Southerners in the American Old West

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

I was literally just talking to Koopa about this and she didn't know either, so maybe one of our historians can enlighten us.

So I made the observation that in every Western film, the characters speak with Southern accents. This, obviously, creates the impression that it was almost exclusively Southerners who migrated out West. The irony is that the Homestead Acts themselves were overwhelmingly supported by anti-slavery Northerners who wanted individual farmers to own their land, as opposed to Southern slave-owners - who could easily out-compete the Free Soilers with slave labor. Hence why the repeal of the Missouri Compromise led to militias and violence even before the Civil War.

Does Hollywood exaggerate the extent to which Southerners seized the West?

[If my soul was made of stone]

Arizona was heavily peopled by Southerners at first, and claimed for a time by the Confederacy. Much of the mythology of the Old West is centered on the turbulent pre-statehood history of that state, so it makes sense that the whole gestalt would be represented as an outpost of Southerners even though the remainder of the Interior West was settled more by those from parts north.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Per the federal census of 1880, 32,572 (7.3%) of the 443,782 native-born American citizens resident of the western territories (Arizona, Dakota, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming) had been born in a state where slavery was legal at the outset of the Civil War. This excludes the District of Columbia, where native Southerners made up a considerably larger share of the population (36.2%) owing mainly to the influence of Marylanders and Virginians. I am not a linguist and I can't speak to the appropriate accent of Americans from this time and place, but just from a cursory review of the data, the suggestion that the West was settled primarily by Southerners would appear to be very wrong. (1)

1. U.S. Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880 (Washington, 1883) 480-87.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Arizona was heavily peopled by Southerners at first, and claimed for a time by the Confederacy. Much of the mythology of the Old West is centered on the turbulent pre-statehood history of that state, so it makes sense that the whole gestalt would be represented as an outpost of Southerners even though the remainder of the Interior West was settled more by those from parts north.

Looking into it, it seems native Southerners (4,086) made up just 16.75% of native born U.S. citizens living in Arizona in 1880. Of course, this was thirty years after the territory was acquired by the United States. Another 2,162 were native Californians and 8,166 had been born in Arizona —how many of them may have been born to parents of Southern extraction is hard to say, though presumably a review of earlier censuses could answer for the latter group.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

It depends on the period of the Westerns in question.

There was strong early Lost Cause influence in old Hollywood and this influence is seen in the number of movies in which ex-confederate goes west to start over but gets screwed by evil Yankee businessman/land/rail/bank type who just happens to be in cahoots with corrupt US (read Union) Army officer.

Some of this influence even spilled over to the Leone films and similar Italian knockoffs. Though for their purposes it was more about the inherent class angle in the above dynamic, then the Lost Cause.