This is the first book-length study of free, white craftsmen and tradesmen in the pre-Civil War South. Michele Gillespie details these workers' worlds and tells how they struggled against declining social and economic opportunities while skilled slaves increasingly took up the mechanical, building, clothing, and decorative arts trades.

MICHELE GILLESPIE is a professor of history and dean of the undergraduate college at Wake Forest University. She is also author of Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789-1860 (Georgia) and co-editor of ten books, including North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times (Georgia).