What Makes the South Different

In 2024 Southern Living, a popular glossy lifestyle magazine that graces coffee tables across the South (and other parts of the country, as it turns out), ran an article proposing the resurrection of 23 Southern traditions that would make America a better place: “Saying Please and Thank You”, “Cursive”, “Saying Sir and Ma’am”, “hand-written notes”, “Sunday Suppers”, “Holding the Door Open for Others”, “welcoming neighbors”, and so on. What struck me, as a native Southerner living in the Midwest, was how much Southern Living’s list did not seem distinctively Southern. It was a list of old-fashioned things, perhaps, but not anything particularly Southern. 

The Southern Living article, and the fact that the United States 250th birthday falls on a contentious midterm election year, got me thinking about the way in which the South still operates as a sort of socio-political other: it’s a mirror for what mainstream telemedia thinks the country might have been, or should be, or—if race is the topic of the day—was and should not have been. 

I grew up in Salisbury, North Carolina. Around forty thousand people live there, 40 miles up I-85 from Charlotte. The town is large enough to have its own identity, and just far enough away from the big city not to be a suburb. It still has southern feeling racial dynamics; the population is split roughly equally between whites and blacks, with a growing Hispanic minority. Salisbury is an old place, as the South goes, settled in the 1720s and 1730s. It was incorporated in 1753. It has Revolutionary War history (the Regulator Movement) and Civil War history (Salisbury Prison, the other Andersonville). The latter was one of the reasons the late Tony Horowitz picked it to open his Confederates in the Attack. It certainly has foodways that identify as “Southern”: Lexington-style chopped pork BBQ was created 15 miles up the road. And its religion is more or less evangelical; the largest religious group as of the 2020 census was the United Methodist Church. 

And yet for all of the things that make Salisbury “Southern” they are also quintessentially American. Television and mass media more broadly have mitigated regional accents, and the internet has certainly helped homogenize American society. But even without technologies of the twenty-first century, there has always been something essentially American about the South. The drafter of the Declaration of Independence, the Great Emancipator and unifier of the nation, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the man who led the Civil Rights Movement all were southerners. In 250 years, from “Give Me Liberty to Give Me Death” to Ella Langley, the South’s loves and hatred, its sins and successes, have been America’s loves and hatred, and America’s sins and successes. 

New York City-born and North Carolina-reared essayist and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor John Shelton Reed once asked of the South: “What is this place? What’s different about it?” Reed’s first question is an unsurprising one; the South is certainly a place, and natives and non-natives know it. But answering the question as to what makes it different is, 250 years after southerners helped make America independent, still hard to answer. That difficulty is, perhaps, the best evidence for an affirmative answer of Reed’s last question: Is it different anymore?

About the Author

MILES SMITH IV is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.