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,...

This book examines the lives of the Antebellum South's underprivileged whites in nineteenth-century America.

The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today.