The term was first used to describe the states which were most economically dependent on plantations and slavery, specifically Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.

After the American Civil War ended in 1865, the region suffered economic hardship and was a major site of racial tension during and after the Reconstruction era.

The Deep South is part of the highly-religious, socially conservative Bible Belt and is politically a stronghold of the Republican Party.

[6] West Tennessee is sometimes included due to its history of slavery, its prominence in cotton production during the antebellum period,[7] and cultural similarity to the Mississippi Delta region.

Oglethorpe imagined a province populated by "sturdy farmers" who could guard the border; because of this, the colony's charter prohibited slavery.

[17] A visiting French dignitary concurred in 1810 that American customs seemed "entirely changed" over the Potomac River, and that Southern society resembled those of the Caribbean.

[17] Although often used in history books to refer to the seven states that originally formed the Confederacy, the term "Deep South" did not come into general usage until long after the Civil War ended.

[18] When "Deep South" first began to gain mainstream currency in print in the middle of the 20th century, it applied to the states and areas of South Carolina, Georgia, southern Alabama, northern Florida, Mississippi, northern Louisiana, West Tennessee, southern Arkansas, and eastern Texas, all historical areas of cotton plantations and slavery.

[21] Later, the general definition expanded to include all of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as often taking in bordering areas of Eastern Arkansas, West Tennessee, East Texas and North Florida.

After Reconstruction ended in 1877, a small fraction of the white population composed of wealthy landowners, merchants and bankers controlled the economy and, largely, the politics.

As prices fell, farmers' work became harder and longer because of a change from largely self-sufficient farms, based on corn and pigs, to the growing of a cash crop of cotton or tobacco.

A key difference was the Deep South's plantation-style cash crop agriculture (mainly cotton, rice and sugar), using the forced labor of enslaved African Americans on large farms while plantation owners tended to live in towns and cities.

The sharp division between town and country, the intensive use of a few cash crops, and the high proportion of slaves, all differed from the Upland South.

Its history of slavery originated in Virginia and predated the Caribbean plantation model, relying on tobacco as a cash crop from the start.

Cotton and rice operations were large and factory-like, while tobacco profits hinged on skilled, careful, and efficient labor units.

It has a tropical climate and high levels of migration from the Caribbean and Latin America, particularly in the densely populated Miami metropolitan area.

[26][27] After 1950, the region became a major center of the Civil Rights Movement, including: the work of Martin Luther King Jr., the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the 1964 Freedom Summer.

[28][29] The Deep South has three major Metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) located solely within its boundaries, with populations exceeding 1,000,000 residents (Four including Memphis).

[36] Political expert Kevin Phillips states that, "From the end of Reconstruction until 1948, the Deep South Black Belts, where only whites could vote, were the nation's leading Democratic Party bastions.

"[37] From the late 1870s to the mid-1960s, conservative whites of the Deep South held control of state governments and overwhelmingly identified with and supported the Democratic Party.

[39] At the turn of the 20th century, all Southern states, starting with Mississippi in 1890, passed new constitutions and other laws that effectively disenfranchised the great majority of blacks and sometimes many poor whites as well.

[42] In the 1928 presidential election, Al Smith received serious backlash as a Catholic, but carried all 5 Deep South states, though he nearly lost Alabama.

"[44] White southern voters consistently voted for the Democratic Party for many years to hold onto Jim Crow Laws.

Once Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power in 1932, the limited southern electorate found itself supporting Democratic candidates who frequently did not share its views.

[45]Kevin Phillips states that, "Beginning in 1948, however, the white voters of the Black Belts shifted partisan gears and sought to lead the Deep South out of the Democratic Party.

As a result, the Republican party came to control all the state legislatures in the region, as well as all House seats that were not representing majority-minority districts.

[61] The demographics of these states changed markedly from the 1890s through the 1950s, as two waves of the Great Migration led more than 6,500,000 African-Americans to abandon the economically depressed, segregated Deep South in search of better employment opportunities and living conditions, first in Northern and Midwestern industrial cities, and later west to California.

[63] The District of Columbia, one of the magnets for black people during the Great Migration, was long the sole majority-minority federal jurisdiction in the continental U.S.