title: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge Studies on the American South)
author:  Keri Leigh Merritt 
description: 'In Masterless Men, Keri Leigh Merritt offers a sweeping analysis of how we should understand the place of poor whites in the larger narrative of the Old South. Her detailed examination of the Deep South's impoverished white class will deepen our understanding about the human and economic costs of America's system of black slavery.' Charles Bolton, University of North Carolina, Greensboro<br /><br />'Merritt moves class front and center as she documents the brutal, unfair realities of life for poor whites struggling to survive in a society structured against them. Her work holds tremendous implications for our understanding of social relations, the economy, politics, and the law in the Old South.' Jeff Forret, author of Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside<br /><br />'Keri Leigh Merritt reveals the parallel roots of white poverty and slavery in the antebellum South. With precision and conviction, she demonstrates that landlessness, low wages, and illiteracy, accompanied by legal and extra-legal harassment by the state, were not mere by-products of slavery, but the result of policies that enriched slaveholders while muting dissent by poor whites.' Victoria Bynum, Texas State University, San Marcos<br /><br />'Eloquently argued, Merritt's work will be of interest to economic, social, and legal historians as its attention to poor whites' place in southern society provides a more complete understanding of the history of the 19th-century South. Essential.' T. K. Byron, Choice
zlib_text: Masterless Men
  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
  that was 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 slave-
  holders toward secession and civil war.
  Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent scholar in Atlanta, Georgia.
  Merritt’s work on poverty and inequality has 