LOL! Very similar to what I was going to say.

Dan, they knew the words, but wouldn't be proper for any character interesting enough to have in a novel to use.

South at turn of century: You're only 15 years outside of reconstruction. The South is rebuilding, adding railroad lines to a guage that matches the North. They are instituting and enforcing Jim Crow laws, Plessey v Ferguson is 1896 I believe. The Klan is rampant. Sharecropping entrenched.

The South loathes the North. Many Southerners are migrating North and West.

That gives you some things to research. My guess, if you wish to get the setting and characters correct, you'll spend more time at research than writing.

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"We are fighting today for our life, for our liberty, for our all, we cannot go on being led as we are. Somehow or other, we must get into the Government men who can match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution and in thirst for victory."~Leo Amery 1940, while staring at Chamberlain