Masterless Men Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South Cambridge Studies on the American South Series
Langue : Anglais
Auteur : Merritt Keri Leigh
This book examines the lives of the Antebellum South's underprivileged whites in nineteenth-century America.
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.
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 duel emancipation; Appendix: numbers, percentages, and the census.
Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent scholar in Atlanta, Georgia. Merritt's work on poverty and inequality has garnered multiple awards, and she is a co-editor of a volume on American South labor history.
Date de parution : 12-2017
Ouvrage de 371 p.
15.3x23 cm
Date de parution : 05-2017
Ouvrage de 370 p.
16x23.5 cm
Thème de Masterless Men :
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