Southern DU'ers: Tell me about the South

[Spider Jerusalem]

57. Not really

the inland South was settled largely by people from the Scottish border country, either directly from the Scottish lowlands/north of England (Cumberland and Northumberland) or by way of Ulster (where a good many Scots border country Presbyterians went in James I's Plantation of Ulster). More than a quarter-million people emigrated from the Scots Lowlands, north of England and Ulster to North America between 1715 and 1775, and almost all of them ended up in the inland South (the Carolinas, the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Georgia, etc) and most of those first emigrants' descendants ended up moving west to Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and so on. The Ulster Scots Presbyterians came to culturally dominate the lowland South to the extent that even people whose ancestral origins may be different in those parts of the country became culturally Scots-Irish (as an aside: the origins of the term "redneck" come from the Scots Covenanters, who signed an oath and declaration pledging to uphold Presbyterism as the established church of Scotland...many of them signed in blood, and wore red scarves to signify their support, hence "redneck&quot . Some of the disctinctive elements of this culture; social organisation based around the extended family, a distrust of outsiders, quick temper and use of violence as a means of settling disputes, and early marriage...the average marriage age in the Scots border country was the youngest in Britain, at around 19 or so, and the inland South continues to have the youngest age at marriage of American regions.

The South also, historically, experienced very low levels of immigration in the post-colonial era; much lower than any other part of the country (all those people in the South who put "American" for ancestry on the Census? Are probably descended from colonial-era immigrants).

There's a very interesting book, by David Hackett Fisher, called "Albion's Seed: Four English Folkways in America" that looks at American cultures through the lens of the persistence of the distinctive British regional cultures of the earliest groups of settlers (New England Separatists from East Anglia, Pennsylvania Quakers from the north Midlands of England, Virginia Cavaliers from the south and southwest of England, and from the Scots border country to the inland South). I'd recommend it as being worth a read.