Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South

Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.

Author: Keri Leigh Merritt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12/14/2017
Pages: 371
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9781316635438
ISBN10: 1316635430
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States | State & Local | South (AL,AR,FL,GA,KY,LA,MS,
- History | United States | 19th Century
- Social Science | Poverty & Homelessness