Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South

Publisher:  Cambridge Press
Year Published:  2017
ISBN:  9781316875568
Resource Type:  Book
Cx Number:  CX24008

Analyzing land policy, labour, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor.

Abstract: 
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From the publisher:

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.

Tanble of Contents



Masterless Men
Cambridge Studies on the American South - Series page
Masterless Men - Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
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 Dual Emancipation
Appendix - Numbers, Percentages, and the Census
Index