Deep South

Examples of Deep South in the following topics:

• 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.

• 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

• Slavery in the South

  • The rise of large-scale plantations in the South led to the widespread use of slavery to support the colonial economy.
  • Every colony had slaves, from the southern rice plantations in Charles Town, South Carolina, to the northern wharves of Boston.
  • However, it was in the large agricultural plantations in the South where slavery took hold the strongest.
  • The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 enabled the cultivation of short-staple cotton in a wide variety of areas, leading to the development of large areas of the Deep South as cotton country in the 19th century.
  • The rapid expansion of large-scale plantations and single-crop agriculture in the Deep South greatly increased demand for slave labor, and slavery became the backbone of the British colonies.

• Agriculture

  • As the upper South of the Chesapeake Bay Colony developed first, historians of the antebellum South defined planters as those who held 20 or more slaves.
  • Major planters held many more, especially in the deep South as it developed; however the majority of slaveholders held ten or fewer slaves, often just a few to labor domestically.
  • The 19th-century development of the Deep South for cotton cultivation depended on large plantations with much more acreage, requiring more slaves for labor.
  • Cotton became dominant in the lower South after 1800 .
  • 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.

• 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).
  • In the aftermath of the Presidential election of 1860, President Buchanan did little to halt this secessionist tide in the Deep South.
  • Guided by the political belief that the essence of good self-government was restraint, Buchanan refused to deploy troops and artillery to the South to protect federal properties.
  • Essentially, Buchanan argued that, although secession was not legal, the North had pushed the South to the brink of justifiable revolution by encroaching on Southern rights.
  • Before Buchanan left office, all arsenals and forts in the seceding states were lost (except Fort Sumter, off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina).

• Manufacturing and Trade

  • Cotton became dominant in the lower South after 1800.
  • 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.
  • The reaction in the South, particularly in South Carolina, led to the Nullification Crisis that began in late 1832.

• Change in the Democratic Party

  • 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.
  • This political cartoon from 1877 depicts the Democrats' control over the South.
  • 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."

• Skin Color in the South

  • Though fewer in number than in the Upper South, free blacks in the Deep South (especially in Louisiana and Charleston, South Carolina) were often mixed-race children of wealthy planters and received transfers of property and social capital.

• The Sectional Crisis Deepens

  • Yet the abundance of political parties and organizations was eventually whittled down due to increasing sectionalism between the North and the South.
  • Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social structure, customs, and political values of the North and the South.
  • 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 Democrats were split between the North and the South with separate election tickets in 1860.

• Plantation Masters and Mistresses

  • 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.