If you’re interested in exploring the deep roots of our nation’s polarization, take a closer look at the term “Southland.” Many Californians might not realize how the greater Los Angeles area came to be known by a nickname more commonly linked to the Old South. This curious story actually sheds light on today’s challenges as it touches upon America’s regional and political divides and how one shrewd businessman capitalized on these tensions.
The southeastern United States got the name “Southland” back in 1861, with the birth of the Confederacy. Even before the Civil War’s first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, a poem titled “The Southland Fears no Foeman” appeared in Richmond’s “Southern Literary Messenger.” From then on, Confederate poetry celebrating “the Southland” flourished.
Unionists, in turn, crafted their own poetic responses. In an 1863 poem, Augustine Duganne, a New York lawmaker, soldier, and poet, posed a stark question: “For what hath all this Southland been / But one white sepulchre of sin / So fair without — so foul within?”
Even though the Civil War concluded in 1865, the nickname and its ties to the Confederacy lingered. In 1878, a “Southland” poem recited at the Mississippi Press Association’s convention ignited controversy. The author, Will Kernan, a well-known extremist, penned the virulent “Song of Hate.” Though Kernan edited Mississippi’s Southern States newspaper, he hailed from Ohio, highlighting how America’s polarization transcended regional lines. In his “Southland” poem, Kernan criticized the 14th and 15th amendments, which granted citizenship rights to Black Americans and voting rights to Black men, urging that “the blessing of the ballot by Caucasians be controlled.”
Iowa’s Le Mars Sentinel countered with a satirical take on Kernan’s work: “Ho Southland / Sunny Southland /… Land of half-breeds, cross-breeds, bastards, hybrids, Hottentots, brigands, savages / Of raw-boned he-traitors and scrawny she-devils…” This parody spread widely, angering Southerners. By 1880, Mississippi’s Meridian Mercury was calling for severing ties with the North: “Above all, love your own sunny Southland…Eschew all slimy hypocrisy about loving the whole country.” The New York Times even reprinted, and criticized, the Mercury’s tirade.
Amidst this national journalistic brawl over the term “Southland,” Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the new Los Angeles Daily Times, entered the fray. California had its own north-south rivalry, and Otis disliked how Northern Californians looked down on the “cow counties” south of the Tehachapi Mountains. He used the Times to fight back, commissioning pieces like Edward Vincent’s “Southern California,” which celebrated the area’s virtues. Otis cheekily struck back at San Francisco’s jabs in the manner Lynyrd Skynyrd would eventually respond to Neil Young’s anti-Southern remarks in “Sweet Home Alabama”: by “singin’ songs about the Southland.”
While Otis wasn’t the first to dub L.A. as the Southland, he certainly made the term famous, wielding it as part of his robust promotional campaigns. In the tumultuous economic year of 1887, when the San Jose Mercury News suggested central California attract tourists away from the “crowded South,” Otis accused “the unhappy North” of harboring “sectional jealousy,” lamenting their schemes against “this fair and sunny southland.”
In this context, “southland” referred to geography. But just a month later, the Times accused “all Northern California” of plotting against “Southland,” claiming they sent agents to trick tourists into going north. Here, “Southland” began to denote a novel region. As one Times writer explained: “We read much about the New South, referring to the Southern states of our Union. California has a New South, and the world at large is beginning to have a knowledge of it.” Gradually, California’s New South embraced a connection to the old one.
In part, this made sense given early Los Angeles’ influx of Southern transplants who had backed the Confederacy. As the San Francisco Bulletin noted in 1862, “Let it never be forgotten that the county of Los Angeles, in this day of peril to the Republic, is two to one for Dixie and Disunion.” However, Otis himself wasn’t a Southerner. He was a Union veteran from Ohio who had fought at Antietam.
When Otis pushed the concept of California’s Southland, he wasn’t reveling in regional pride but rather constructing a new dominion. He had once emerged victorious over the old Southland and was replicating that triumph on the West Coast. Nicknamed “General Otis,” he used military lingo to name his L.A. mansion “the Bivouac” and called his Times staff “the phalanx” as he built and ruled over this new Southland.
Regrettably, Otis’ new domain mirrored the worst aspects of the old one, evolving into a white oligarchy marked by inequality where the affluent thrived at the expense of the working class. Otis amassed wealth through real estate speculation, while his aggressive union-busting sparked the tragic 1910 bombing of The Times, resulting in 21 fatalities.
It would take another century for Los Angeles to strive towards a better Southland. That endeavor, both in California and across America, continues to this day.
Laura Brodie, an English professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, is known for her works including “Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women.”
