It’s hard to say what distinguishes the Old South from the New South, as one single characteristic of the South does not seem to change the meaning of Southern culture. There is however something to be said about the way that the South has always remained a cultural identity of America. There are many distinct characteristics that set the South apart from the rest of the country, but who can say which of those characteristics is central to the construction of regional identity.

Agrarian culture has always been a part of the South. The wide expanse of farms, the freedom in not having to rely on the rest of the world for anything has allowed a culture to thrive in the South that does not find dependence on interaction with other cultural spheres outside of their own. To what extent though does this agrarian culture define a regional identity for the South?

Unlike the Old South, the post-antebellum South has found it necessary to redefine the importance of agrarian culture. The institution of slavery allowed for a dominance of this agrarian culture and defined the South economically and culturally within this idea of an agrarian society. But following the abolition of slavery it became more clear that there was also “no longer an importantly separate political and cultural unite known as the South” (Rubin 3). So it became increasingly hard for writers and historians to limit the idea of what the South was in contrast to what it has become. It is however as some might point out still “too early to dismiss the importance or the sustaining power of the regional identification” (Rubin 3). As Louis Rubin points out, “In the period before the secession of the southern states and the formation of the Confederate States of America in 1860-1861, the nature and the well-being of the South were associated with chattel slavery. Even though only one of every three white southern families owed slave, and of these the majority owned only one or two a piece, the Peculiar Institution was held to be the sine qua non for maintaining and enhancing the unique nature of southern life” (Rubin 4). This sine qua non, a staple of Southern identity and culture, known as slavery helped to define the Old South, but how would this unique part of southern life affect the greater regional identity once it had been dissolved? Many thought that, “If the right to own black men and women as property were not protected by strict constitutional construction and by legislative and executive authority, then the unique civilization south of the Potomac and Ohio rivers would surely crumble to ruin” (Rubin 4). But surely if this was the case, “If southern sectional identity were dependent upon slavery, then the loss of the war and the end of slavery should have destroyed that identity” (Rubin 4). So how then does the South live on if the idea of agrarian culture was central to the regional identity and central to a maintenance of that agrarian culture was the institution of slavery?

I believe this question is answered in what we see come out in the various mediums of culture expression following the period of reconstruction in the South, and namely in literature. To a large extent the literature of the post-antebellum period seems to battle with a redefinition of the South. Many come to realize that in their defeat, the South has, in a sense maintained, its comfort as part of the country that should be left alone. And so authors begin to write about the South not necessarily as an agrarian culture, in a way that might have been suggested before the Civil War, but as a legacy that continues to live on past all ideas of what it’s central constructs of identity might be.

God’s Little Acre, a book by Erskine Caldwell, reflects on the life in the South during the 1930s. The Walden family owns a farm, but has neglected to keep it up: “Across the field the two negro men were ploughing in the new ground. There was very little land remaining under the cultivation on the farm then. Fifteen or twenty acres of the place had been potted with holes that were anywhere from ten to thirty feet deep, and twice as wide. The new ground had been cleared that spring to raise cotton on, and there was about twenty-five acres of it. Otherwise, there would not have been sufficient land that year for the two share-croppers to work. Year by year the area of cultivated land diminished as the big holes in the ground increased. By autumn, they would probably have to begin digging in the new ground, or else to close the house” (Caldwell 9). The opening scene Pluto Swint arrives at the Walden farm to ask Ty Ty Walden to think of him when voting for the next sheriff. Pluto comments about the state of things, he reckons “there’s enough to complain about these days if a fellow wants to belly ache some. Cotton ain’t worth the raising no longer, and the darkies eat the watermelons as fast as they ripen on the vine. There is not much sense in trying to grow things for living these days” (Caldwell 5).

Farming is central to agrarian culture but its clear that the identity of the South is not lost in absence of cultivated land. So then the “question of what to do with the land itself—how to use it and who should own it—is of paramount importance” in much of the Southern literature written after the Civil War (Jones 124). Does the land become a the source of burden like in God’s Small Acre in the sense that the idea of maintaining what once was a farm has long since died as a part of Southern identity? Or does the land simply serve as a reminder of what once was a part of the South? George Tindall comments on why he thinks Southern identity is not lost in all of this, “Contrary to the supposition that social and economic change would quickly obliterate the ethnic and regional difference in American life, southern cultural difference have stubborn reasserted themselves” (Tindall 164). This ability to reassert themselves can be reaffirmed when Ty Ty says, “Maybe God made two kinds of us, after all. It looks like now, though I used to never think so, that God made a man to work the ground and a man to work on machinery. I reckon I was a fool to try and make Will Thompson take an interest in the land” (Caldwell 184). Ty Ty recognizes that a farm life is of no more significance than that of a life in the factory. That God had made two types of men after all and that industrialism isn’t anymore a “boundless aggression against nature” than digging holes in farmland (Core 298).

Flannery O’Connor’s approach to agrarianism as part of the Southern regional identity takes a different outlook on the question of what to do with the land, as the land doesn’t necessarily represent something physical but perhaps a metaphor for what Southern identity encompasses. In Good Country People one of O’Connor’s stories about life in South, good country people are seen as “the salt of the earth.” This metaphor is repeated a few times and seems to suggest that a fading agrarian culture doesn’t separate the Southern identity from the land. This redefinition of what it agrarian culture means to the regional identity seems to rely on its simple definition as “an effort to project the possibilities of a life in the South based on the family and the land” (Core 298).

The extent to which an agrarian culture has founded the bases of regional identity in the South seems to indicate that agrarian culture does find a central role in the construction of the Southern identity. However, agrarian culture seems to redefine itself along with the identity of the South as not necessarily being founded on the backs of slaves, but rather as an effort to establish life based on the family and the land.

Works Cited

  • Caldwell, Erskine. God’s Little Acre. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1933.
  • Core, George. “The Dominion of the Fugitives and Agrarians.” The American South: Portrait of a Culture. 1980.
  • Jones, Suzanne W. “I’ll Take My Land: Contemporary Southern Agrarians.” South To A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture. 2002.
  • O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find: And Other Stories. London: Women’s Press Ltd, 1980.
  • Rubin, Louis D. “The American South: The Continuity of Self-Definition.” The American South: Portrait of a Culture. 1980.
  • Tindall, George B. “The Resurgence of Southern Identity.” The American South: Portrait of a Culture. 1980.