Dixie


Dixie is a nickname for the Southern United States, especially those states that seceded to form the Confederate States of America.

Region

As a definite geographic location within the United States, "Dixie" is usually defined as the eleven Southern states that seceded in late 1860 and early 1861 to form the new Confederate States of America. They are : South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Maryland never seceded from the Union, but many of its citizens favored the Confederacy. While many of Maryland's representatives were arrested to prevent secession, both the states of Missouri and Kentucky produced Ordinances of Secession and were formally admitted into the Confederacy. West Virginia was part of Virginia until 1863; counties that chose not to secede from the Union became part of West Virginia.
Although Maryland is not included in Dixie today, Maryland is on the Dixie side of the Mason–Dixon line; if the origin of the term Dixie is accepted as referring to the region south and west of that line, Maryland was in Dixie in 1760. It can also be argued that Maryland was, in 1860, part of Dixie, especially culturally. In this sense, it would remain so into the 1970s, when an influx of people from the Northeast made the state and its culture significantly less Southern.
However, the location and boundaries of "Dixie" have, over time, become increasingly subjective and mercurial. Today, it is most often associated with those parts of the Southern United States where traditions and legacies of the Confederate era and the antebellum South live most strongly. The concept of "Dixie" as the location of a certain set of cultural assumptions, mind-sets and traditions was explored in the 1981 book The Nine Nations of North America.
In terms of self-identification and appeal, the popularity of the word "Dixie" has been found to be declining. A 1976 study revealed that in an area of the South covering some "Dixie" reached 25% of the popularity of "American" in names of commercial business entities. A 1999 analysis found that between 1976 and 1999 in 19% of US cities sampled there was an increase of relative use of "Dixie", in 48% of cities sampled there was a decline and there was no change recorded in 32% of cities, while a 2010 study found that in the course of 40 years the area in question shrank to just, to the territory at the confluence of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. In 1976 at some "Dixie" reached at least 6% popularity of "American"; in 2010 the corresponding area was some.
Significant scholarship has been devoted to the mythology of Dixie and the South as developed "by the many attentions of northern artists to southern mythology, the North's fascination with aristocracy and lost causes, the national appeal of the agrarian myth, and the South's personification of that ideal, to say nothing of the North's persistent use of the South in the manipulation of her own racial mythology."
In the 21st century, concerns over glorifying the Confederacy has led to the term being removed from some public references.

Origin of the name

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the origin of this nickname remains obscure. The most common theories according to A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles by Mitford M. Mathews are:
  1. "Dixie" is derived from Jeremiah Dixon, a surveyor of the Mason–Dixon line, which defined the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania, separating free and slave states subsequent to the Missouri Compromise. Evidence shows that 'Dixon' became 'Dixie' in a children's game played in New York back in the 1840s.
  2. The word "Dixie" refers to currency issued first by the Citizens State Bank in the French Quarter of New Orleans and then by other banks in Louisiana. These banks issued ten-dollar notes labeled Dix on the reverse side, French for "ten". The notes were known as "Dixies" by Southerners, and the area around New Orleans and the French-speaking parts of Louisiana came to be known as "Dixieland". Eventually, usage of the term broadened to refer to the Southern states in general.
  3. One apocryphal account claims that the word preserves the name of a Mr. Johan Dixie, a slave owner on Manhattan Island where slavery was legal until 1827. The story as told in Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends tells that Dixie's slaves were later sold in the South, and having formerly worked "Dixie's Land", told of the relatively less harsh treatment they faced while in the North. There is no evidence that this story is true.