*Paging NC Yankee*
From my very simple understanding, it largely has. However, this has been for very different reasons and with some exceptions. The South's support for free trade in the 1800s largely had to do with the slave power's desire for cotton trading with Britain and partly because many Southerners viewed many Northerners' support for protective tariffs as an explicitly pro-Northern-industry policy that targeted Southern "enterprise." Also, keep in mind that for most of the late 19th Century and at least until the 1940s, American labor unions supported free trade, and this is a huge component of why people like FDR were free traders, and I think the South more or less just kept towing the party line on the issue (though I still think the region benefited from free trade). It wasn't until post-WWII America emerged as a true economic super power that free trade came to be favored by most in the business community and became more associated with "conservative" thinking, IMO, but this also coincided with the South becoming much more commercial in nature and therefore conservative in economic thinking. This is a blurry cutoff and all, but I've read that before WWII, the labor community saw free trade as benefiting them because they wanted to get American goods out there to sell to the world but sharply changed their tunes once the effect of free trade on the US economy meant more imports and fewer exports. By this time, the South was a very, very different place and was supporting free trade for a largely different reason. As I said, I'd wait for NC Yankee's response, though.
This is a good answer.
