Free labor in an unfree world2000

"In the first book-length study of white tradespeople in the pre-Civil War South, Michele Gillespie highlights the complex world and lives of a nearly hidden population marginalized by a growing slave system. Gillespie demonstrates that the appearance of solidarity in the white antebellum South was false, that, in fact, strong class conflicts threatened to divide white southern society."--BOOK JACKET.

"Beginning with a discussion of the roles and interests of white artisans in the commercial and industrial revolutions and political world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book explores the migration of craft and trade workers to the South, the evolution of a rudimentary class identity, and the development of political culture and structure among artisan groups...