Pre-Owned Masterless Men (Paperback) 1316635430 9781316635438

9781316635438. Pre-Owned: Good condition. Trade paperback. Language: English. Trade paperback (US). Contains: Unspecified. Cambridge Studies on the American South . Includes unspecified. Intended for professional and scholarly audience. 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.