
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
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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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title
- Series information
- Title page
- Copyright information
- Dedication
- Table of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Second Degree of Slavery
- 1 The Southern Origins of the Homestead Act
- 2 The Demoralization of Labor
- 3 Masterless (and Militant) White Workers
- 4 Everyday Life: Material Realities
- 5 Literacy, Education, and Disfranchisement
- 6 Vagrancy, Alcohol, and Crime
- 7 Poverty and Punishment
- 8 Race, Republicans, and Vigilante Violence
- 9 Class Crisis and the Civil War
- Conclusion: A Dual Emancipation
- Appendix: Numbers, Percentages, and the Census
- Index