Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt (review)

Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men may prove as groundbreaking to southern history as E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class was to British history. Indeed, Merritt uses Thompson’s definition of class consciousness and shows that poor white southerners understood themselves as a class abused by the powerful landholding elites. Both studies uncover responses of working people to economic forces beyond their control; Thompson examined urban industrial and Merritt focuses on rural agricultural. Recent scholars have demonstrated fissures in antebellum class unity. With this deeply researched book, Merritt synthesizes and expands knowledge of class divisions in the South. Masterless Men will upend any continued assumptions about poor white unity and redirect historical study as Thompson did. Merritt’s monograph destroys any vestiges of accepted historical truth about the unity of all white southerners while also speaking directly to the connectedness of slavery and class. While she does not address current race and class relations of today’s South, Merritt does show how class affected race relations after the Civil War. It is impossible to read Masterless Men and not ponder how those historical circumstances created the environment of racism and racial violence in the following decades.

Merritt weds both a firm grasp of economic history and an encyclopedic knowledge of southern historiography to describe how the Panic of 1837, changing patterns of land-ownership, availability or lack of credit, rising slave prices, and lowering real wages closed the possibility of slave ownership for poor whites. Obtaining slaves was the surest way to move up the economic ladder, and purchasing enslaved people became impossible for landless men. They understood and resented their lack of economic opportunity. Those at the top of the economic ladder used their immense power to protect their riches. The slave-owning class hegemony cannot be overstated. Those who owned slaves controlled every aspect of southern society, including politics—local and state, as well as national representation. Elites determined laws; controlled the court system; served on juries; and established policing, both legal and extralegal. The rich prevented the expansion of education, thus keeping poor whites illiterate, for fear they would read abolitionist literature and learn that they were “second degree slaves” then challenge the slave system that shut them out (1).

Merritt defines poor whites as landless men who owned less than $100 worth of property. Conservatively, this was one third of the southern population. The Panic of 1837 transformed the economy, as some southerners lost their land as the wealthy bought up smaller holdings—increasing their own plantations and power. Slave labor displaced that of poor whites, who had traditionally worked in agriculture. Poor men responded in two ways. One group turned to unskilled labor, which they called mechanical work, taking seasonal and temporary employment when possible. Some jobs were available to poor whites only because they were deemed too risky for valuable enslaved men. Because of lack of competition, these white laborers could not ask for higher wages. If they did go on strike, employers would use African American strikebreakers. Other poor whites became demoralized and dropped out of legal work. They hunted, fished, foraged, and stole. Much to the distress of enslavers, they carried on a thriving underground economy with slaves, trading stolen goods and alcohol. The biracial interaction was a particular worry for the masterclass, as it weakened their mastery over both poor whites and the enslaved. Interaction was not only economic but often sexual, creating a mixed race population.

Despite focusing on a primarily illiterate population who could not leave accounts in their own words, the monograph is thoroughly and deeply researched. Merritt skillfully mines court and jail records, coroner’s reports, censuses, petitions for pardons, newspapers, slave narratives, Civil War veterans’ questionnaires, travelers’ accounts, laws and proposed laws, and the words of abolitionists and slave owners and is able to recreate the dismal, unequal, harsh society of...