At the outset of this richly documented and superbly chronicled account of poor white antebellum southerners, Keri Leigh Merritt presents a crucial question: “What happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor?” (i). The answer, persuasively argued over nine thematic chapters, may come as a surprise even to readers well versed in southern history. Systematically denied the presumed privileges of whiteness, impoverished whites grew intensely resentful of the region’s slaveholding oligarchs and developed a clear consciousness of their underclass and unequal status. Slaveless, landless, jobless, uneducated, disenfranchised, and criminalized, many of these “masterless men” and women disengaged from southern society and the formal economy and nearly dropped out of the historical record. In this volume Merritt synthesizes the scholarship of the last quarter century alongside a creative reading of limited primary sources to reincorporate an understudied, undercounted, and misunderstood mass of poor white southerners into...
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