Keri Leigh Merritt

Merritt argues that black chattel slavery was vital to keeping poor whites poor in the antebellum South, and that many of the forms of control later imposed on freed blacks were developed to control and demean poor whites. Slave labor drove down white workers’ wages; many poor white men were forced to live apart from their families if they wanted the few jobs that were available, even as consolidation of landholding and slaveholding destroyed security for all but the wealthiest whites. The resulting social pathologies included lack of stable families, a disinclination of white men to take wage work because it was too demeaning (and often dangerous—building railroads, for example, was often white men’s work because it was too dangerous for valuable slaves), and a focus on violence instead of work as a source of masculinity. As the Civil War approached, enslavers feared an alliance of poor whites and blacks, and did what they could to avoid it: evicting poor whites from land near slave labor camps so that there couldn’t be trade between them; imprisoning poor whites for debt and for being unable to support themselves (and then selling their labor to rich whites); attempting to strictly control alcohol use and sexual behavior (which could again land a poor white child in indentured servitude because of their mother’s supposed immorality); disenfranchising poor whites with poll taxes and other voting restrictions; and increasingly arguing for chattel slavery for poor whites as well as blacks. Merritt argues that one reason enslavers, and thus elected Southern politicians, opposed free soil policies was that they didn’t want poor whites to have an outlet where they might become not-poor without slavery, as much as they wanted land reserved for wealthy slaveowners. Only after secession was the Congress able to enact laws giving land out in relatively small parcels. Emancipation ended up being very helpful to poor whites, both by giving them access to land and by making their political support important to rich whites, who finally consented to some redistribution and simultaneously succeeded in what they’d never fully accomplished during slavery: convincing poor whites that white supremacy was rewarding enough that poor and rich whites shared sufficient political interests to unite against African-Americans. Relatedly, the criminal justice system in the South shifted from being almost entirely populated by white convicts to almost entirely African-American.… (mer)