The truth is that most of the slaveowners came to America with nothing. They 
were landless peasants in England, who were granted headrights by the 
English. They only legitimacy they had was own slaves and calling themselves 
Gentlemen. For them giving up slaves was giving up their identity, and 
returning to the peasant status they started at.

Anita


>From: Henry Wiencek <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history         
>      <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Madison's slaves (and black descendants?)
>Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 12:28:52 -0400
>
>Jurretta writes, "I cannot see any large-scale alternative" to slavery. But
>George Washington could. The alternative can be found in letters between
>Washington and David Stuart, a Custis heir, which were published for the
>first time in my book. The letters show that while Washington was president
>he tried to free all the slaves at Mount Vernon, including the slaves owned
>by Martha's family, the Custis heirs. The bare outline of Washington's
>alternative to slavery was – we will free them, and hire them right back on
>wages or shares. So the plantations would not have lost their labor and
>farming operations would continue. (Sharecropping, by the way, was already
>well established in Virginia. In Washington's youth, most of the white
>laborers on the Northern Neck were sharecroppers.) The key is, Washington
>had come to the conclusion that he had no right to the ownership of human
>souls, thus he did not expect to be compensated for the "loss" of this 
>human
>capital. But to Stuart and to other large slaveholders who had surpluses of
>slaves, the slaves were a portfolio, assets they could mortgage, sell,
>bequeath, or hire out at great profit. They had monetized slaves. Slavery
>had evolved beyond being a simple labor system to being a complex and 
>highly
>lucrative financial system. Washington railed against this business of
>regarding people as if they were "cattle in the market," but that's what
>they had become. Stuart and his type were delighted that newly emerging
>markets for surplus humans gave them increasing liquidity. Winthrop Jordan
>wrote that by the end of the 1790s slavery "had taken on new dimensions." 
>It
>was a bonanza--that's what they did not want to give up.
>
>Henry Wiencek

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