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Masterless Men: Poor whites and slavery in the Antebellum south by Keri Leigh Merritt - Book review
"1619" and the myth of white unity under slavery
London, Eric http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/09/mast-s09.html
Publisher: International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Date Written: 09/09/2019
Year Published: 2019
Resource Type: Article
A critique of the New York Times' "1619" initiative, marking the 400th anniversary of the disembarkation of the first African slaves in what was to become the United States.
Abstract:
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Excerpts:
When the seceding states held conventions and voted on disunion, Merritt explains that white workers and poor farmers overwhelmingly voted against. This contradicts the Times’ presentation of poor whites as actively supporting or silently acquiescing to slavery—“they generally accepted their lot,” in the condescending phrase of Matthew Desmond. In fact, secession was rammed through in fraudulent elections by slaveowners in a desperate attempt to save their slave system both from Northern Republicans and from the prospects of disunion from within. A war to establish slavery in the west (and likely in the Caribbean and Latin America) was needed to prop up a slave order that was crumbling from within. The slaveowners carried out their rebellion in order to preempt this movement from below.
Merritt writes: “Regardless of their professions, one thing was clear. Secession, the Confederacy, and Civil War were all overwhelmingly the creations of one small class of Americans: wealthy southern slaveholders.”
The lack of support among poor whites for the Confederate war effort and the active opposition from below was a major factor in the South’s military collapse in 1864 and 1865, as explained by David Williams in Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War and Victoria Bynum in Free State of Jones, upon which the 2016 film by the same title was based.
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None of this lessens the horrific reality that thousands of blacks were lynched, tens of thousands more thrown in jail, and blacks as an entire segment of Southern society were forced into legal and social second-class citizenship in what was, in all but name, a racial caste system. Skin color made a qualitative difference in the life of a Southern person living under Jim Crow.
But segregation did not provide poor whites with positive political or social benefits that would lead to an improvement of their living standards. In economic and political terms, racial segregation drove wages down for all races, it reduced social spending on schools, hospitals and other social services, and the backward political and cultural climate that dominated the South well into the mid-20th century has created conditions for the hyper-exploitation of all white and black workers that remains today.
In a larger sense, regardless of what an individual poor white person thought (and racism was not the sole property of the rich), the segregationist system did not provide the majority of whites with “privilege” because segregation ultimately blocked the development of a united movement from below, which was the only thing that could have improved the living conditions of all Southern workers and farmers.
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