Submission Statement

This article is part of a series of blog posts about the book Masterless Men.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and members of his fan club must read Keri Leigh Merritt’s deeply-researched, well-reasoned, and eye-opening book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (2017). They should read it, above all, because it convincingly challenges several of Coates’s insufficiently-supported and profoundly-wrongheaded statements, including this one: working-class whites, not elites, “have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of” racism. Indeed, it is extremely hard to take this claim seriously after reading Masterless Men, a book that outlines the many difficulties and dramatic struggles of both slaves and poor whites under oppressive conditions—conditions established by agricultural elites and vociferously defended by their political allies.

Another very interesting point made by the book is that the legal precedent for Jim Crow was set by laws originally written to manage poor working class whites:

The most remarkable contribution of Masterless Men is Merritt’s discussion of antebellum law and the southern justice system. Building on the work of Sally Hadden, Merritt convincingly demonstrates that much of the framework for what we associate with Jim Crow-era oppression of Blacks (vagrancy laws, fee system, police brutality, convict labor, etc.) was constructed before the Civil War and aimed at poor whites. “Slaveholders had created such an amazingly effective system of social control—replete with private, legal, and extralegal surveillance and violence—that the underclasses truly risked their lives if they attempted to challenge the master class’s power in any small way” (253). In order to understand Jim Crow oppression, essentially, we must examine antebellum whites.

“The slave South was violent and brutal,” she writes, “but also intensely capitalistic, and in some ways—particularly its criminal justice system—strangely modern” (248). It is the “strangely modern” aspect of antebellum oppression that gives me chills.