Masterless Men
Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South
Unable to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Failed to remove from Wish List.
Adding to library failed
Unable to follow podcast
Unable to unfollow podcast
Get 30 days of Standard free
Masterless Men
Buy Now for €22.99
-
Narrated by:
-
Keri Leigh Merritt
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 socioeconomic 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.
©2017 Cambridge University Press (P)2019 Keri Leigh Merritt