Deep South States

Examples of Deep South States in the following topics:

• Secession of the South

  • Seven Deep South states passed secession ordinances by February 1861 in the aftermath of the 1860 presidential election.
  • South Carolina invoked the Declaration of Independence to defend their right to secede from the Union, seeing their declaration of secession as a comparable document.
  • Seven Deep South states passed secession ordinances by February 1861 prior to Abraham Lincoln acceding to office.
  • Delegations from Arkansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, Oregon, and all of the Deep South states were not present at the conference.
  • Examine the South's arguments for secession and the reaction to secession in the North

• Final Efforts at Compromise

  • With the seven states of the Deep South already committed to secession, the emphasis for peacefully preserving the Union focused on the eight slaveholding states in the Upper South.
  • Crittenden submitted six proposed constitutional amendments that he hoped would address all the outstanding issues pushing the South towards secession.
  • The Peace Convention convened on February 4, 1861, at the same time that the seven Deep South states were forming a new government in Montgomery, Alabama.
  • No delegates were sent by the Deep South states, or by Arkansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and Oregon.
  • Fourteen free states and seven slave states were represented.

• Buchanan's Waiting Game

  • In the aftermath of the 1860 election, seven Deep South states passed secession ordinances by February 1861 (before Abraham Lincoln took office as president).
  • Declaring themselves as the Confederate States of America, these seven states selected Jefferson Davis as the provisional president, declared Richmond the nation's capital, and began raising an army.
  • In the aftermath of the Presidential election of 1860, President Buchanan did little to halt this secessionist tide in the Deep South.
  • South Carolina declared its secession on December 20, 1860, followed by six other slave states; by February 1861, they had formed the Confederate States of America and declared eminent domain over federal property within their states.
  • Before Buchanan left office, all arsenals and forts in the seceding states were lost (except Fort Sumter, off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina).

• Change in the Democratic Party

  • Redeemers wanted to reduce state debts.
  • In the lower South, violence continued and new insurgent groups arose.
  • This marked the beginning of heightened insurgency and attacks on Republican officeholders and freedmen in Deep South states.
  • The New Departure was strongly opposed by large factions of Democrats in the Deep South, who professed loyalty to the Confederate legacy.
  • Posters around the man read, "The Republican Party is dead in the South," "Old line Whigs are dead," and "The South solid for the democracy."

• Origins of the War

  • A contentious issue between North and South was the expansion of slavery into western territories.
  • Lincoln’s victory triggered declarations of secession by seven slave states in the Deep South even before he took office.
  • The United States had become a nation of two distinct regions.
  • The South also had fewer large cities and few manufacturing hubs, except in border areas.
  • By the time of the 1860 election, the heavily agricultural Southern states as a group had fewer Electoral College votes than the rapidly industrializing Northern states.

• Manufacturing and Trade

  • This led to an explosion of cotton cultivation, especially in the frontier uplands of Georgia, Alabama, and other parts of the Deep South, as well as riverfront areas of the Mississippi Delta.
  • From the 1820s through the 1850s, more than one million enslaved African Americans were transported to the Deep South in forced migration, two-thirds of them by slave traders and the others by masters who moved there.
  • It had the largest slave market in the country, as traders brought slaves to New Orleans by ship and overland to sell to planters across the Deep South.
  • In resistance to federal legislation increasing tariffs, South Carolina passed an "Ordinance of Nullification," a procedure in which a state would, in effect, repeal a Federal law.
  • This ordinance declared by the power of the state that the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and, therefore, null and void within the sovereign boundaries of South Carolina.

• The Sectional Crisis Deepens

  • Sectionalism increased steadily between 1800 and 1860 as the North (which phased slavery out of existence) industrialized, urbanized, and built prosperous farms, while the deep South concentrated on plantation agriculture based on slave labor together with subsistence farming for the poor white families.
  • During this time, the South aimed to expand into rich new lands in the Southwest.
  • The debates between slave-state and free-state interests raged in Congress; many people in the North and the South began to polarize along similar fault lines, and various disparate political organizations began to coalesce into distinct camps.
  • The Democrats were split between the North and the South with separate election tickets in 1860.
  • By the election of 1860, these political camps were firmly aligned with Northern and Southern interests, with Southern states whipping up public support for state conventions to vote on secession if Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans won the presidency.

• Free Blacks in the South

  • Free blacks were an important demographic in the United States, though their rights were often curtailed.
  • In the Upper South, the percentage of free blacks soared from one percent before the Revolution to 10 percent by 1810.
  • Though fewer in number than in the Upper South, free blacks in the Deep South (especially in Louisiana and Charleston, South Carolina) were also often mixed-race children of wealthy planters.
  • Many blacks who were elected as either state or local officials during the Reconstruction era in the South had been free in the South prior to the Civil War.
  • Freedom's Journal was the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States.

• African Americans and the Republic

  • Free black people in the North and South fought on both sides of the Revolution, though most fought for the colonial rebels.
  • The agricultural economy of the US South especially depended on slavery and the internal slave trade to provide free labor.
  • During that time, planters in states of the lower South imported tens of thousands of slaves.
  • After this time, few slaves were freed in the South except those who were personal favorites or the master's children.
  • As the demand for slave labor in the Upper South decreased because of changes in crops, planters began selling their slaves to traders and markets to the Deep South in an internal slave trade.

• Plantation Masters and Mistresses

  • Planters were slaveholding owners of Southern plantations who wielded great political power in both the federal and state governments.
  • While the term "planter" has no universally accepted definition, historians of the antebellum South have generally defined it in the strictest definition as a person owning property and 20 or more slaves, as noted by Peter Kolchin in his 1993 survey of American slavery.
  • This was particularly true of what evolved as the Upper South, the original Chesapeake Bay Colonies of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the Carolinas.
  • The later development of cotton and sugar cultivation in the Deep South had different characteristics, in which planters typically owned greater amounts of land and hundreds of slaves .
  • Planters are often spoken of as belonging to the planter elite or planter aristocracy in the antebellum South.