Antiques

Magazine Antiques, March, 2005 by Wendell Garrett

There exists among us by ordinary--both North and South--a profound
conviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from
the rest of the American nation .... the notion that the country is--not
quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it.
W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South, 1941

The Old South is both a geographical and cultural region that has always maintained a distinctive identity. As early as 1750, a generation before the American Revolution, clear differences existed between the southern colonies and the Middle Atlantic and New England colonies. Those differences persisted after the Revolution and intensified during the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1860 the division between the South and the rest of the country had grown into a chasm. The South had become synonymous with plantations, cotton, and slavery--a beleaguered region seeking to hold onto a way of life that could not endure.

The region's decision to leave the Union in 1860 and 1861 defined the South forever after. However, it is not, as the modern stereotype would have it, an unchanging land of magnolia blossoms, Spanish moss, and crumbling plantations. Geographically it is a land of many contrasts, from the red soil of Virginia and North Carolina to the black clay of the Mississippi Delta; from the wild forests of eastern Kentucky to the swampy jungles of southern Louisiana; from the wind-swept plains of the Texas Panhandle to the humid tidelands of the South Carolina coast.

The people of the South are and have always been as diverse as the landscape. The Creole gentleman and the Georgia cracker, the rich lowland planter and the upland tobacco farmer have rubbed shoulders more or less amicably for a very long time.

The South remains the most obviously distinctive region of the United States, due largely to southerners' deep attachment to it; their sense of place and their feeling that their past is unique. They are determined not to become part of the homogenized global culture now overtaking the world. This separateness has stimulated all manner of speculative explanations. The historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips has emphasized the sustained commitment of southerners to white supremacy. Others have argued that the distinctive climate of the South predetermined the plantation economy, slowed the pace of life, and tempered the speech of southerners. Still others have alleged that the rural nature of southern society, the piety of the Bible Belt, and southerners' defensive feeling that they are a minority have combined to maintain the distinctiveness of the region. The final definition of the southern identity has still not been achieved and indeed may never be achieved. But the South endures, its past and present commingled, as always.