Old Southwest
The "Old Southwest" is an informal name for the southwestern frontier territories of the United States from the American Revolutionary War c. 1780, through the early 1800s, at which point the US had acquired the Louisiana Territory, pushing the southwestern frontier toward what is today known as the Southwest.
After
Geography
Historians usually describe the Old Southwest as bounded by the Mississippi River to the west, the Ohio, its tributary, to the north, the body of water these rivers flow into—the Gulf of Mexico—to the south, and to the east, the western boundaries of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. Much of northern, western, and southern Georgia is part of the Old Southwest, as the state did not grow into its modern boundaries until 1827.
Historians usually include West Florida in the Old Southwest, but the peninsula of Florida, or East Florida, is often excluded. The Apalachicola River was the boundary between West Florida and East Florida until 1820. The Florida Parishes of Louisiana, lying east of the Mississippi, are part of the Old Southwest.
History
The Old Southwest includes the homelands of numerous
After the American Revolutionary War, in the Treaty of Paris of 1783, Britain ceded most of its North American territory to the United States, while Spain, a U.S. ally, took over in West and East Florida. In 1787 the United States Congress organized the Northwest Territory and established rules for founding new states, but the Old Southwest proved more difficult to manage.[clarification needed][citation needed] As was the case with the Northwest Territory, the states to the east each claimed overlapping territory extending to the Mississippi River.
The
Despite the Proclamation of 1763 prohibiting Anglo-American settlement in this region until the Treaty of Paris in 1783, by the 1790 census there were over 100,000 American settler-colonists in Kentucky and Tennessee alone, and by the 1800 census there were about 400,000 Americans in this region (including enslaved people). Members of Indigenous Nations were not US citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and thus were not counted in the census. The US waged several wars of extermination against the Indigenous people of this region, including the Cherokee wars, the Creek War, and the Seminole Wars. Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the American Indian Nations of this region were all but annihilated, surviving mainly in isolated rural pockets of land that were often unsuitable for agriculture and thus of little value to American settler-colonists. The only federally recognized American Indian groups in this region in the 21st century are the Mississippi Choctaw, the Poarch Band Creek in Alabama, and the Seminoles and Miccosukee in Florida. Their combined population was approximately 18,000 in 2020—over 11,000 of which were Mississippi Choctaw.
Following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, this region and the Old South gradually came to be collectively known as the Southeast, although the northeast portion of the Old South is sometimes instead considered part of the US Atlantic Midland. By the late 1840s, following the Mexican–American War, the term American Southwest referred mainly to the southern portion of the Mexican Cession.
Economy
The region's climate and soils favored
See also
- Royal Proclamation of 1763
- Indian removal
- Indian barrier state
- Southwest Territory
- Indian Reserve (1763)
- Overmountain Men
- Kentucke's Frontiers by Craig Thompson Friend
Notes
- ^ Bateman and Weiss
References
- Bateman, Fred, and Thomas Weiss. A deplorable scarcity: the failure of industrialization in the slave economy. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
- Clark, Thomas Dionysius. The Old Southwest, 1795-1830: Frontiers in Conflict. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996)
- Flora, Joseph, Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, and Todd Taylor. "Old Southwest". The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).
Further reading
- ISBN 978-0-19-502209-4.