Masterless Men

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 socioeconomic 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.