Keri Leigh Merritt

Masterless Men (eBook, PDF)

Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. Mai 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781316880173
• Artikelnr.: 55374420

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

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.