Masterless Men

Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South

By: Keri Leigh Merritt

Narrated by: Keri Leigh Merritt

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.

©2017 Cambridge University Press (P)2019 Keri Leigh Merritt

A Story Seldom Told

Masterless Men illuminates a seldom explored portion of the story of American slavery, and exposes the peculiar institution as one that was not simply aimed at perpetuating one racial class’s oppression of another racial class. Instead it paints the arguably more complete picture of American slavery as a system whereby both slaves of African or African American descent and so-called poor or middling class whites were exploited so that members of the planter class could secure all of their labor at below market wages or no wage at all.

If more people were acquainted with this part of the story, one can’t help but wonder how it would impact modern-day debates about wage and labor rights.

wanna learn something read this

very informative. alot of this I wasn't aware of. society teaches use from a white supremacy point of view.

Critical addition to the debate over this history

Balanced Report that in no way minimizes the suffering of blacks under slavery and after the Civil War. However, this fills in the story poor whites and class division in the south. This helps us better understand what really happened, and better respond to the concerns of everyone in order to build a better future. It’s just too bad she had to narrate her own book – she did her best, but she’s not a pro.

Game changer

This book helped close a gap of understanding for me. We’ll researched and written. Bravo.

Long but necessary…

New narratives based on fact and not social construct need to become the story!!! Well researched…