| Total population | |
|---|---|
 64,685,898 (2020 census)[1] 57.70% of the total population | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Southern United States (except incounties with a Black majority or aHispanic majority) | |
 Texas | 14,609,365[1] |
 Florida | 12,422,961[1] |
 North Carolina | 6,488,459[1] |
 Georgia | 5,555,483[1] |
 Virginia | 5,208,856[1] |
 Tennessee | 4,990,938[1] |
 South Carolina | 3,243,442[1] |
 Alabama | 3,220,452[1] |
 Louisiana | 2,657,652[1] |
 Oklahoma | 2,514,885[1] |
 Arkansas | 2,114,512[1] |
 Mississippi | 1,658,893[1] |
| Languages | |
| Southern American English,Appalachian English,Isleño Spanish,Louisiana Creole,Texan English,Texan German,Cajun English,Louisiana French,Italian andSpanish[2] | |
| Religion | |
| PredominantlyProtestantism (especiallySouthern Baptist,nondenominational, andMethodist),[3] alsoJudaism[4] | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Old Stock Americans,Scotch-Irish Americans,Cajuns,Louisiana Creoles,Melungeons,Louisiana Isleños,Floridanos,Jews | |
White Southerners, historically calledWhite Confederates orSouthrons, areWhite Americans from theSouthern United States, originating from the various waves ofNorthwestern European immigration to the region beginning in the 17th century.[5] A uniform sense of identity among White Southerners emerged as part of a commonSouthern culture.[6]
AcademicJohn Shelton Reed argues that "Southerners' differences from the American mainstream have been similar in kind, if not degree, to those of the immigrant ethnic groups".[7][8] Reed states that Southerners, as other ethnic groups, are marked by differences from the national norm, noting that they tend to bepoorer, less educated, more rural, and specialize in job occupation. He argues that they tended to differ in cultural and political terms, and thattheir accents serve as an ethnic marker.[9]
Upon white SouthernersJimmy Carter andBill Clinton being elected to theU.S. presidency during the late 20th century, it symbolized generations of change from anOld South toNew South society. JournalistHodding Carter andState Department spokesperson during the Carter administration stated: "The thing about the South is that it's finally multiple rather than singular in almost every respect." The transition from President Carter to President Clinton also mirrored the social and economic evolution of the South in the mid-to-late 20th century.[10]
White Southern diaspora populations exist inBrazil andBelize, known respectively as theConfederados andConfederate Belizeans.[11][12]
The Spanish were the first Europeans to explore the Southern United States and to contactNative Americans in the region.Juan Ponce de León discoveredFlorida.[14]Hernando de Soto explored Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas.[15]
Before European colonization, The Southern United States was originally inhabited by various Native American tribes. Europeans had wiped out their population by giving them diseases. During the early 1800s, Native Americans were forcibly displaced as part of a brutal initiative aimed at clearing land for white settlers. The introduction of Spanish and French explorers in the 1500s marked the onset of European influences and the marked the beginning of white settlement in the South, and subsequently, the establishment of the United States of America placed Native Americans in direct opposition to an increasing number of white settlers. By the early 1800s, the Indian Removal Act presented a harrowing dilemma for most tribes: either assimilate into white culture or migrate westward into an uncertain future. Under the leadership of presidentAndrew Jackson, the notoriousTrail of Tears resulted in the forced removal of thousands of Native Americans from the South to Indian Territory, which is now known as Oklahoma.[16]
ThePlantations of Ireland took place before and during the earliestBritish colonization of the Americas, and a group known as theWest Country Men were involved in both Irish and American colonization.[17]
Spain,England andFrance colonized the region.[18]
TheSouthern United States is not a geographical monolith. The South consists of several geographical regions, including theDeep South, theUpland South, and theBorder states.Texas andFlorida also have significantHispanic influence, from being formerly part of Mexico and Spain, respectively.[19]
In particular, the border states of the Upper South have geographic, social, political, and economic connections to both the North and South. They are still considered to delineate the cultural border between the North and South, with theOhio River being an important boundary between them.[23]
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The politics and economy of the South were historically dominated by a small rural elite.[24] When looked at broadly, studies have shown that Southerners tend to be moreconservative than most non-Southerners, withliberalism being mostly predominant in places with aBlack majority or urban areas in the South.[25][26]
The predominant culture of the original Southern states wasEnglish, particularly fromSouth East England,South West England and theWest Midlands.[27] In the 17th century, most voluntary immigrants were of English origin and settled chiefly along the eastern coast, but had pushed as far inland as theAppalachian Mountains by the 18th century. The majority of early English settlers wereindentured servants, who gained freedom after working off their passage.[28] The wealthier men, typically members of the Englishlanded gentry, who paid their way received land grants known asheadrights to encourage settlement.[27]
During the colonial era, the British upper classes consisted of two sometimes overlapping entities, thepeerage and landed gentry. In the British peerage,only the senior family member (typically the eldest son) inherited a substantive title (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron); these are referred to as peers or lords. The rest of the nobility form part of the landed gentry (abbreviated "gentry").[30]
The landed gentry was a traditional Britishsocial class consisting ofgentlemen in the original sense; that is, those who owned land in the form ofcountry estates to such an extent that they were not required to actively work, except in an administrative capacity on their own lands.[31] The estates were often (but not always) worked bytenant farmers, in which case the gentleman could live entirely offrent income. Gentlemen, ranking aboveyeomen, formed the lowest rank of British nobility.[32]
William Berkeley, who served as thegovernor of Virginia from 1660 to 1677, instituted a "Second Sons" policy, in which younger sons of the British nobility were recruited to emigrate to Virginia.[33] Berkeley also emphasized theheadright system, the offering of large tracts of land to those arriving in the colony. This early immigration by an elite contributed to the development of an aristocratic political and social structure in the South.[34]
According to historianG. E. Mingay, the gentry were landowners whose wealth "made possible a certain kind of education, a standard of comfort, and a degree of leisure and a common interest in ways of spending it". Leisure distinguished gentry from businessmen who gained their wealth through work. From the late 16th-century, the gentry emerged as the class most closely involved in politics, the military and law.[35]
The colonies of Virginia,Bermuda, and Maryland had strong Royalist sympathies, owing to their origins and demographics. Virginia, the oldest and third most populous colony, was turned into acrown colony in 1624 when the Royal charter of theVirginia Company was revoked. The much smaller Maryland was aproprietary colony founded by Roman Catholic gentry, supported by a Protestant underclass.[37]
Maryland had resisted the republic until finally occupied byNew England Parliamentary forces after theBattle of the Severn in 1655. The Battle of the Severn was fought on March 25, 1655, on theSevern River at Horn Point, across Spa Creek fromAnnapolis, Maryland, in what at that time was referred to as thePuritan settlement of "Providence", and what is now the neighborhood of Eastport. It was an extension of the conflicts that formed theEnglish Civil War, pitting the forces of Puritan settlers against forces aligned withLord Baltimore, then Lord Proprietor of the colony of Maryland.[38] In 1660 the GovernorJosias Fendall tried to turn Maryland into a Commonwealth of its own in what is known as Fendall's Rebellion, but with the fall of theCommonwealth of England he was left without support and was replaced byPhilip Calvert upon the Restoration.[39]
After the death of GovernorSamuel Matthews, Virginia'sHouse of Burgesses reelected the royalistWilliam Berkeley in 1659. Thus, in the view of historianRobert Beverley, Jr. writing in 1705, the Virginia colony "was the last of all the King's Dominions that submitted to the Usurpation, and afterwards the first that cast it off".[40] Many of theFirst Families of Virginia trace their founding to this time period and not the first days of the colony. As a reward for its loyalty, Charles II gave Virginia the epithet "Old Dominion". He awarded a group of his faithful supporters the rights to found a new colony directly south of Virginia, to be calledCarolina after his father.[41]
On March 24, 1663,King Charles II issued a charter to a group of eight English noblemen, establishing theProvince of Carolina as a reward for their support ofhis efforts to regain the throne of England. The eight were calledLords Proprietors or simply "Proprietors".[43] "Carolina" is taken from theLatin word for "Charles" (Carolus), honoring KingCharles I and II.[44]
The eight Lords Proprietors were:[45]
The Lords Proprietors were anxious to secure Carolina against Spanish attacks fromSan Agustín in Florida, and to do so, they needed to attract more colonists. The Lords had a headright system whereby they granted 150 acres of land to each member of a family. An indentured male servant who served his term received his freedom dues from his master and a grant of one hundred acres from the Lords Proprietors. To attract planters with capital to invest, the Lords Proprietors also gave the owner and master the 150-acre headright for every slave imported to the Colony. These incentives drew 6,600 colonists to the colony by 1700 compared with only 1,500 in the Spanish colony of Florida. Carolina attracted English settlers, French Protestants (Huguenots) and other colonists fromBarbados and theWest Indies. The first government in Carolina began inAlbemarle County in 1664, when William Sayle was appointed as the governor. Proprietary authority was weaker near the Virginia border. The Lords Proprietors established a North Carolina with its own assembly and deputy governor. In 1712, the division of Carolina into North and South was completed with the elevation of the deputy governor to governor of North Carolina.[46]
According toBertram Wyatt-Brown, "Bondage was an answer to an economic need. The South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South."[48] Between one-half and two-thirds of European immigrants to theThirteen Colonies between the 1630s and theAmerican Revolution came asindentured servants.[49] However, while more than half the European immigrants to the Thirteen Colonies were indentured servants, at any one time they were outnumbered by workers who had never been indentured, or whose indenture had expired. Thus free wage labor was the most prevalent for Europeans in the colonies.[50]
Indentured servitude began its decline afterBacon's Rebellion (1676-1677), a servant uprising against the government of Colonial Virginia.[51] This was due to multiple factors, such as the treatment of servants, support of native tribes in the surrounding area, a refusal to expand the amount of land an indentured servant could work by the colonial government, and inequality between the upper and lower class in colonial society.[51]Edmund S. Morgan's 1975 classic,American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, connected the threat ofBacon's Rebellion, namely the potential for lower-class revolt, with theColony of Virginia's transition over to slavery, saying, "But for those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. Virginians did not immediately grasp it. It would sink in as time went on."[52]
In the Chesapeake andProvince of North Carolina,tobacco constituted a major percentage of the total agricultural output.[33] TheAlbemarle Settlements were the first permanent English settlements in North Carolina, founded in theAlbemarle Sound andRoanoke River regions, beginning in the middle of the17th century. The settlers were mainly Virginians, migrating south.[53] When it was learned that the Albemarle Settlements were not included in the Carolinaproprietary grant of 1663, a new charter was granted in 1665 which included them. A government was instituted in the region ofAlbemarle Sound in 1664; and within a decade, settlements extended from theChowan River toCurrituck Sound, known asAlbemarle County.[54]
TheDeep South was dominated bycotton andrice plantations, originating with thecolony of South Carolina, which was settled by aplanter class who initially migrated from theBritish Caribbean island of Barbados.[55] TheBarbados Slave Code of 1661 was used as a model to control and terrorize the African American slave population.[56] The first European colonists in theProvince of Carolina, before it was split, introduced African slavery into the colony in 1670, the year the colony was founded.Charleston, South Carolina ultimately became the busiest slave port in North America.[57]
In the early 17th century Barbadians began large-scale migration from Barbados to Province of Carolina, becoming among some of the first resident settlers in those states.[58] The first English settlement in South Carolina was made in 1670, when three shiploads of emigrants fromBarbados sailed up the Ashley River. Ten years later, a more favorable site for the town, between theCooper andAshley Rivers, was chosen. This is where Charles Town was founded in 1680, where it remains today with the slightly altered nameCharleston. Since the Barbadians had been in the "plantation" business for decades, they brought this concept and its associated culture to Charles Town in the 1670s.[59][60]
Roughly 80% of all European settlers in colonial South Carolina were of English origins, however many of them did not come straight from England but rather came to Carolina fromBarbados.[61] The Barbadian Adventurers also brought with them theBarbados Slave Code, a legal code for the "management" of large populations of enslaved people. The code was initially developed in Barbados in 1661, thenJamaica in 1684, before being adopted in Carolina in 1695 as theCarolina slave codes.[62] The Carolina slave codes would subsequently be adopted in Georgia in 1770, and Florida would adopt the Georgia code soon afterbecoming aterritory of the United States in 1821.[63]
Some notable Barbadian Adventurers included:
In 1765, London philanthropist Dr.John Fothergill remarked on the cultural differences of the British American colonies southward from Maryland and those to the north, suggesting that the Southerners were marked by "idleness and extravagance". Fothergill suggested that Southerners were more similar to the people of the Caribbean than to the colonies to the north.[6]J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's 1782Letters from an American Farmer describedCharleston, South Carolina slaveholders as having "all that life affords most bewitching and pleasurable, without labour, without fatigue, hardly subjected to the trouble of wishing." Crèvecœur sought to portray Southerners as stuck in the social, cultural and economic remnants of colonialism, in contrast to the Northerners whom he considered to be representative of the distinctive culture of the new nation.[6] All of the states north ofMaryland passed laws to gradually or immediately abolish slavery between 1777 and 1804.[65]
Early in United States history, the contrasting characteristics of Southern states were acknowledged in a discussion betweenThomas Jefferson andFrançois-Jean de Chastellux. Jefferson ascribed the Southerners' "unsteady", "generous", "candid" traits to their climate, while De Chastellux claimed that Southerners' "indelible character which every nation acquires at the moment of its origin" would "always be aristocratic" not only because of slavery but also "vanity and sloth". A visiting French dignitary in 1810 contrasted the "bold and enterprising" residents of the northern states with the "heedless and lazy" people of the South and observed that American customs seemed "entirely changed" over thePotomac River, with Southern society resembling those of the Caribbean.[6]
Northern popular press and literature in this early period of US history often used a "we"-versus-"they" dichotomy when discussing Southerners, and looked upon Southern customs as backward and a threat to progress. For instance, a 1791 article in theNew York Magazine warned that the spread of Southerncockfighting was tantamount to being "assaulted" by "the enemy within" and would "rob" the nation's "honor".[66]
Most of the Southern United States is known as the "Bible Belt", because of the prevalence ofevangelical Protestantism. Except inAcadiana in Louisiana, Catholicism is almost entirely absent among White Southerners.[67]
During the colonial period (1607–1776), the South was a stronghold of theAnglican church. Its transition to a stronghold of evangelical Protestantism occurred gradually over the next century as a series of religious revival movements, many associated with the Baptist denomination, gained great popularity in the region.[68]
In the colonial period and early 19th century, theFirst Great Awakening and theSecond Great Awakening transformed Southern religion. The evangelical religion was spread by religious revivals led by local lay Baptist ministers or itinerant Methodist ministers. They fashioned the nation's "Bible Belt."[69] In the early decades of the 18th century, the Baptists in the South reduced their challenge to class and race. Rather than pressing for freedom for slaves, they encouraged planters to improve treatment of them, and ultimately used the Bible to justify slavery.[69]
In 1845, theSouthern Baptist Convention separated from other regions. By the beginning of the Civil War, theBaptist andMethodist churches had attracted the most members in the South, and their churches were most numerous in the region.[69]
In general, the inland regions of the Deep South and Upper South, such as Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama were less attractive to immigrants and have stronger concentrations of Baptists, Methodists,Churches of Christ and other Protestant fellowships.[70]
Texas was oncepart of Mexico, and Florida was oncepart of Spain. Both became states of the United States in part to protect slavery.
At the time of theAmerican Civil War, Florida and Texas were sparsely populated and not fully settled, with Florida and Texas being the least-populated and third least-populated of the 11 Confederate states per the1860 United States census, respectively.[71]
African slavery was practiced in parts of Latin America. TwoLatin American countries,Brazil andCuba, did not abolish slavery until the 1880s, and to this day have significantBlack populations.
 | It has been suggested thatConfederate patriotism bemerged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since November 2025. |
TheWar of 1812 brought increasing awareness to the differences between Northerners and Southerners, who had opposed and supported the war respectively. ThePanic of 1819 and the1820 admission of Missouri as a slave state also exacerbated the North–South divide. In 1823, New York activistGerrit Smith commented that there was an almost "national difference of character between the people of the Northern and the people of the Southern states." Similarly, a 1822 commentary in theNorth American Review suggested that Southerners were "a different race of men", "highminded and vainglorious" people who lived on the plantations.[72] Political disputes surrounding foreign policy, slavery and tariffs weakened the notion of an all-Union ideological identity which Southern writers had been promoting for the first thirty years after independence. Due to migration in the South itself, the notion of the South as a unified, distinctive political-economic entity began to replace the more specific local divisions between Easterners and Westerners/plantation-versus-backwoods in the years following the War of 1812, culminating in the Southern literature ofWilliam Gilmore Simms. It was only in this generation's youth that the United States as a whole began shifting to a postcolonial society with new vehicles for collective identity; in their adulthood they helped define and historicize the South.[73]
Some Southern writers in the lead up to theAmerican Civil War (1861–1865) built on the idea of a Southern nation by claiming that secession was not based on slavery but rather on "two separate nations". These writers postulated that Southerners were descended fromNorman cavaliers,Huguenots,Jacobites and other supposed "Mediterranean races" linked to the Romans, while Northerners were claimed to be descended fromAnglo-Saxon serfs and other Germanic immigrants who had a supposed "hereditary hatred" against the Southerners.[74] These ethnonationalist beliefs of being a "warrior race" widely disseminated among the Southern upper class, and Southerners began to use the term "Yankee" as a slur against a so-called "Yankee race" that they associated with being "calculating, money worshipping, cowardly" or even as "hordes" and "semi-barbarian".[75] Southern ideologues also used their alleged Norman ancestors to explain their attachment to the institution of slavery, as opposed to the Northerners who were denigrated as descendants of a so-called "slave race".[75] Union Secretary of the NavyGideon Welles and German-American political scientistFrancis Lieber, who condemned the Southerners' belief in their supposed distinct ancestry, attributed the Civil War's outbreak to that belief. In 1866,Edward A. Pollard, author of the first history book on the ConfederacyThe Lost Cause, continued insisting that the South had to "assert its well-known superiority in civilization over the people of the North."[75] Southerners developed their ideas on nationalism on influences from the nationalist movements growing in Europe (such as the works ofJohann Gottfried Herder and the constructed north–south divide between Germanic peoples and Italians). Southern ideologues, fearful of mass politics, sought to adopt the ethnic themes of therevolutions of 1848 while distancing themselves from the revolutionaries' radical liberal ideas.[76] The slaveholding elite encouragedRomantic "antimodern" narratives of Southern culture as a refuge of traditional community hospitality and chivalry to mobilise popular support from non-slaveholding White Southerners, promising to bring the South through a form of technological and economic progress without the perceived social ills of modern industrial societies.[76]
In the eleven states that seceded from the United States in 1860–61 to form theConfederacy, 31% of families held at least one African American inslavery, which includes the territory that split from Virginia to becomeWest Virginia.[77] The fourborder states that did not secede also permitted slavery.
Slavery was less common in theUpland South, comprising the areas in the South outside theAtlantic Plain, which remains heavily white to this day.[79]Northern English,Scots lowlanders andUlster-Scots (later called theScotch-Irish) settled inAppalachia in the 18th century,[80] and eventually spread westward into theOzarks andTexas Hill Country. The early settlers of theOhio Valley were mainly Upland Southerners.[81]
As independent small farmers living on the harshAmerican frontier, poor whites had starkly different interests than those of white Southerners that lived on commercialplantations or in large cities. Poor whites were often isolated from the rest of Southern society and civilization during theAntebellum South, with few owning slaves, and many were more likely to be critical of slavery.[82]
During theAmerican Civil War, some regions of the Upland South such asWest Virginia andEast Tennessee remainedloyal to the Union.[83] East Tennessee's Republican leanings are rooted in its antebellumWhig sentiments, with historian O.P. Temple tracing this sentiment back to the anti-aristocraticCovenanters of Scotland.[84]
During thenadir of American race relations at the turn of the 20th century, intense violence andwhite supremacy flourished in a region suffering from a lack of public education and competition for resources.[85] Southern politicians of the day built on conflict between poor whites and African Americans in a form ofpolitical opportunism.[86] As John T. Campbell summarizes inThe Broad Ax in 1906, the Civil War also caused poor whites to experience intense dire economic conditions and were brought into poverty along with enslaved African-Americans.[87]
In the past, white men have hated white men quite as much as some of them hate the Negro, and have vented their hatred with as much savagery as they ever have against the Negro. The best educated people have the least race prejudice. In the United States the poor white were encouraged to hate the Negroes because they could then be used to help hold the Negroes in slavery. The Negroes were taught to show contempt for the poor white because this would increase the hatred between them and each side could be used by the master to control the other. The real interest of the poor whites and the Negroes were the same, that of resisting the oppression of the master class. But ignorance stood in the way. This race hatred was at first used to perpetuatewhite supremacy in politics in the South. The poor whites are almost injured by it as are the Negroes.[87]
According to a 2014 study, about 10% of self-identified White Southerners have >1% African ancestry, compared to 3.5% ofWhite Americans in general.[90][91]
Sociologist William L. Smith argues that "regional identity and ethnic identity are often intertwined in a variety of interesting ways such that some scholars have viewed white southerners as an ethnic group".[92] In her bookSouthern Women, Caroline Matheny Dillman also documents a number of authors who posit that Southerners might constitute an ethnic group. She notes that the historianGeorge Brown Tindall analyzed the persistence of the distinctiveness of Southern culture inThe Ethnic Southerners (1976), "and referred to the South as a subculture, pointing out its ethnic and regional identity". The 1977 bookThe Ethnic Imperative, by Howard F. Stein andRobert F. Hill, "viewed Southerners as a special kind of white ethnicity". Dillman notes that these authors, and earlier work by John Shelton Reed, all refer to the earlier work of Lewis Killian, whoseWhite Southerners, first published in 1970, introduced "the idea that Southerners can be viewed as an American ethnic group".[93] Killian does however note, that: "Whatever claims to ethnicity or minority status ardent 'Southernists' may have advanced, white southerners are not counted as such in official enumerations".[94]
Precursors to Killian include sociologist Erdman Beynon, who in 1938 made the observation that "there appears to be an emergent group consciousness among the southern white laborers", and economist Stuart Jamieson, who argued four years later in 1942 that Oklahomans, Arkansans and Texans who were living in the valleys of California were starting to take on the "appearance of a distinct 'ethnic group'". Beynon saw this group consciousness as deriving partly from the tendency of northerners to consider them as a homogeneous group, and Jamieson saw it as a response to the label "Okie".[95] More recently, historianClyde N. Wilson has argued that "In theNorth andWest, white Southerners were treated as and understood themselves to be a distinct ethnic group, referred to negatively as 'hillbillies' and 'Okies'".[96]
TheHarvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, published in 1980, includes a chapter on Southerners authored by John Shelton Reed, alongside chapters by other contributors onAppalachians andYankees. Writing in the journalEthnic and Racial Studies, social anthropologistM. G. Smith argued that the entries do not satisfactorily indicate how these groups meet the criteria of ethnicity, and so justify inclusion in the encyclopedia.[97] Historian David L. Carlton, argues that Killian, Reed and Tindall's "ethnic approach does provide a way to understand the South as part of a vast, patchwork America, the components of which have been loath to allow their particularities to be eaten away by the corrosions of a liberal-capitalist order", nonetheless notes problems with the approach. He argues that the South is home to two ethnic communities (white and black) as well as smaller, growing ethnic groups, not just one. He argues that: "Most important, though, and most troubling, is the peculiar relationship of white southerners to the nation's history." The view of the average white Southerner, Carlton argues, is that they are quintessential Americans, and their nationalism equates "America" with the South.[98]
southerners ethnic group.
john shelton reed Southerners.
in six colonies, the reaction was strong enough to turn into rebellion. These were Bermuda, Virginia, Maryland, Newfoundland, Barbados and Antigua. These six colonies said that the king's death made the prince of wales the new rightful ruler, and declared King Charles II to be the legitimate authority in their colonies. They didn't petition Parliament to reconsider. They didn't agitate for a change in policy. What they did was most akin to what Scotland did, which was to say "we're our own entity, and Charles II is our king." Scotland was an independent country, though. Virginia and Barbados were not.
The details of how this happened differed from colony to colony, but there were also some interesting similarities, so today we'll go through all six colonies in order.
Chronologically, the first was Bermuda, where there was an armed rebellion, exile and a new governor. Colonists there were already willing to go "to Bermuda, rather than be governed by an Independent!" and they had just received several ships worth of Royalist prisoners, so as soon as they heard about the regicide, a large group rose up in arms and started marching on St. George's. Leading citizens were a part of the march, and even the island's militia joined them.
Once they reached the capitol, the mob ousted all remaining Independents in the Bermudian government. Then, unencumbered by Independent resistance, Turner declared Prince Charles to be King Charles II, passed a law which required all Bermudians to take an oath of allegiance to the King, and removed governmental protection from anyone who wouldn't. Effectively, this meant that Independents had to leave Bermuda, and most of them made their way to Eleuthera or back to England, where they complained to Parliament about their treatment, saying that even Spanish sailors who had been shipwrecked were treated better than Independents in Bermuda.
White Southerners Killian.
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