Southerners Head West (CEC)

Many people moved to Texas from the rest of the American South, but being a big place, their places of origin varied greatly. Contrary to many preconceptions about a monolithic South, there were many “souths” that often varied greatly in their cultural and social mores. As a result, Texas while overwhelmingly southern inherited a number of different kinds of southerners–from small farmers in Tennessee and Kentucky, backwoodsmen from Appalachia, and aspiring slave sons of slave owners in the deep South, to well-heeled plantation owners looking to expand their holdings west of the Sabine and south of the Red.