Review: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt

Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South is a piece of game-changing scholarship that fundamentally alters how we understand the South, slavery, and the Civil War. She argues that, previously, the lives of poor whites had not been adequately studied leaving a huge gap in our historical understanding of southern society. Prevailing interpretation portrayed the South as white versus black, a bottom class of southern slaves held in bondage by a class of elite slaveholders, with a middle tier class of white yeoman farmers who may or may not own slaves but certainly benefited from and supported the institution of slavery. This has been used often to explain how white men who did not own slaves supported the Confederacy and went to fight for the South during the Civil War. This social structure ignored the lives of the poorest whites, and Merritt’s research demonstrates how this lower class proved problematic for white slaveholders both before and during the Civil War.

Using a wide range of sources, from census records to court documents to Civil War veterans’ records, Merritt examines the lives of poor southern whites and how they fit into a society based on the institution of slavery. In many ways their lived daily experience placed them closer to slaves than the elite whites of the South, and slaveowners were keen to control them in some of the same ways in order to promote and protect the institution of slavery. Elite whites tried to keep distance between poor whites and slaves by preventing both social and economic relationships. There was a fascinating section in the book on the policing of sexual relationships between white women and black men and cases of possible infanticide of mixed race children. Because children took their free or slave status from their mothers (a rule that meant that any children born to a slave mother were automatically slaves, and more property for the slaveowner), a mixed race child born to a white mother created a problem for the elite trying to maintain a clear division between white and black. Merritt’s case studies of social relationships and cases of policing and punishment in the south provide a new understanding of the white/black divide in southern society.

Merritt’s work also alters our understanding of the Civil War and its aftermath. Instead of all white men supporting the cause of slavery and the Confederacy, Merritt suggests that there were more complex reasons for poor white men fighting in the war. In addition, her research suggests more instability in the foundation of the Confederate States, compared to an interpretation that all, or most, white southerners supported the cause. This scholarship about poor white southerners also affects the Reconstruction period as the south tried to recover from war and rebuild its society. Her argument about the post-war period was illuminating. Before the Civil War, African Americans occupied the secure position as slaves and poor whites were the class that were heavily policed and incarcerated by the elite in order to protect the social structure of the South. In the post-war period, once slavery was abolished, African Americans moved into that position in society that was policed and incarcerated in large numbers in order to protect the elites’ view of the south.

In short, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the Antebellum South, the Civil War, or the post-war period.

Dr. Kathleen Logothetis Thompson earned her PhD in Nineteenth Century/Civil War America from West Virginia University, and also holds a M.A. from WVU and a B.A. from Siena College. Her research is on mental trauma and coping among Union soldiers and she is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled War on the Mind. She currently teaches history at several colleges and universities and leads tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Kathleen was a seasonal interpreter at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park for several years and is the co-editor of Civil Discourse.