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: 05/08/2017
Pages: 370
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.42lbs
Size: 9.43h x 6.31w x 1.03d
ISBN: 9781107184244

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2018

About the Author
Merritt, Keri Leigh: - Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent scholar in Atlanta, Georgia. Merritt's work on poverty and inequality has garnered multiple awards, and she is a co-editor of a volume on American South labor history.