Upper and Lower South

The evidence presented indicates two movements of American settlers into Texas. In the interior of Texas, in a block of contiguous counties in and to the west of the Blackland Prairie, Upper Southerners were dominant in the population. The natives of the Gulf Coastal Plains occupied counties with hot, humid climate "prepared" for cotton and slavery. At the same time, patterns of population origins taken alone do not constitute evidence to support the thesis that Texas was characterized by a economic, political and cultural dichotomy. Therefore I will discuss similarities/differences in-between this two peoples to cultural preferences: Negro Slavery, Cotton, Secession and food production, and try discover correlation’s between pattern of origin and other cultural preferences.

The most obvious index in origins of the Texas population is a study of birthplaces of the settlers who inhabited the state in the nineteenth century. Before the pre-Civil war people mainly trekked from Upper South. By 1830 the total aggregate population was about 20,000. The revolution caused a large influx of Lower southerners and by the time of the federal census in 1850, when the total aggregate population was 210,000, it was obvious that Texas was no longer exclusively within the domain of the upper south. From 1836 to the Civil war, the area dominated by Gulf southerners expanded from a small foothold in the coastal bottomlands, and the upper southerners had been forced to seek land in the interior of Texas, primarily in the Fertile Blackland Prairie, a block of contiguous counties in and to the west. This helps to explain the assumption that the major differences between the Lower and Upper south pertained to farming. The Lower South was a land of cotton and slavery, a land dominated economically by the plantation agriculture. In contrast, the Upper south was primarily the domain of slaveless yeoman farmers, an area largely devoid of cotton and other subtropical cash crops. Grains especially corn and wheat, formed the backbone of the rural economy, supplemented in certain areas by tobacco and hemp. In other words the cultural-economic origins were quite different.