On this episode of the It’s Going Down show, we caught up with historian and author Keri Leigh Merritt out of Atlanta, Georgia. Merritt is the author of both the 2017 book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South as well as the new essay, War Happens in Dark Places, Too. Merritt’s work focuses on labor history, slavery, and class tensions in the South, both before and after the civil war and the research work that she is producing, a long with a new wave of historians, is reshaping how we view the Confederacy, its collapse, and also whites supremacy within the United States.
As we cover in this discussion, the Confederacy collapsed because of a variety of factors, but chief among them was the mass desertion of Confederate soldiers as well as the general strike of Black slaves. In looking at this history, we are confronted not only by the shallow false history of the “Lost Cause,” but also the real question of how the present American plantation could also be collapsed by a succession of collective acts of mass refusal.
As Confederate and colonial statues are toppled across the so-called US, we hope this history serves to inspire and educate.