Masterless Men
Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South

This book examines the lives of the Antebellum South's underprivileged whites in nineteenth-century America.

Keri Leigh Merritt (Author)

9781316635438, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 14 December 2017

371 pages
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.56 kg

'… the lesson to be drawn from Merritt's magnificent work is that the problem of justice requires enormous bridge-building exercises if we wish to level the playing field without worsening other forms of inequality. History shows us the limits of ideological progress, but also reveals opportunities that can be seized, if only we can muster the courage and the know-how.' Robert L. Tsai, Los Angeles Review of Books

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.

Introduction: the second degree of slavery
1. The Southern origins of the Homestead Act
2. The demoralization of labor
3. Masterless (and militant) white workers
4. Everyday life: material realities
5. Literacy, education, and disfranchisement
6. Vagrancy, alcohol, and crime
7. Poverty and punishment
8. Race, Republicans, and vigilante violence
9. Class crisis and the Civil War
Conclusion: a duel emancipation
Appendix: numbers, percentages, and the census.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], History [HB]