with the South.

Academic John Shelton Reed also 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.

Comparisons to Afrikaners and white Rhodesians

Further information: Apartheid, Great Trek, and Afrikaner nationalism

A map of the proposed Volkstaat, an Afrikaner white ethno-state.

Both Anglo-Americans in the American South and Afrikaners in southern Africa emerged as unique identities from Protestant settlers who fled, were exiled, or voluntarily immigrated to overseas European colonies. Much like the white South, Afrikaners founded their own white settler republics in the interior of southern Africa partially in protest of the British abolition of slavery. These settlers also developed a forced system of indentured servitude, Inboekstelsel, which has been compared to the Southern practice of sharecropping and colonial-era indentured servitude.

Perhaps the most prominent similarly between white Southerners and Afrikaners is their historic support and use of racial segregation.

The flags of the Boer republics and that of apartheid-era South Africa are viewed similarly to how the Confederate battle flag is perceived the modern United States.

Similarities have also been drawn between the white-dominated Republic of Rhodesia and the Confederacy, as both states were founded to ensure the perpetuation of white supremacy over the black population.

Culture of Violence

Further information: Culture of honor (Southern United States) and Lynching

The lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas (1916)

Some researchers believe white Southerners to have a culture of violence, stemming from their British cattle herder and aristocratic ancestry. Cattlemen on the frontiers of Britain relied on their livestock to sustain themselves and their family, making any threat to it a cause for violent response. Conversely, British aristocrats developed an system in which disrespect was met with violence as a means of defending one's honor.

This violence also presented itself in white Southerners' attacks on blacks to enforce white supremacy. Brutality was a common feature of the Southern lynching. Common acts included slicing off extremities and selling them as souvenirs, burning the victim alive, rape, dragging behind vehicles, symbolic cannibalism, and utilizing photos of the deceased victim as postcards.

Psychological research

The Southern United States has some of the lowest reported rates of mental illness in the country, due to the lack of accessibility to mental health treatment and education.

A report from the CDC 2006 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System indicated that moderate to severe depression, psychological distress, and mental unhappiness to be the most prevalent in the American South due to socio-economic factors.

A 1989 study part of the NIMH Epidemiologic Catchment Area Program reported a high presence of anti-social personality disorder and other mental health conditions among the 914 Southerners tested.

Researchers in 1996 reported white Southerners' cortisol levels spike abnormally when insulted due to the culture of honor embedded within Southern society.

Discrimination and stereotypes

Main articles: White trash, Redneck, and Hillbilly

White Southerners are often victims of economic, social, cultural, medical, regional, and linguistic discrimination.

Since the founding of the United States, white Southerners have variously been portrayed as lazy, inbred, unintelligent, backwards, racist, and fervently religious. Poor whites, in particular, were often targeted by eugenicists during the 20th century who believed they were a social disease that only damaged the gene pool by supposedly passing on sub-human and criminal traits. Many poor white women in the American South were forcibly sterilized due to these beliefs.

Southern American English has consistently been perceived as sounding less intelligent, unrefined, silly, racist, and a mark of lower economic class in the United States. This discrimination has led to many white Southerners forcing themselves to lose their native dialects and adopt a General American dialect.

Military tradition

Unidentified young Confederate soldier during the Civil War (c.1861-1865)

White Southerners have always composed a significant percentage of the United States military and have historically contributed many military leaders.

Southerners make up 40% of the recruiting pool for the US military and 8-in-10 Southerners have a close relative who served.

Various factors contribute to this martial tradition including; socio-economic factors, the high presence of military bases in the region, and most importantly, the culture of chivalry. Researchers have compared the Southern military tradition to other traditionally martial cultures, such as the Prussian Junkers.

This military tradition was a major advantage the Confederate States of America had over the United States during the American Civil War, as white Southerners had dominated the United States military prior to 1860.

Sub-groups

Anglo-Americans

Further information: British colonization of North America, American nativism, and Old Stock Americans

Arriving during the British colonial period, white Southerners of English ancestry form the dominant ancestry group in the American South. Anglo-Americans, despite the name, are not of entirely English ancestry, with many families also have varying amounts of Irish Protestant, Scottish, French Huguenot, Welsh, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian ancestry. Despite the persistent myth of the Scotch-Irish forming the largest percent of white Southern settlers, most settlers originated in England and half of all Irish immigrants to the colonies were Anglo-Irish and indigenous Irish Protestants from Leinster, Munster, and Connacht. Many of these families, due to the amount of time their family had been in America and the local cultural identities which emerged there, began to identify themselves as solely American. These Anglo-Americans formed into a unique ethno-cultural group with its own regional subcultures, music, history, literature, mythos, food, and dialects. Among these Anglo settlers are also many families with varying degrees of African and Native American ancestry. Various tri-racial isolate groups, numbering in the hundreds by some estimates, exist throughout the Southern United States. These isolates, such as the Melungeons and Lumbee, mostly originate in colonial Virginia and emerged from relationships between free people of color and local whites.

Texians

Further information: Revolts against the Centralist Republic of Mexico and Empresario

According to the Telegraph and Texas Register, San Felipe, 5 March 1836"...the English Jack showing the origin of Anglo-Americans, thirteen stripes representing that most of the colonists in Texas are from the United States; the Star is Texas, the only state in Mexico retaining the least spark of the light of Liberty; tricolor is Mexican, showing that we once belonged to the confederacy; the whole flag is historic."

The Texians were Anglo-American immigrants and their descendants who, legally and illegally, settled in Spanish and Mexican Texas between before 1836. Immigrants to Spanish Texas were required to convert to Catholicism and were only then naturalized as Spanish citizens. Mexico would later abolish this prerequisite but required immigrants to renounce their American citizenship. These settlers brought with them their English language, Protestant faith, and chattel slavery.

In October 1835, due to political and cultural clashes with the centralist government of Mexico, the Texas Revolution began and the Republic of Texas, dominated by Anglos and the Tejano elite, was later established. Both Texians and Tejanos had varying motivations for the revolt, but most involved the curtailment of American immigration, lack of political representation, the overthrowing of President Anastasio Bustamante and President Valentín Gómez Farías by General Antonio López de Santa Anna, abolition of African slavery, and increasing centralization of federal power.

Poor whites

Further information: Plain Folk of the Old South, Social and economic stratification in Appalachia, and Okie

Poor whites, often labelled derogatorily as "poor white trash", are an Anglophone socio-cultural sub-group of generationally economically disadvantaged white people in the Southern US. The form what has usually been described as the South's underclass, though they were positioned higher than blacks in the region in the racist hierarchy of the Antebellum and post-Civil War eras. Commonly called "rednecks", "hillbillies", and "crackers", these poor white Southerners formed the core of the fighting force of the Confederacy during the Civil War. After the conflict, many became sharecroppers and were commonly exploited during the nadir of American race relations to advance the agendas of rich white Southerners through oppressing the black minority in the region.

Mestees, Little Races, Quasi-Indians, and Anglo-Mestizos

Further information: Elizabeth Key Grinstead, First Africans in Virginia, and John Punch (slave)

Mestees are members of old mixed-race groups who are mostly white in ancestry, appearance, and culture. Other names for these groups include: Anglo-Mestizos, Quasi-Indians, and Little Races. Some of these groups, such as the Melungeons, are overwhelmingly of European descent with varying amounts of African and Native American ancestry, with little phenotypical evidence of their non-European descent existing among the younger generations.

Culturally, Mestees are almost identical to their white neighbors, excluding the racism faced by many. Some Mestees, such as Gideon Gibson Jr., were slaveholders and were essentially socially accepted as white. While others, such as Henry Berry Lowry, were hunted by white slave catchers.

Confederate general, Randall Lee Gibson, who's great grandfather, Gideon Gibson Jr, was a free man of color and Revolutionary War veteran

It is unknown how many Mestees exist among the white Southern population, but it is theorized that hundreds of "little races" once existed throughout the region, and that roughly 10% of the white Southern population has traceable African ancestry stemming from the Antebellum era. Examples of such groups are the Melungeons, Dominickers, Lumbee, Redbones, Turks of South Carolina, Ramapough Mountain Indians, Chestnut Ridge people, and Brass Ankles.

Modern research has concluded these groups are overwhelmingly descended from free people of color and local whites in the British Colony of Virginia. It is believed that early Atlantic Creole slaves, descended from or acculturated by Iberian lançados and Sephardi Jews fleeing the Inquisition, were one of the pre-cursor population to these groups. Many creoles once in British America were able to obtain their freedom and many married into local white families.

Some members of these tri-racial groups fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, though others resisted the Confederate government, such as Henry Berry Lowry.

Some notable Mestees include: Confederate general Randall L. Gibson, the outlaw Sam Bass, Patriot and slaveholder Gideon Gibson Jr., historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., Tuscarora resistance leader Henry Berry Lowry, actress Heather Locklear, and politician Charles Graham.

Irish Travelers and Romanichal

Further information: Romani Americans in Texas, Shelta, and Ladislas Lazaro

Louisiana politician and Montenegrin Romani, Ladislas Lazaro

Some regions of the South are home to communities of Irish Travelers and Romanichal from Britain and Ireland. The Romanichal, a South Asian diaspora group which migrated to Europe in the Middle Ages, have commonly been simultaneously rejected and accepted as white in Britain or categorized as "white, but not quite". Irish Travelers, in contrast, are of entirely indigenous Irish descent.

Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell sent over a large number of forcibly indentured Romanichal to the Colony of Virginia in 1664. Many eventually escaped the plantations on which they worked and returned to their nomadic lifestyle, eventually settling in states like Arkansas.

The National Gypsy Evangelical Conference, an organization composed of Protestant Romani-Americans, held a conference in Arkansas in 1977.

It is estimated that about 10,000-40,000 Irish Travelers exist in the United States, primarily in the Southern US. Most immigrated during the Irish Famine in the mid-19th century. Groups exist in Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Georgia.

Germanic-Americans

Further information: Pennsylvania Dutch Country, Revolutions of 1848 in German states, and German Coast

The very first German settler in the South was Dr. Johannes Fleischer, who assisted the English in establishing Jamestown.

Later in the colonial era, more German-speaking colonists arrived in the British Southern colonies from the various states of the Holy Roman Empire, primarily due to religious persecution, poverty, and war. Many of these settlers disembarked in the German-friendly Colony of Pennsylvania and then traveled south on the Great Wagon Road to the Shenandoah Valley, which became a major hub of German-American culture in the South. Adam Miller (Mueller), a Mennonite born in Schriesheim, became the first permanent white and German settler in the valley.

The origins of these "German" settlers were not uniform. Palatines, Alsatians, Swiss, Moravians, Hollanders, Hessians, and even some French Protestants were the primary groups that immigrated and coalesced into the colonial era German-speaking ethnic community. These German-speakers were often called Dutch by the Anglo colonists, as the term Dutch in this era encompassed both Dutch and German speakers, though a common misconception is that the English were unable to pronounce Deitsch or Deutsch.

White and black Texas Germans aiming pistols in Brenham, Texas.

German settlers would also go on to found several German-speaking settlements in other parts of the South, specifically in Appalachia. For example, John Weaver (Weber), a German-speaking immigrant from the Netherlands, founded a settlement in the Reems Creek Valley that would eventually develop into Weaverville, North Carolina. Dutch Fork, South Carolina also was primarily settled by Pennsylvania Germans, though most descendants have entirely assimilated into the Anglo majority.

Other groups of Germans in the South descended from later immigrants include: the Texas-Deutsche, descended from German immigrants brought to Texas by the Mainzer Adelsverein at Biebrich am Rhein in the 1840s; the Germans of the Missouri Rhineland, who began immigrating in the 1830s; the Germans of Cullman, Alabama, which was established as a Germany colony by Colonel John G. Cullmann in 1873; and the Wolgadeutsche of Texas, who primarily came from existing colonies in Kansas.

Dutch and Swedes

Further information: New Amsterdam and Second Anglo-Dutch War

After the absorption of the New Netherland colony by the English, many settlers from the formerly Dutch colony spread out across the Southern frontier. New Netherlanders were of diverse origins, with many being of Dutch, Flemish, Walloon, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, German, Sephardi Jewish, Polish, Italian, Atlantic Creole, Moroccan, Croatian, Scots, English, Norwegian, Brazilian, and Indigenous ancestry.

The Dutch, prior to the English invasion, had conquered New Sweden, a fledgling Swedish colony comprised primarily of ethnic Swedes and Forest Finns located along the Delaware River, in September 1655.

James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow, a Fire-Eater writer who wrote scathing articles on the supposed Germanic barbarity of Northerners in his magazine, De Bow's Review, was the son of Garrett De Bow, a New Jersey native of French Huguenot and Dutch descent.

Franco-Americans

Further information: Louisiana (New France), Louisiana (New Spain), and Louisiana Purchase

French settlement of what is now the Southern United States began in the 17th century with the establishment of French Louisiana. Various groups of French and French-Canadian settler descent exist in the region, such as the Louisiana Creoles, Cajuns, Alabama Creoles, and Mississippi Creoles. Many of these white French Southerners have African and Native American ancestry due to the comparatively lax French colonial attitudes towards interracial relationships. Though significantly fewer in numbers, Filipinos also left their mark on local Creoles. Due to the influx of various waves of immigration to Louisiana, there are also thousands of white families of French ancestry descended from Germans, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Sephardi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews Haitians, Irishmen, Hungarians, Croats, Czechs, and Anglo-Americans.

Louisiana Creole girls in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana (1935)

Following the Louisiana Purchase, there was a mass influx of Anglo-American migration into the solidly French region. Conflict ensued between the two communities, with Anglo-American influence threatening many societal and cultural norms formed under the previous French colonial government. Eventually, the use of the French language was prohibited and other assimilation efforts were pursued to Americanize the French population. In recent times, there has been a major push to revive the French language within the state, though critics argue that these efforts contribute to the destruction of local dialects, as the dialect of instruction is usually Metropolitan French.

Huguenots

Further information: Huguenot Church

French Huguenots also played a massive role in the settlement of the Southern colonies. Fleeing religious persecution in France, Wallonia, and even as far as Spain; these immigrants established several communities across the South, with most eventually seamlessly assimilating into the Anglo majority. Nicolas Martiau, a refugee from Saint-Martin-de-Ré and ancestor of President George Washington, arrived in Jamestown aboard the ship, Francis Bonaventure, in 1620 and laid the defenses which saved the colony from a Powhatan massacre in 1622.

Hispano-Americans

Further information: Tejanos, Floridanos, and Isleños (Louisiana)

Spanish Creoles from Texas in Frederic Remington's "The Drawing of the Black Bean" (1896)

Spanish colonization of the South began in the 16th century, but settlers were unable to found any major settlements outside of Florida, Texas, and Louisiana. Guartari and Joara, two Spanish forts established in Appalachia in the 1500s, both fell to Native American raids by 1568.

Hispanos are the descendants of Spanish settlers who settled on the northern frontier of New Spain. Many of these families are also descended from settlers from other Spanish colonial possessions, notably Mexico and Cuba, as well as local Native Americans, and free Africans brought over as slaves to the New World. Various Hispano groups exist in the American South; such as the Tejanos of Texas, Floridanos of Florida, and Isleños of Louisiana. Each of these groups have their own specific history shaped by where their ancestors migrated from. Many Tejanos may variously describe themselves as being Spanish or Mexican, whilst some Canary Islanders assimilated into the Cajun population and identify as such.

Hundreds of Mexicans in Texas were lynched and murdered by Anglo-Texans between 1850 and 1930. La Matanza (English: The Slaughter) was a period of Texas history between 1910 and 1920 in which Mexican-Americans were lynched and massacred en masse.

Middle Eastern-Americans and North African-Americans

Further information: History of the Jews in the Southern United States, Turks of South Carolina, and Moors Sundry Act of 1790

The first Middle Easterner and Jew to set foot in the American South was Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, a Portuguese Sephardi conquistador, slaver, and first Governor of Nuevo León who crossed the Rio Grande river into what is now Texas. Jewish immigration to the colonies was initially very low but increased in the 17th century, with waves of Jews fleeing to the Americas to escape antisemitic persecution in Christian Europe. Charleston, South Carolina became the first hub of American Jewry, becoming home to many Sephardi and Ashkenazi families from Europe, the Caribbean, and North Africa.

Southern Jewish army officer, Alfred Mordecai (bottom left), in Crimea as a member of the Delafield Commission.

Legally, Middle Easterners and North Africans, such as Syrians, Lebanese, Moroccans, Turks, and Jews were categorized as white in the Antebellum and Jim Crow South, though this categorization has never been consistent throughout history. Socially, perceptions of Middle Easterners and North Africans shifted between categorizing them as "neither white nor black", white, and Jews as racially Hebrew. Some Middle Easterners were targeted by white supremacist mobs in the Southern United States and lynched, much like Italians. An infamous case was the lynching of Leo Frank, who was accused of murdering a white girl and dumping her body in the factory he owned. Researchers have since determined he was, in fact, completely innocent and the motivations of the lynching were steeped in growing antisemitic attitudes in the South. Another case was the lynching of Lebanese immigrant, N'oula Romey, in Lake City, Florida in 1929. Romey and his wife had moved to Lake City due to constant attacks and harassment from the Ku Klux Klan and after several run in with the laws in Valdosta. The run ins did not end and one day the Sheriff of Columbia County, Florida and his deputies shot and killed Romey's wife, Fanny, over an altercation at their store. N'oula was then arrested, jailed, and murdered by a racist mob in the night.

The first Turks arrived in the Southern colonies in 1586 when Sir Francis Drake brought at least 200 Muslims, identified as Turks and Moors, to the newly established Roanoke colony on the coast of present-day North Carolina. The English government managed to repatriate about 100 of them to the Ottoman Empire.

Rancher and thoroughbred horse breeder, James Ben Ali Haggin, was the grandson of Ibrahim Ben Ali, a colonial era Turkish-American settler.

Arieh O'Sullivan is a Southern Jew, Israeli military veteran, and journalist who became a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Southeastern European-Americans and Eastern European-Americans

Further information: Soviet Jews in America, George de Mohrenschildt, and Czech Texans

Greeks in Tarpon Springs, Florida at a sponge auction (1947).

The first Eastern European to set foot in the American South was Don Doroteo Teodoro, a Greek sailor who landed in Boca Ciega Bay at the Jungle Prada site in present-day St. Petersburg, Florida with the Narváez expedition in 1528. Eastern European immigrants began arriving in the region in the British colonial period with the arrival of Polish artisans to the Jamestown colony in 1608. In the 18th century, groups of Eastern European settlers arrived to the Southern colonies, such as the German-speaking Moravians who settled in North Carolina and the Croatian Protestants who founded Ebenezer, Georgia. The two fathers of the American cavalry, Hungarian nobleman Michael Kovats de Fabriczy and Polish nobleman Casimir Pulaski both fell in the Southern theater of the American Revolutionary War in Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, respectively.

Later 19th century immigrants from Eastern Europe established the Polish, Czech, Silesian, and Wendish colonies of Texas and Arkansas and the Hungarian Árpádhon colony of Louisiana.

A Greek Company within the Confederate Louisiana Militia fought for the Confederate States of America.

Mike Gillich Jr, an ethnic Croat, was the kingpin of the Dixie Mafia in Biloxi, Mississippi.

White Southern diaspora

Various waves of white migration out of the Southern United States have occurred throughout history, shaping the cultures of various regions of the United States and other countries.

Butternuts

Main article: Butternut (people)

The Butternuts were white Southern settlers who poured into the southern regions of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois in the early to mid 19th century. Prominent Butternuts include President Abraham Lincoln and President William Henry Harrison.

Culturally, the southern portion of the Midwest is considered an extension of the Upland South due to the influence of Butternut settlers.

Florence Thompson, an Okie migrant, with her two children in California.

Okies and Arkies

Main article: Okie

Poor white and Native American migrant farmers from Oklahoma and Arkansas made the trek from their home states to the Central Valley of California during the Dust Bowl, which ecologically devastated the region. These migrants would synthesize into a unique cultural group in California, creating the Bakersfield sound country music genre, the rural inland dialect of California English, and inspiring John Steinbeck's award-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath.

Confederados

Main articles: Confederados; Americana, São Paulo; and Festa Dos Confederados

Confederados at the annual Festa Dos Confederados in Americana, Brazil.

The Confederados of Brazil are the descendants of some 20,000 post-Civil War Southern immigrants who left the United States due to their opposition to abolition and Reconstruction. They introduced Southern cuisine, the Southern Baptist Church, American educational methods, and improved methods of cotton farming.

"Many persons who, from long habit and fondly cherished theories, have become strongly attached to the institution of African slavery, fancy that in Brazil they will find an opportunity for the permanent use of that system of labor — Brazil and the Spanish possessions being the only two slaveholding communities remaining in the civilized world," - New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 1865.

Confederate Belizeans

Main article: Confederate settlements in British Honduras

Descendants of Confederate immigrants form a distinct sub-group in Belize. Their ancestors had left the United States due to Reconstruction and the abolition of slavery. Well known Confederate Belizeans include Confederate politician Colin J. McRae and Joseph Benjamin, brother of Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin.

Politics

Main article: Politics of the Southern United States

Nationalist and Neo-Confederate groups

• 

  The "Southern nationalist flag" created by the League of the South.

  Knights of the Golden Circle - A 19th century secret society that sought to create a Southern slave empire that would include the Southern US, the Caribbean, Mexico, and northern regions of South America.
• League of the South - White supremacist and Neo-Confederate secessionist group.
• The Abbeville Institute - A self described association of scholars that perpetuates the Lost Cause myth.
• Sons of Confederate Veterans - Society composed of male descendants of Confederate military veterans that promotes the Lost Cause myth.
• United Daughters of the Confederacy - Society composed of male descendants of Confederate military veterans that promotes the Lost Cause myth.

Segregationist parties

• Southern Democrats - Pro-segregation political faction in the American South.
• State's Rights Party (Dixiecrats) - Segregationist party that separated from the Democratic Party over the issue of Civil Rights.
• National States' Rights Party - Neo-fascist, antisemitic, and white supremacist political party.

Terrorist groups

• White League - White supremacist paramilitary that attempted to overthrow the local government during the Battle of Liberty Place. (Defunct)
• Red Shirts - White supremacist paramilitary that targeted blacks and Republicans in the South. (Original is defunct; modern group started by the League of the South is active)
• Ku Klux Klan - White supremacist terrorist group that was initially founded during the Reconstruction era. (Active)
• Knights of the White Camelia - White supremacist terrorist organization that murdered up to 1,800 people during the Reconstruction era. (Defunct)

Left wing and moderate groups

• Young Patriots Organization - Cultural nationalist, anti-racist, and working class rights group allied with the Black Panthers.
• Blue Dog Democrats - Centrist faction of Democratic Party descended from the original Southern Democrats.
• Southern Poverty Law Center - Civil rights organization that tracks hate groups.
• Southern Tenant Farmer's Union - Interracial sharecropper union founded in Tyronza, Arkansas.

Notable white Southerners

Anti-slavery and civil rights advocates

• P. G. T. Beauregard - Former Confederate general who became a civil rights activist after the Civil War.
• James Longstreet - Former Confederate general who fought white supremacist terrorists and was killed by the White League during the Battle of Liberty Place in 1874.
• Nathan Bedford Forrest (Dubious) - Former Confederate general, slaveowner, and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who attempted to save his image towards the end of his life by advocating for racial equality.
• Albert Parsons - Former Confederate soldier who later became a Radical Republican and anarchist activist.
• John S. Mosby - Former Confederate cavalry commander nicknamed the "Gray Ghost". A fervent opponent of slavery, he became a Republican at the end of the war and was known for attempting to combat Lost Cause mythology.
• Patrick Cleburne - Irish-born Confederate general who sought to emancipate and enlist blacks in the Confederate army.
• Cassius Marcellus Clay - Anti-slavery activist and politician from Kentucky.
• George Mason (Dubious) - Virginia slaveholder, Founding Father, and vocal anti-slavery advocate. Despite this, he never freed a single one of his slaves.
• Sarah and Angelina Grimké - Anti-slavery activists born into a wealthy slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina.
• Abraham Lincoln - Former President of the United States and anti-slavery advocate known for enacting the Emancipation Proclamation.

White supremacists

• Alfred Moore Waddell - Politician who led the white mob that murdered up to 300 blacks in the Wilmington insurrection of 1898.
• James K. Vardaman - 36th Governor of Mississippi and pro-lynching advocate who stated: "If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy."
• George Fitzhugh - Fire-Eater writer and proto-fascist ideologue who believed slavery was the ultimate form of Communism.
• Donald Henry Gaskins - Serial killer and rapist from South Carolina.
• Douglas Williams - Perpetrator of the Lockheed Martin shooting in Meridian, Mississippi which targeted his black coworkers.
• Joseph Paul Franklin - Neo-Nazi serial killer and domestic terrorist who wanted to incite a race war.
• Chevie Kehoe and Daniel Lewis Lee - Neo-Nazi murderers.
• Mark Anthony Stroman - Neo-Nazi spree killer who targeted Arab-Americans.
• William Joseph Simmons - 2nd Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
• Marie Delphine LaLaurie - Creole slaveowner and serial killer who was known for torturing and murdering her slaves for pleasure.
• Patty Cannon - Serial killer, slave catcher, and leader of the multiracial Cannon-Johnson gang who kidnapped and murdered free blacks. She was once recorded as having roasted a black child alive in a fireplace.

Military

Further information: General officers in the Confederate States Army and Confederate States Army

• General Robert E. Lee (Virginia)
• General P.G.T Beauregard (Louisiana)
• General John A. Lejeune (Louisiana)
• First Lieutenant Audie Murphy (Texas)
• General Stonewall Jackson (Virginia)
• General Francis "Swamp Fox" Marion (South Carolina)
• General Patrick Cleburne (Arkansas)
• Admiral William Nathaniel Thomas (Mississippi)

Presidents

Further information: List of presidents of the United States by home state

• President George Washington (Virginia)
• President Thomas Jefferson (Virginia)
• President James Madison (Virginia)
• President James Monroe (Virginia)
• President Andrew Jackson (South Carolina)
• President William Henry Harrison (Virginia)
• President Zachary Taylor (Virginia)
• President John Tyler (Virginia)
• President James K. Polk (North Carolina)
• Confederate President Jefferson Davis (Kentucky)
• President Andrew Johnson (North Carolina)
• President Abraham Lincoln (Kentucky)
• President Woodrow Wilson (Virginia)
• President Dwight D. Eisenhower (Texas)
• President Lyndon B. Johnson (Texas)
• President Jimmy Carter (Georgia)
• President Bill Clinton (Arkansas)
• Texan President Sam Houston (Texas, naturalized Cherokee)

Writers

Further information: Southern United States literature

• James Agee (Tennessee)
• William Faulkner (Mississippi)
• W. J. Cash (South Carolina)
• William Alexander Percy (Mississippi)
• Robert Penn Warren (Kentucky)
• Eudora Welty (Mississippi)
• Shelby Foote (Mississippi)
• Walker Percy (Alabama)
• Erskine Caldwell (Georgia)
• Margaret Mitchell (Georgia)
• Flannery O'Conner (Georgia)
• Katherine Ann Porter (Texas)

See also

• Mountain white
• Poor White, a sociocultural group
• Black Southerners
• Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands
• Redneck
• Hillbilly
• Culture of the Southern United States
• History of the Southern United States
• Politics of the Southern United States
• White Americans in Texas
• Jews in the Southern United States
• Cajuns
• Cracker (term)
• French Louisianians
• Country (identity)
• White Americans in Louisiana
• White Americans in Maryland
• History of Italians in Arkansas
• History of Italians in Mississippi
• Floridanos
• White trash
• Confederate colonies

Further reading

• Griffin, Larry J.; Evenson, Ranae Jo; Thompson, Ashley B. (2005). "Southerners, All?". Southern Cultures. 11 (1): 6–25. doi:10.1353/scu.2005.0005. S2CID 201776159.
• Lind, Michael (5 February 2013). "The white South's last defeat". Salon. Retrieved 24 June 2015.
• Moltke-Hansen, David (2003). "The Rise of Southern Ethnicity". Historically Speaking. 4 (5): 36–38. doi:10.1353/hsp.2003.0034. S2CID 161847511.
• Reed, John Shelton (1980). "Southerners". In Thernstrom, Stephan; Orlov, Ann; Handlin, Oscar (eds.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. pp. 944–948. ISBN 0674375122. OCLC 1038430174.
• Tindall, George B. (1974). "Beyond the Mainstream: The Ethnic Southerners". The Journal of Southern History. 40 (1): 3–18. doi:10.2307/2206054. JSTOR 2206054.
• Abd-Allah, Umar Faruq (2010), Turks, Moors, & Moriscos in Early America: Sir Francis Drake's Liberated Galley Slaves & the Lost Colony of Roanoke (PDF), Nawawi Foundation, retrieved 2016-02-04