Poor Whites and the Labor Crisis in the Slave South

While studies on southern slaveholders, yeomen, and even the enslaved abound, relatively little has been written about the Deep South’s white working-class. My new book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, seeks to illuminate the lives of about one-third of the cotton belt’s whites, who owned neither land nor slaves. By doing so, we can understand more about the labor crisis and class tensions that helped to bring on the Civil War. Read more →