Masterless Men : Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South PDF
by Keri Leigh Merritt
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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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- Format:PDF
- Publisher:Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date:08/05/2017
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- ISBN:9781316880173
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Information
-
Download Now
- Format:PDF
- Publisher:Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date:08/05/2017
- Category:
- ISBN:9781316880173