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 clearly in this book-the first comprehensive account of the Civil War Era and late nineteenth century state constitutional conventions that forever transformed southern politics.

Southern politics, to an unusual degree, has been a product of the process Herron traces. What his book tells us about these constitutional conventions and the documents they produced is key to understanding southern history and the South today.