SOUTH, THE

region, southeastern United States, generally, though not exclusively, considered to be south of the Mason and Dixon Line, the Ohio River, and the 3630 parallel. It includes, as defined by the U.S. federal government, Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. The South was historically set apart from other sections of the country by a complex of factors: a long growing season, its staple-crop patterns, the plantation system, and black agricultural labour, whether slave or free. White racial domination of blacks characterized Southern politics and economics from the 17th century and began to yield only after World War II. The warm climate of the South affords a period of 200290 frost-free days per year, enabling such profitable crops as tobacco, rice, sugarcane, and cotton to grow. This climate, coupled with abundant rainfall, offered 17th- and 18th-century European settlers a superb opportunity to raise crops for export if an adequate permanent labour supply could be found. The source proved to be African slaves, made available for purchase through the international slave trade. From this unique situation of supply and demand arose the system of plantation slavery, which above all other factors distinguished the South from other U.S. regions. By 1790 blacks constituted about one-third of the Southern population and almost the entire work force on the plantations. At the beginning of the American Civil War (1861), more than four million blacks remained in bondage, though less than one-sixth of the white population actually owned slaves. Economically the antebellum and cotton-oriented South looked to the British textile industry for its market and opposed the growing politico-economic power of the industrializing North. The Southern social philosophy, holding to an ideal of rural gentry, presented a sharp contrast with that of the North, for it stressed a genteel, aristocratic life-style rather than one based on the earnest accumulation of money. In the period between the American Revolution (177583) and about 1830, the North, spurred by the abolitionists, passed from mild opposition to strong condemnation of slavery. In response, the white South rose to an unqualified defense of its peculiar institution, supporting it on the grounds of biblical sanction, economic justification, the supposed racial inferiority of blacks, and the necessity for a well-ordered society. Southern separatism in defense of slavery culminated in 186061, when 11 Southern states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee) seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. The ensuing Civil War (186165) wrought immense destruction on much of the South, which emerged the loser in the conflict. In many areas cropland was ruined, livestock lost, railroads destroyed, and billions of dollars in slave-related investments wiped out. Recovering slowly from this destruction, much of the South continued to rely largely on a one-crop economycotton, tobacco, or riceand to cultivate the crops with the labour of black freedmen. The white-dominated South's continuing insistence on the inferiority and subordination of blacks through a system of legalized racial-control measures known as Jim Crow laws resulted, after Reconstruction ended (1877), in the replacement of slavery with three institutions: the economic system of sharecropping (tenant farming), the political system of one-party politics (Democratic), and the social system of racial segregation, supported by law and custom. Until 1932 the South remained an impoverished and undiversified region. The growth of a textile industry in the Carolinas and the movement to develop a New South after the Civil War had not seriously qualified the region's commitment to cotton, to agriculture, and to a rural way of life. The blacks remained a kind of peasantry, and the income of the South stood at only $372 per capita in 1929, while income outside the South was $797 per capita. Chronic overproduction of cotton, with its attendant low prices, forced more and more farmers, both black and white, into sharecropping: between 1880 and 1930 Southern land tenancy increased from 36 to 55 percent. The Great Depression of the 1930s caused a total bankruptcy of the cotton economy, which was not relieved until federal New Deal legislation intervened to provide payments for reducing cotton acreage and for unemployment relief. Both of these devices encouraged migration to the cities, a trend that was accelerated during World War II by a heavy influx of Southern blacks to Northern industrial centres. The New Deal, however, was ultimately to benefit the South. The cotton acreage quota system led to improvements in productivity and to diversification of the agricultural base. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a vast river-development scheme created in 1933, brought electricity to many rural families, further increased farmland productivity through flood control and improved soil management, and laid the groundwork for new industry. After World War II the South began to experience a sustained surge in growth and industrialization. The increase in the number of manufacturing establishments and the value added by manufacturing after 1939 was nearly double that of the nation as a whole. Industrial development centred on lumber, paper, petrochemicals, aerospace, and agricultural processing. The cultivation of such crops as peaches, peanuts (groundnuts), and soybeans eradicated the Deep South's historic dependence on cotton, a crop that now ranks below livestock and textile production in value. Population growth was slightly above the national average after 1940 but almost twice the national average after 1970. Contrasting sharply with earlier decades when it lost consistently in interstate migration, the South began to experience net in-migration in 1960. In the 1970s alone, more than 4,000,000 arrivals came to the South. Consistent with this growth were steady urbanization and increasing per capita income for both blacks and whites. Politically, the traditional Democratic control of the South disappeared, with Republicans coming to power in many Southern states and communities. Efforts to end the centuries-old racial segregation of the South took a positive turn in 1954 with the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling that public-school segregation was unconstitutional. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early '60s helped bring down many other racial barriers in the South. Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 institutionalized the advances in black rights and profoundly altered the biracial system that had been in place through the preceding century.