Natives & Newcomers: Ethnic Southerners and Southern Ethnics

In Natives and Newcomers, George Brown Tindall surveys the changes in the South's cultural and racial makeup over the past two centuries. Tindall discusses southern ethnicity in light of immigration laws and trends, attitudes toward immigrants, and economic and political forces that have changed the region's ethnic makeup from within (such as the Civil War) or without (such as Castro's rise to power in Cuba).
Tindall shows that the colonial South developed the most polyglot population in the English colonies, encompassing Indian tribes, Western Europeans, and West Africans. The southern and western rims of the South, moreover, were adjoined by Spanish and French colonies into the nineteenth century. After the American Revolution fewer immigrants came south, Indians were largely expelled, the slave trade subsided - and southerners of whatever color came to be almost wholly native-born.