SOURCE: Degler, Carl N. “The Foundations of Southern Distinctiveness.” The Southern Review 13, no. 2 (April 1977): 225-39.

In the following essay, Degler outlines the economic and historical sources of Southern cultural distinctiveness, maintaining nonetheless that differences between Northerners and Southerners in the first half of the nineteenth century were a matter of degree, not kind, and that both groups shared an essential worldview.

Whether one is interested in the early antebellum South or the modern South, the agricultural character of the region is fundamental. If today the South is the most rural region of the nation, in the years before the War for Southern Independence that description was even more appropriate. Although the Northwest was then often spoken of as an agricultural region, too, the South easily surpassed the West as well as the Northeast in its commitment to agriculture. About 52 percent of the nonslave labor force of the South...