To Ned and All,

  It has long since passed being "politically correct" to favor
emancipation of slaves.  Of course the emancipation worked in the
US in the 1860s was painful for many of those freed, but that was
because, as some wit once observed, "Lincoln didn't free the
slaves, he fired them!"
  Thaddeus Stevens studied intently Czar Alexander II's
emancipation of the serfs in Russia, noting among other things,
that the freedmen were provided with land as part of their
establishment as free men in the agrarian sector of Russian
society.  (See Fawn Brodie's old, but very good biography of
Stevens.)  Hence, Stevens' and other Radicals attachment to a
land distribution plan.
  White southerners opposed such a plan because it would have
been their land that was distributed.  Republican leaders in general
opposed it, because it was unprecendented to take property from
white people and give it to people of color (the reverse, of course,
was alright and being carried out as they deliberated, in the
Homestead Act of 1862.)  Moreover, the Republican Party, like the
Democratic Party, was a party of property interests.
  I don't doubt that there were many Quakers in Delaware, but I do
doubt that their presence was the determining factor in Delaware's
gradual emancipation (or manumission.)  Delaware, home of Du
Pont de Nemours, was perhaps the most industrialized slave state
by 1850.  I don't believe they favored slaves manufacturing gun
powder, whilst due south in Virginia, after 1842, skilled slave
puddlers worked the iron (later to be made into cannons for R. E.
Lee's army) at Tredegar.
  As all the Eastern Seaboard states inherited the British system of
local (county) poor relief, the Delaware manumission seems in part
to have been a system which focused the burden of support for
superannuated slaves on the owners as opposed to rate payers in
general.  Meanwhile, the decline of agriculture and the rise of the
chemical industry and attendant supports for it, made slavery as
ancillary in Delaware as Barbara Fields' reminds us it become
around industrializing Baltimore.

Harold S. Forsythe
History & Black Studies
Fairfield University

Date sent:              Mon, 16 Apr 2001 07:16:09 -0400
From:                   ned heite <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:                Re: Monticello Slave Graves Found and Reuters Remarks
To:                     [log in to unmask]
Send reply to:          Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
        <[log in to unmask]>

> In fact, free blacks in urban situations were quite well off before
> the Civil War. After emancipation, urban black populations suffered a
> terrible decline in wealth and status. The reasons for this decline are
> complex, but they include an influx of unskilled rural ex-slaves, a
> glutted labor market, and a dilution of black status.
>
> This last phenomenon is quite interesting, because the ante-bellum
> black artisans in the cities were approaching stable middle class
> status. I am familiar with one study that clearly shows a change in
> white attitudes toward blacks as a class that came with emancipation.
>
> In Delaware, the Quaker element in the population was quite strong,
> and some major abolitionists were based here. Yet we were a slave
> state. Gradual emancipation was built into our laws, and owners were
> forbidden to manumit slaves who were no longer productive. Of course
> there were ways around the laws, but generally sudden emancipation
> was seen as a bad thing, even among some of the less radical Quaker
> abolitionists.
>
> Anyone who manumitted elderly or infirm slaves was obliged in
> Delaware to provide for them, sometimes by giving a bond.
> Manumission was not a simple matter, and any attempt to characterize
> it in entirely moral terms is futile.
>
> Manumission, or emancipation, was primarily an economic issue, at
> least to the slave owning element of the population. The slaves may
> not have considered it an economic issue, but they certainly suffered
> economically if manumission was not managed properly. I suspect the harsh
> economic effects suffered by antebellum ex-slaves could have been avoided
> if more states had adopted manumission systems like Delaware's that
> provided for the interests of both owner and slave.
>
> But to characterize emancipation as a universally good thing is
> oversimplification I cannot accept.  The evidence certainly does not
> support such a sweeping generalization, however politically correct
> it may be.
>
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