There are no agreed-upon boundaries that make the American South the South. Just as Washingtonians will fight to the death over the precise boundaries of Ledroit Park or Park View, scholars have debated the identity of the South for decades. The Census Bureau has its own definition (which includes Maryland, Delaware, and Oklahoma), and it differs from what is commonly thought of as Dixie (the 11 states of the Confederacy) or the Deep South (generally, but not always, limited to Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina).

The American South is wide and varied, but there are a few factors that seem to define its history and its present. Some of these—a large English and Irish population, an agrarian economy, large rural swaths, high church attendance, lower incomes and cost of living, and political conservatism—don’t bear much resemblance to D.C. Others—a large African-American population, some native flora—do. According to Tamika Richeson, a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia specializing in the 19th century who has studied the history of D.C., the time the District most resembled the South was before the Civil War.

“At its conception, it was very Southern,” she says. “It was very rural, surrounded by two of the largest slave-holding states in the country. Its customs were very informed by Maryland and Virginia. It had a very Southern way about it.”

The most Southern thing about Washington was slavery. “Slavery was very much part of the landscape,” Richeson says. “D.C. was a place, prior to the Civil War, where slaves came from everywhere. I mean everywhere.” Marylanders and Virginians with a surplus of slaves could “hire out” to the District, a practice that was popular in Southern cities like Charleston, S.C., and New Orleans. “It was built on the backs of slaves,” Richeson says, “which, in that way, would make D.C. very Southern.”

Abraham Lincoln’s election changed things. “I don’t think it became Northern,” Richeson says, “but it became distinctive.”

Of course when folks new to D.C. call the town “Southern,” they are probably not referring to the miserable legacy of slavery we share with Dixie but to more romanticized and difficult to quantify signifiers of Southern culture: friendliness, say, or a slower pace of life. (As in the famous JFK quote about “Northern charm and Southern efficiency.”) Richeson again cautions that these are extremely subjective notions.

“I think it’s important to make the distinction of what ‘D.C.’ is,” she says. “Suburbs, transplants, actual Washingtonians.” Having said that, Richeson, who moved to Clarendon from Ohio a few years ago and now lives in Manassas, doesn’t find D.C. particularly Southern. “It’s actually a pretty fast-paced place compared to a lot of cities in the Midwest or the South,” she says. “People here I think are more polite, not because they’re more Southern, but because they’re more politically correct.”

Also our barbecue sucks. Sorry, we are not the South.