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 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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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 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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Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South
371Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South
371Paperback(Reprint)
$39.99
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Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781316635438 |
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Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Publication date: | 12/14/2017 |
Series: | Cambridge Studies on the American South |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 371 |
Sales rank: | 337,648 |
Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
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