This paper investigates the role of Southern white migration after the Civil War in diffusing Confed- erate culture throughout the country at a critical juncture of nation building. Estimates based on linked Census records suggest that nearly one million whites—including more than 61,000 former enslavers and 127,000 of their household kin—left the former Confederacy for the rest of the U.S. in the three decades after the war. These migrants and their descendants retained strong attachments to Confederate culture; e.g., like their brethren in the South, they gave their newborn children the names of prominent Confederate leaders long after the war. We explore how this “Confederate diaspora” influenced the cultural landscape and, in the process, changed the trajectory of racial inequity across America.
We begin by characterizing the formation of the Confederate diaspora, tracking migrants, including former slaveholders, and their occupational choices outside the South from 1870 to 1900. We show that these migrants often went west, settling in nascent communities throughout the frontier where in- stitutions were relatively weak and cultural norms not yet deeply ingrained. At destination, Southern migrants sorted into positions of authority—judges, lawyers, public administration, police, and clergy— much more so than other residents, including migrants from elsewhere. Such choices went beyond a broader sorting into high-status occupations and was especially strong for migrants from slaveholding households in the antebellum South, who often assumed leadership roles in newly incorporated areas.
Next, we show how the diaspora brought symbolic and material expressions of Confederate culture throughout the country by the early 20th century. We focus on four outcomes: (i) Confederate memo- rialization (e.g., monuments, place names), (ii) UDC chapters, (iii) KKK chapters, and (iv) lynchings of Black people. Together, these measures capture a process, described by historians of the postbellum U.S., in which Southern whites mobilized grievances and engaged in racial terror in order to recreate the social and economic hierarchies of the old South. We aim to identify a causal impact of the diaspora in catalyzing this process beyond the South. We develop a shift-share instrumental variable (SSIV) frame- work to isolate exogenous county-level variation in exposure to postbellum Southern white migration through 1900. Our SSIV combines historical migrant networks outside the South as of 1870, at the dawn of the postbellum period (shares), with predicted migration flows out of the South from 1870 to 1900 (shifts). Conditional on the population share of Southern-born whites in 1870, our SSIV estimates identify the distinct influence of the Confederate diaspora forged between 1870 and 1900.