The South Atlantic Region

South Atlantic is one of the nine statistical divisions of the US Census Bureau and the largest of them by population. Its eight states run down the Atlantic seaboard from Delaware to Florida, and the District of Columbia is counted here too, which is why the Census treats DC as part of the South. The division sits inside the sixteen-state South region alongside East South Central and West South Central.

States in the South Atlantic division

State	Capital	Statehood	2020 population
Florida	Tallahassee	1845	21,538,187
Georgia	Atlanta	1788	10,711,908
North Carolina	Raleigh	1789	10,439,388
Virginia	Richmond	1788	8,631,393
Maryland	Annapolis	1788	6,177,224
South Carolina	Columbia	1788	5,118,425
West Virginia	Charleston	1863	1,793,716
Delaware	Dover	1787	989,948

Six of the eight were among the original thirteen colonies, and for those the statehood year is the year of ratifying the Constitution. Delaware ratified first, on December 7, 1787. Only Atlanta, Columbia and Charleston are their state's largest city, and Virginia's largest is Virginia Beach rather than the capital at Richmond.

Population, area and economic weight

The division held 66,089,734 residents in 2020 including the District of Columbia's 689,545, about 20 percent of the country and more than any other division. Florida supplies a third of it on its own at 21,538,187. Yet the eight states cover only about 292,900 square miles, roughly 7.7 percent of US land, so this is dense country by American standards. The states send 85 voting members to the House and cast 101 electoral votes, with three more from DC. Florida and North Carolina each gained a seat in the apportionment that followed the 2020 Census while West Virginia lost one, a split that captures the division's internal direction of travel. Charlotte is a national banking center, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson has been the world's busiest airport by passenger count in most years since the late 1990s, Naval Station Norfolk is the largest naval base in the world, and Loudoun County in northern Virginia carries one of the densest concentrations of data centers anywhere.

The geography that holds the region together

The division is built in bands running parallel to the coast. The Atlantic Coastal Plain is flat, sandy and wide, giving way inland at the Fall Line to the rolling Piedmont, and then to the Blue Ridge. The Fall Line is where rivers drop off the harder Piedmont rock and stop being navigable, which is exactly why Richmond, Columbia and Augusta were founded where they were. Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, at 6,684 feet, is the highest point in the United States east of the Mississippi. Florida's high point, Britton Hill at 345 feet, is the lowest state summit in the country. Chesapeake Bay, about 200 miles long, is the largest estuary in the United States, and its watershed of roughly 64,000 square miles reaches across six states and DC. The Outer Banks stretch barrier islands far out into the Atlantic at Cape Hatteras. South Florida is limestone karst, springs and the Everglades. Most of the division is humid subtropical, with south Florida tropical, and Florida has taken more hurricane landfalls than any other state.

How the region was settled

Jamestown was founded in 1607 as the first permanent English settlement in North America, and Georgia, chartered in 1732, was the last of the thirteen colonies. The colonial economy split by soil: tobacco in the Chesapeake, rice and indigo in the Carolina Lowcountry, then cotton pushed inland across the Piedmont after the cotton gin of 1793, all of it built on enslaved labor whose descendants still shape the region's population. Florida passed from Spain to the United States under the Adams-Onis Treaty, signed in 1819 and ratified in 1821, and became a state in 1845. West Virginia is the outlier in every sense: its counties broke away from Virginia during the Civil War and it was admitted in 1863, the only state formed out of a Confederate state. The District of Columbia was carved from Maryland, and the portion originally taken from Virginia was returned in 1846.

What the South Atlantic is known for

Research Triangle Park opened in 1959 between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and set the template for the university-anchored research park. Walt Disney World opened near Orlando in 1971 and made Florida a tourism economy. Kennedy Space Center launches from Cape Canaveral. The Port of Savannah is among the busiest container terminals in the country. Federal employment anchors the Washington and Baltimore corridor. Eight presidents were born in Virginia, more than in any other state, with two more born in North Carolina and one in Georgia.

Where the boundary is argued

This is the division that generates the most disagreement. Is Maryland the South or the Mid-Atlantic? The Census says South, because Maryland sits below the Mason and Dixon line surveyed between 1763 and 1767, but everyday usage, media style guides and Statedoku's own puzzle data all treat Maryland and Delaware as Northeast or Mid-Atlantic. Delaware raises the same question in sharper form, since it borders Pennsylvania and functions as part of the Philadelphia metro. West Virginia is filed under South Atlantic despite being landlocked, and it is the only state lying entirely inside the Appalachian Regional Commission's territory. Virginia splits internally, with the Washington suburbs of the north having little in common with the southwest coalfields. Florida inverts the pattern, since the further south you go the less Southern it reads.

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