From “Know Your Place: Helping White, Southern Evangelicals Cope with the End of The(ir) World” by Justin R. Phillips
Colin Woodard details in American Nations the American South’s regional cultures: The traditional rendering of American history begins in April 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia, the first English colony to survive, and the beginning of the South. Woodard names the coastal lands of Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland the “Tidewater” region, marked by its abiding connection to English customs in governance and social hierarchies. Tidewater maintained the Greco-Roman understanding of “liberty” across the Atlantic, where “most humans were born into bondage.” Woodard says, “Liberty was granted and was thus a privilege, not a right. Tidewater attempted to replicate rural English life, where a lord ran his home,ruled over those who worked his land, and passed on his wealth to his eldest son. Maintaining such a society required an underclass, one which largely came from England’s struggling class who would trade three years of indentured servitude (white slavery) for a fifty-acre plot of land. These indentured servants made up 80 to 90 percent of the seventeenth century European immigrants to Tidewater.
The “Deep South” encompasses the entirety of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and large swaths of North Carolina, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisian. South Carolina brought the chattel slavery economy to American shores in 1670 from the English settlement of Barbados. The Deep South makes for beautiful images in southern magazines; yet the backdrop of the staged scene was a culture propped up by its caste society where one could never rise above their born station. Aristocratic expansion of land, financial wealth, and political power would threaten the unity of the young nation, creating two visions of America, the vestiges of which still linger today in the Deep South.
The final regional culture, “Appalachia,” extends well beyond what is commonly considered to be the South, including large portions of the Midwest. Appalachia also includes West Virginia, Kentucky, nearly all of Tennessee, and slivers of Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas. This “decidedly rural nation” welcomed outcasts from the British Isles from the early eighteenth century. The Scots and Irish brought with them a warrior mentality, forged in bitter clan struggles, that established a lasting defense of individual liberty, personal sovereignty, and suspicion of governing forces. These elements “wove itself into the Southern mind,” according to W. J. Cash, particularly a propensity to respond violently to factors he could not control or affronts to his ego. Those “Don’t Tread on Me” decals affixed to gigantic trucks throughout the South are more than decoration; they signal back to a regional resistance against British forces during the Revolutionary War that birthed the motto. These fiercely independent people moved westward in such massive numbers that by 1800, one-fifth of the American population had settled into the territory between the Appalachian mountains and the Mississippi River. As Nancy Isenberg puts it, “Both crackers and squatters – two terms that became shorthand for landless migrants….lived off the grid, rarely attended a school or joined a church, and remained a potent symbol of poverty.” Even today, this people is characterized by their opposition to big government (at least in theory) and fight for what they have secured, evidenced by their vigorous support of every American war.