Framing the Solid South: The State Constitutional Conventions of Secession, Reconstruction, and Redemption, 1860-1902

The South was not always the South. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those below the Potomac River, for all their cultural and economic similarities, did not hold a separate political identity. How this changed and how the South came to be a political entity that coheres to this day, emerges late nineteenth-century state constitutional conventions that forever transformed southern politics.