The history of capitalist development in the United States is long, uneven, and overwhelmingly focused on the North. Macroeconomic studies of the South have primarily emphasized the role of the cotton economy in global trading networks. Until now, few in-depth scholarly works have attempted to explain how capitalism in the South took root and functioned in all of its diverse-and duplicitous-forms. Southern Scoundrels explores the lesser-known aspects of the emergence of capitalism in the region: the shady and unscrupulous peddlers, preachers, slave traders, war profiteers, thieves, and marginal men who seized available opportunities to get ahead and, in doing so, left their mark on the southern economy. Eschewing conventional economic theory, this volume features narrative storytelling as engaging and seductive as the cast of shifty characters under examination. Contributors cover the chronological sweep of the nineteenth-century South, from the antebellum era through the tumultuous and chaotic Civil War years, and into Reconstruction and beyond. The geographic scope is equally broad, with essays encompassing the Chesapeake, South Carolina, the Lower Mississippi Valley, Texas, Missouri, and Appalachia. These essays offer a series of social histories on the nineteenth-century southern economy and the changes wrought by capitalist transformation. Tracing that story through the kinds of oily individuals who made it happen, Southern Scoundrels provides fascinating insights into the region's hucksters and its history.

William H. Williams operated a slave pen in Washington, DC, known as the Yellow House, and actively trafficked in enslaved men, women, and children for more than twenty years. His slave trading activities took an extraordinary turn in 1840 when he purchased twenty-seven enslaved convicts from the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond with the understanding that he could carry them outside of the United States for sale. When Williams conveyed his captives illegally into New Orleans, allegedly while en route to the foreign country of Texas, he prompted a series of courtroom dramas that would last for almost three decades. Based on court records, newspapers, governors' files, slave manifests, slave narratives, travelers' accounts, and penitentiary data, Williams' Gang examines slave criminality, the coastwise domestic slave trade, and southern jurisprudence as it supplies a compelling portrait of the economy, society, and politics of the Old South.

William H. Williams operated a slave pen in Washington, DC, known as the Yellow House, and actively trafficked in enslaved men, women, and children for more than twenty years. His slave trading activities took an extraordinary turn in 1840 when he purchased twenty-seven enslaved convicts from the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond with the understanding that he could carry them outside of the United States for sale. When Williams conveyed his captives illegally into New Orleans, allegedly while en route to the foreign country of Texas, he prompted a series of courtroom dramas that would last for almost three decades. Based on court records, newspapers, governors' files, slave manifests, slave narratives, travelers' accounts, and penitentiary data, Williams' Gang examines slave criminality, the coastwise domestic slave trade, and southern jurisprudence as it supplies a compelling portrait of the economy, society, and politics of the Old South.

"Forret... has deepened our understanding of the complexity of relations between slaves and poor whites." -- Georgia Historical Quarterly

Covering a broad geographic scope from Virginia to South Carolina between 1820 and 1860, Jeff Forret scrutinizes relations among rural poor whites and slaves, a subject previously unexplored and certainly under-reported. Forret's findings challenge historians' long-held assumption that mutual violence and animosity characterized the two groups' interactions; he reveals that while poor whites and slaves sometimes experienced bouts of hostility, often they worked or played in harmony and camaraderie. Race Relations at the Margins is remarkable for its focus on lower-class whites and their dealings with slaves outside the purview of the master. Race and class, Forret demonstrates, intersected in unique ways for those at the margins of southern society, challenging the belief that race created a social cohesion among whites regardless of economic status.

As Forret makes apparent, colonial-era flexibility in race relations never entirely disappeared despite the institutionalization of slavery and the growing rigidity of color lines. His book offers a complex and nuanced picture of the shadowy world of slave--poor white interactions, demanding a refined understanding and new appreciation of the range of interracial associations in the Old South.

"A useful addition to a growing literature on nonelite southerners in plantation societies." -- Journal of Social History