Paul Finkelman wrote:

> he could have freed his slaves and hired them to work his land; he could have
> provided for their freedom in his will, if we could not see fit to free them in
> his life; he could have gradually freed them as his need for them diminished.
> The possibilities were endless.

I'll grant you the possibilities are endless, but the practicalities aren't. Most of
the "enlightened" freed their slaves upon their deaths. That may be assumed to be
self interested to an extreme. (I won't need them anymore so I shall do the right
thing" kind of argument). Robert Carter who freed his and provided land was an
exception, presumably.

How much discussion was there in the 18th and pre-Civil War 19th century about the
mechanics of earning a living for manumitted slaves? By this I mean did anyone
actually work out on paper or in practice how freed slaves were to be integrated
into the local economy? As it turned out, the aftermath of the Civil War seems to me
to have engendered worse treatment for these folks than anything anyone could have
thought beforehand. Did the thinking go that the slaves, once freed, would be seen
in economic terms as the equivalent of anyone else out there in the labor pool?
Orser makes a good argument for the sort of paralysis on both sides as the mechanics
which ended up with tenant farming and share cropping got themselves worked out, as
poorly as they surely did. Would the largely agrarian economy at the time have had
the means of paying wages on a regular basis as factory workers were paid in the
North? I can't help but think that if by some stroke of a legislative magic wand,
slaves had been freed without bloodshed and attendant hard feelings, then the end
result would have been much the same for large numbers of workers. That is, they
would have continued in their work in a feudal sort of arrangement, still at the
beck and call of the owner. The migration of large numbers of workers off the
plantations would certainly have spelled their doom as I don't see that the
mechanization that enabled farmers to work larger acreages with fewer workers
happening much before it did. Would the established mechanisms of land acquisition
through headrights, apprenticeship and the like have meant that the newly freed
slaves would have ended up as the Appalachian Scots-Irish up in the hollows on the
worst of land, poor but free?

So, apart from a few hardy and enlightened if perhaps self-interested souls, what
was going on regarding the practicalities?

Lyle

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