Historian Keri Leigh Merritt examines the lives and labor of landless Whites in the Antebellum Deep South - as an impoverished underclass situated outside the immediate bounds of chattel slavery, but under a brutal, stratified, undemocratic regime with the violence and exploitation of slavery at its heart and in everything it touched.
Keri Leigh is author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South from Cambridge University Press.