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.
