State Centralization in the South

GOVERNMENT in the South has never been intensely local. Unlike the compact settlements of New England out of which there developed the town as the dominant unit of government, scattered settlement and the plantation system in the South led to the pre-eminence of the county. Except for the feeble and transitory existence of the parish in Virginia and the Carolinas, there was, prior to the Civil War, no government closer to the people than that which was quartered at the county seat. In South Carolina, not even county government got firmly established. There were no townships in the South until they were forced upon North and South Carolina by the carpetbaggers in 1868. In neither state did they survive as active governmental units after the end of Northern domination. The rural South thus never became adapted to a unit of government smaller than the county, though the counties are smaller on the average than they are in the North

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