White Southerners

[3] Academic John Shelton Reed argues that "Southerners' differences from the American mainstream have been similar in kind, if not degree, to those of the immigrant ethnic groups".

[4][5] Reed states that Southerners, as other ethnic groups, are marked by differences from the national norm, noting that they tend to be poorer, less educated, more rural, and specialize in job occupation.

[10] When looked at broadly, studies have shown that Southerners tend to be more conservative than most non-Southerners, with liberalism being mostly predominant in places with a Black majority or urban areas in the South.

In the British peerage, only the senior family member (typically the eldest son) inherited a substantive title (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron); these are referred to as peers or lords.

[20] According to historian G. E. Mingay, the gentry were landowners whose wealth "made possible a certain kind of education, a standard of comfort, and a degree of leisure and a common interest in ways of spending it".

[31] In 1765, London philanthropist Dr. John Fothergill remarked on the cultural differences of the British American colonies southward from Maryland and those to the north, suggesting that the Southerners were marked by "idleness and extravagance".

[32] J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's 1782 Letters from an American Farmer described Charleston, South Carolina slaveholders as having "all that life affords most bewitching and pleasurable, without labour, without fatigue, hardly subjected to the trouble of wishing."

A visiting French dignitary in 1810 contrasted the "bold and enterprising" residents of the northern states with the "heedless and lazy" people of the South and observed that American customs seemed "entirely changed" over the Potomac River, with Southern society resembling those of the Caribbean.

For instance, a 1791 article in the New York Magazine warned that the spread of Southern cockfighting was tantamount to being "assaulted" by "the enemy within" and would "rob" the nation's "honor".

Similarly, a 1822 commentary in the North American Review suggested that Southerners were "a different race of men", "highminded and vainglorious" people who lived on the plantations.

[35] Political disputes surrounding foreign policy, slavery and tariffs weakened the notion of an all-Union ideological identity which Southern writers had been promoting for the first thirty years after independence.

It was only in this generation's youth that the United States as a whole began shifting to a postcolonial society with new vehicles for collective identity; in their adulthood they helped define and historicize the South.

[38] Southern ideologues also used their alleged Norman ancestors to explain their attachment to the institution of slavery, as opposed to the Northerners who were denigrated as descendants of a so-called "slave race".

In 1866, Edward A. Pollard, author of the first history book on the Confederacy The Lost Cause, continued insisting that the South had to "assert its well-known superiority in civilization over the people of the North.

"[38] Southerners developed their ideas on nationalism on influences from the nationalist movements growing in Europe (such as the works of Johann Gottfried Herder and the constructed north–south divide between Germanic peoples and Italians).

Southern ideologues, fearful of mass politics, sought to adopt the ethnic themes of the revolutions of 1848 while distancing themselves from the revolutionaries' radical liberal ideas.

[42] Northern English, Scots lowlanders and Ulster-Scots (later called the Scotch-Irish) settled in Appalachia in the 18th century,[43] and eventually spread westward into the Ozarks and Texas Hill Country.

[47] During the nadir of American race relations at the turn of the 20th century, intense violence and white supremacy flourished in a region suffering from a lack of public education and competition for resources.

[49] As John T. Campbell summarizes in The Broad Ax in 1906, the Civil War also caused poor whites to experience intense dire economic conditions and were brought into poverty along with enslaved African-Americans.

[56] Killian does however note, that: "Whatever claims to ethnicity or minority status ardent 'Southernists' may have advanced, white southerners are not counted as such in official enumerations".

[58] More recently, historian Clyde N. Wilson has argued that "In the North and West, white Southerners were treated as and understood themselves to be a distinct ethnic group, referred to negatively as 'hillbillies' and 'Okies'".