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

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 the American past.

Focused on the rural Deep South, Masterless Men includes discussions of land policy and ownership, slavery’s impact on free and white labor, material and educational deprivation, legal punishment and extralegal violence, and the coming and consequences of the Civil War and Emancipation. Skillfully braiding evidence and sharp analysis, Merritt connects these topics through a number of core arguments. Despite their tight hold on economic wealth and political power, southern slave masters are repeatedly described as anxious and terrified. With northern abolitionists joining enslaved blacks’ long fight against the increasingly peculiar institution, slaveholders could ill afford the opening of a third front against poor southern whites. Hinton Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South (excerpts from which inaugurate each of Merritt’s chapters) was frantically banned in 1857 before nonslaveholding and indigent whites could unravel the centuries-old ascendancy of race over class. “The masterless men and women greatly threatened the existing southern hierarchy,” Merritt contends, “and undoubtedly helped push the slaveholders toward secession” (26). Masters’ fear of an internal rebellion allying enslaved blacks and destitute whites, more than the prospect of Republican rule, triggered an effort to address class enmity and maintain the racial divide. The result was disunion, civil war, and a “dual emancipation” (323) that witnessed the liberation of poor white southerners as black freedmen stepped onto the rickety bottom rung of free society. Among the most compelling of Merritt’s contributions is the catalog of repressive policies and civil violations redirected from white to black targets after the Civil War and Reconstruction: poll taxes, vagrancy laws, forced child indenture, vigilante violence, tenant farming, crop liens, and so forth.

Merritt also identifies subjects ripe for deeper exploration. Having thoroughly combed the secondary literature, for instance, the author calls for future work on “the daily transactional lives of poor white laborers” (76); a “crisis in work ethic” among unemployed and underemployed antebellum whites (107); “the little-explored prevalence of infanticide in the plantation South” (128); and “the role of poll taxes in antebellum elections” (168). To this list might be added more research into the working and nonworking poor of the urban and Upper Souths. Aside from providing a roadmap to guide the field for years to come, Merritt engages in bold myth-busting. “While many historians assume that the ranks of overseers were filled with poor white men,” she states, for example, “this supposition is simply incorrect” (84). Most plantation overseers were from the South’s yeomen and middle class, who usually possessed land, education, and prospects for socioeconomic advancement. The “slaveholder-aspiration illusion” (8) and notion of a “herrenvolk democracy” (17) fare poorly as the author details slavery’s destructive legacy for both black and white southerners. And in a helpful appendix Merritt takes other scholars to task for “continu[ing] to rely on census returns as if they are factually sound, even though a bevy of research has disproven their accuracy” (343). Reevaluating the antebellum era with...