Slaves, Poor Whites, and the Underground Economy of the Rural Carolinas.

Explores the underground economy of the rural South through an investigation of slaves' unlawful trade with poor whites in the antebellum Carolinas. Important place the poor whites occupied within slaves' underground trading networks; Argument that while anxious slaveholders found such economic cooperation inimical to a society stratified on the basis of race, the calculated, rational nature of slave-poor white exchange blunted its potentially subversive character; Analysis of court records, census returns, slave narratives, and other sources; Several factors that helped determine the likelihood of illicit slave-poor white commerce.