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