Description
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.… (more)
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Available
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Publication
Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2017
Media reviews
Merritt examines deep economic inequality among whites in the South, which grew after the Panic of 1837 and the cotton boom of the 1850s—both of which combined to allow the slave-owning planter class to consolidate its wealth, and which left behind landless whites in particular. Another factor
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contributing to this yawning gap was that after about 1840 all the land forcibly taken from native tribes in the Southeast had been distributed—the author discusses this “brutal elimination of Native Americans” in some detail. This shortage of land increased the price, making it harder for the landless to alter their situation. In 1860, 1,000 families had almost 50 percent of all wealth in the Deep South, while the poorest half of whites had only 5 percent. Additionally, the overall percentage of whites who owned slaves and who owned land dropped in the last decades before 1860. Show Less
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LibraryThing member rivkat
Merritt argues that black chattel slavery was vital to keeping poor whites poor in the antebellum South, and that many of the forms of control later imposed on freed blacks were developed to control and demean poor whites. Slave labor drove down white workers’ wages; many poor white men were
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forced to live apart from their families if they wanted the few jobs that were available, even as consolidation of landholding and slaveholding destroyed security for all but the wealthiest whites. The resulting social pathologies included lack of stable families, a disinclination of white men to take wage work because it was too demeaning (and often dangerous—building railroads, for example, was often white men’s work because it was too dangerous for valuable slaves), and a focus on violence instead of work as a source of masculinity. As the Civil War approached, enslavers feared an alliance of poor whites and blacks, and did what they could to avoid it: evicting poor whites from land near slave labor camps so that there couldn’t be trade between them; imprisoning poor whites for debt and for being unable to support themselves (and then selling their labor to rich whites); attempting to strictly control alcohol use and sexual behavior (which could again land a poor white child in indentured servitude because of their mother’s supposed immorality); disenfranchising poor whites with poll taxes and other voting restrictions; and increasingly arguing for chattel slavery for poor whites as well as blacks. Merritt argues that one reason enslavers, and thus elected Southern politicians, opposed free soil policies was that they didn’t want poor whites to have an outlet where they might become not-poor without slavery, as much as they wanted land reserved for wealthy slaveowners. Only after secession was the Congress able to enact laws giving land out in relatively small parcels. Emancipation ended up being very helpful to poor whites, both by giving them access to land and by making their political support important to rich whites, who finally consented to some redistribution and simultaneously succeeded in what they’d never fully accomplished during slavery: convincing poor whites that white supremacy was rewarding enough that poor and rich whites shared sufficient political interests to unite against African-Americans. Relatedly, the criminal justice system in the South shifted from being almost entirely populated by white convicts to almost entirely African-American. Show Less
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Language
Original publication date
2017
ISBN
1316635430 / 9781316635438