Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in the American South
Episode: Keri Leigh Merritt, "Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
Description: Keri Leigh Merritt discusses her book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and intersections of race, class, politics, and slavery in the pre-Civil War South.Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, 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...