Masterless men : poor whites and slavery in the antebellum South
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Masterless men : poor whites and slavery in the antebellum South
（Cambridge studies on the American South）
Cambridge University Press, 2017
- : pbk
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Note
"First paperback edition 2017"--T.p. verso
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
- 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.
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