Thanks, Henry, Kevin, Gregg, Bland, and others for pushing this
discussion in such interesting directions!
Yes, the mid-Atlantic and New England emancipation examples were
certainly relevant and might well have provided a model for Virginia.
However, none of those states were anywhere nearly as dependent on
slave labor as was Virginia (as Bland noted, Ira Berlin's clarifying
distinction between "societies with slaves" and "slave societies" is
exactly relevant here), and the Caribbean example is also problematic
because the supply of arable land there was (and is) so severely
limited.
When I said I could not see any alternative to slavery that wouldn't
have required Virginia slaveholders to face the very real risk of
impoverishment I was thinking not so much of the moment of emancipation
itself -- whether immediate or gradual -- but of the post-emancipation
situation. If slaves were to be truly free, what would have induced
them to hire themselves back to former slaveholders in sufficient
numbers and with sufficient permanence to provide a free agricultural
labor force comparable in size and dependability to the coerced force
of slavery? If studies such as Melvin Patrick Ely's wonderful Israel
on the Appomattox are any indication, African-Americans, no less than
poor whites, desired land and wanted to become independent farmers, not
dependent farm laborers. ("Forty acres and a mule" reflected genuine
black aspiration, not just white theory.) I am surmising that they
would have done their best to get themselves out of dependent-laborer
status as soon as possible so as to acquire at least small farms of
their own (small enough not to depend on substantial numbers of others
as laborers) or would have headed west for the same purpose -- and that
slaveholders knew that perfectly well, whatever their paternalistic and
racist rhetoric to the contrary. (It would be interesting to look
again at the 1831 convention arguments to see whether any of this was
acknowledged openly.)
In other words, had Virginia adopted the gradual, post-nati
emancipation scheme of its northern neighbors, former slaves would
eventually--perhaps quickly--have been better off not only in absolute
terms -- being free -- but in economic terms as well, possibly through
massive outmigration. In the process, they would have effected a
radical restructuring of Virginia's entire economy. And for precisely
the same reason, their former owners, whether major plantation owners
such as Madison and Jefferson or modest farmers like the majority of
Virginia's slaveholders, would have faced economic crisis and the very
real possibility of impoverishment in any individual case (how could
you be sure you'd be able to find, or afford, laborers to work any more
land than you could physically plow and harvest yourself?).
So yes, of course, alternatives to slavery could be, were, and can be
imagined -- and all praise to those such as Washington who tried to
effect them. But (and I may be wrong) I still can't see how they could
have been effected widely without traumatic upheaval and risk,
individually and collectively, for nearly all those who benefited from
slavery.
And that is why, like Kevin, "I tend to focus more on the conservative
(reactionary, maybe?), and the pessimistic" rather than on "the
progressive, and the optimistic" aspects of Virginia's history of
slavery of which Henry's book so tantalizingly reminds us.
--Jurretta
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