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