Thread by @Andrea_Lakota

Periodization of the South, Removal, and slavery:

In the US, despite knowing better, we think that the US is an old country. What this serves to obscure is the unbelievably fast expansion of settlement and slavery throughout the history of the US. Here we will look at the South.

https://twitter.com/andrea_lakota/status/1102052144713093121

What I seek to make clear here is the fact that the “Deep South” and “South” in general, as we think of it today, had barely existed by the time the Civil War (CW) had started. This idea of “Southern culture” as hyper-distinct from “Northern culture” at the time was a myth.

By the 1790s, the US had only then begun to move into the central part of Cherokee land. What today we see as Tennessee, North Georgia, and North Alabama hadn’t been settled by nearly any people. It’s important to say, at 1800, we’re only 60 years away from the start of the CW.

By 1820, settlements had expanded deeper into Muscogee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw land. Slavery both among white people and 4 of the “5 Southern Tribes” and expanded with the expansion of settlements. But don’t let the blue of the map fool you, there may have been settlements...

in what we now see as the Deep South, but they weren’t settlements of tens of thousands of people. Those were only found in Tennessee and southern Louisiana, where the Spanish and French had been. The coast was still the primary population center of both whites and enslaved ppl.

Now, let’s take a break from moving forward in time and comment on this for a minute. By 1820, settlements were sparse in the Deep South, the coast is where most people lived, and slavery had not been abolished in many northern states. We’re only 40 years away from the CW.

George Washington had only been dead for 21 years and Thomas Jefferson was still alive. 40 years off from the CW is no time at all.

Many of us know that there’s this Antebellum South cultural imaginary which says that slavery was a way of life in the South, it was cultural.

What I’m seeking to point out here is that by 1820 (and up to 1861) there was no such thing as a southern culture. The whole of the United States operated off a singular settler culture. The only difference of the South was that, at this point, they were creating new settlments.

But let’s continue through time, reaching 1840. Only 10 to 5 years before 1840 had most removals of the “5 Southern Tribes” started. If you look at the last maps I posted, you will see grey holes in the South. These were the areas where some nations found themselves.

Again, settlement into much of these areas was sparse before removal, although settlers had been illegally entering the area and had been pushing the government to remove the Indigenous peoples. Around 59,000 Indigenous people and 2,000 people they had enslaved were removed.

Around 16,500 people died during the genocide of the Trail of Tears. This genocide lead the way for white settlement in the “Deep South” and the massive expansion of slavery in territories that had been under the control of Indigenous nations.

The 2nd Seminole War would continue well into the 1840s. In short, the 2nd Seminole War was a war in which the US looked to expel Seminole people from Florida, and also recapture those enslaved people who had escaped and lived with Seminole people.

With all this in mind, let us realize something. At this point, there is only 20 years until the CW. But at this point, the South had not at all been fully settled. The coast and major rivers had sizeable populations, but not the vast majority of land, especially the land that...

had just been stolen or was still being fought for. Again, we are supposed to think that by the time of the CW, only 20 years away, that the South is a Civilization in and of itself, completely distinct from the North. This is an absolute lie.

The South had only just begun to exist by the time the Civil War started. We may say that the Deep South had only begun to exist in by the end of the Third Seminole war in 1858, only *3 years* before the beginning of the CW. But let’s continue to the last part of our history.

In these maps from 1860, we see that Alabama has pretty well settled most Muscogee and Cherokee lands that find themselves within its borders. But if we look at Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida (even parts of Tennessee), we can see that settlement isn’t as strong as it could be.

By the beginning of the CW, the Deep South had only begun to be settled in large numbers for 30ish years. And those patterns of settlement, and the expansion of slavery that came with it, was splotchy. The “Southern way of life” didn’t exist. Ways of life don’t arise in 30 years.

What I’ve been hammering home with this, and what I hope people realize, is that the Deep South, and much of the South in general, was a brand spanking new entity by the beginning of the CW. The primary contradiction between the North and South was economic, not cultural.

Something else we can then draw from this how to think about appeals to “Southern Culture” drawn from a Lost Cause mythology. Of course we all know that this mythology is wrong. But we should realize that it attempts to pull from a culture that hadn’t even existed.

The segregationist and Jim Crow policies that arised at the end of Reconstruction built themselves on an entierly false image of the South. And although we deny the antebellum image of the South created by white southerners after the CW, we still accept the South as a distinct...

“civilization”, something that had a cultural, economic, linguistic, and geographic foundation. But this is a lie. The South was not a sturdy formation by the time of the CW, but instead it was a part of the country that had only just begun to claim dominion over its stolen land.

In summary; we think of the South by the time of the CW as a firm entity. That is wrong. It had only just begun to form. Even during the CW, there were large areas where little settlement had occured. The South only came into existence after Reconstruction.