Book : Masterless Men Poor Whites And Slavery In The...

-Titulo Original : Masterless Men Poor Whites And Slavery In The Antebellum South (cambridge Studies On The American South)

-Fabricante :

Cambridge University Press

-Descripcion Original:

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. Review One of the books many strengths is that Merritt tells the story of poor white southerners without downplaying the experiences of black southerners and the brutality of slavery. - L.A. Review of Books For Merritts poor (landless, slaveless, mostly propertyless) whites, relying on whiteness as a means of class mobility was normally out of the question, and the same elite and bourgeois institutions that sustained slavery also went a long way in oppressing poor whites: slavery as a driver of low wages and unemployment; an almost total lack of public schools and access to credit; slave patrols and behavioral laws and community surveillance as forms of social control and retributive justice (against poor whites, too); and the slaveholders monopolization of land, resources, credit, and political power. - Counterpunch Book Description This book examines the lives of the Antebellum Souths underprivileged whites in nineteenth-century America. About the Author Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent scholar in Atlanta, Georgia. Merritts work on poverty and inequality has garnered multiple awards, and she is a co-editor of a volume on American South labor history.