page_title: Southern United States
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Southern United States / Geography
caption_attribution_description: English: Texas Hill Country, on Route 187 heading North, just north of Garner State Park.
context_page_description: The Southern United States, also known as the American South, the Southern States, or simply the South, is a geographic and cultural region of the United States. It is located between the Atlantic Ocean and the Western United States, with the Midwestern United States and Northeastern United States to its north and the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico to its south.
  The South does not precisely coincide with the geographic south of the United States but is commonly defined as including the states that fought for the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. The Deep South lies entirely within the southeastern corner. California, Arizona and New Mexico, which are geographically in the southern part of the country, are rarely considered part, while West Virginia, which separated from Virginia in 1863, commonly is. Some scholars have proposed definitions of the South that do not coincide neatly with state boundaries. While the states of Delaware and Maryland, as well as the District of Columbia, continued to permit slavery during the Civil War, they remained with the Union.
context_section_description: The question of how to define the subregions in the South has been the focus of research for nearly a century.
  As defined by the United States Census Bureau, the Southern region of the United States includes sixteen states.  As of 2010, an estimated 114,555,744 people, or thirty seven percent of all U.S. residents, lived in the South, the nation's most populous region.  The Census Bureau defined three smaller divisions:
  The South Atlantic States: Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
  The East South Central States: Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee.
  The West South Central States:  Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.
  The Council of State Governments, an organization for communication and coordination between states, includes in its South regional office the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.
  Other terms related to the South include:
  The Old South: can mean either the slave states that existed in 1776 (Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina) or all the slave states before 1860 (which included the newer states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas).
  The New South: usually including the South Atlantic states.
  Dixie: various definitions, but most commonly associated with the 11 states of the Old Confederacy.
  Southeastern United States: usually including the Carolinas, the Virginias, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.
  The Solid South: region largely controlled by the Democratic Party from 1877 to 1964, especially after disfranchisement of most blacks at the turn of the 20th century. Before that, blacks were elected to national office and many to local office through the 1880s; Populist-Republican coalitions gained victories for  Fusionist candidates for governors in the 1890s. Includes at least all the 11 former Confederate States.
  Southern Appalachia: mainly refers to areas situated in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, namely Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Western Maryland, West Virginia, Southwest Virginia, North Georgia and Northwestern South Carolina.
  Upland South: Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and on rare occasions Missouri, Maryland and Delaware. When combined with the southern Appalachian Mountains is sometimes referred to as "Greater Appalachia" following Ulster Protestant migrations to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries.
  Border South: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware were states on the outer rim of the Confederacy that did not secede from the United States in the 1860s, but did have significant numbers of residents who joined the Confederate armed forces.  Kentucky and Missouri had Confederate governments-in-exile and were represented in the Confederate Congress and by stars on the Confederate battle flag. West Virginia formed in 1863 after the western region of Virginia broke away to protest the Old Dominion's joining of the Confederacy, but residents of the new state were about evenly divided on supporting the Union or the Confederacy.
  Tidewater: low-lying Atlantic coastal plain regions of Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina.
  The Gulf South: various definitions, usually including Gulf coasts of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama.
  The Deep South: various definitions, usually including Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina. Also, parts of adjoining states are included (sections of North and East Texas, the Mississippi embayment areas of Arkansas and Tennessee and northern and central Florida).
  The Mid-South: Various definitions, including that of the Census Bureau of the East and West South Central United States; in another informal definition, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and sometimes adjoining areas of other states.
  The popular definition of the 
caption: Texas Hill Country
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