Masterless men : poor whites and slavery in the antebellum South /
"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 Sout...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY :
Cambridge University Press,
2017.
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| Series: | Cambridge studies on the American South.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "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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| Physical Description: | x, 361 pages ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781107184244 (hardback : alkaline paper) 110718424X (hardback : alkaline paper) |