This paper illuminates one particular aspect of the theme of this session, property rights in man. It will deal with various emancipation plans: those actually enacted in various slave societies; those discussed by legislators who debated slave and antislave proposals; and those which, being purely fictional, have become part of counterfactual history.

In a recent article in this journal we presented an analysis of productivity change of steamboats on western rivers, 1815–60. Although the steamboat dominated river commerce during this period, other transportation technologies had been and were available. Prior to the steamboat era, keelboats and flatboats were the primary means by which the agricultural surpluses of the trans-Appalachian regions reached outside markets (especially through New Orleans). Although flatboating persisted, keelboating was quickly eclipsed with the introduction of the steamboat. This contrast is explained in part by the differential impact of the steamboat on upstream and downstream rates. Successful keelboat operations depended primarily on upstream revenues, and it was on the upstream rates that the steamboat had its most dramatic effects. One study indicates that by the early 1820's, keelboat revenues on the Mississippi had fallen below or very near to average variable costs, and keelboating was maintained only on shallower waters off the main trunk routes. Alternatively, flatboating not only survived but even expanded in the face of the stiff competition generated by the newer technology. For instance, in 1816, the year before the first successful steamboat navigation of the western rivers, 1287 flatboats arrived in New Orleans. By the commercial year 1846–47, the number of arrivals had increased to a peak of 2792. This persistence of flatboating occurred despite the fact that flatboats underwent no changes in their physical characteristics. Neither were there any apparent technical advances in their handling or navigation.

The circumstances resulting in the Coinage Act of February 21, 1853 support Harry Johnson's thesis that historically fiduciary money has been substituted “for commodity-money in response to the interaction of scarcity of the latter and ingenuity in devising the former.” The Act of 1853 replaced bimetallism in the U.S. with a Composite Legal Tender System composed of a subsidiary small silver coinage adjunct to a de facto gold standard. After 1853 bimetallism remained only as a legal fiction which was finally terminated twenty years later.

The purpose of the following observations on serfdom in Western and Eastern Europe is to call attention to some of the problems, in part methodological ones, that arise in attempts to analyze the system of serfdom as a social institution in space and time.

Alexander Gerschenkron's research on industrialization in Europe suggests that both the timing and character of growth may have conditioned the institutional structure of nineteenth-century industrializers. He argues that:

…the more backward a country's economy, the greater was the part played by specialized institutional factors designed to increase the supply of capital to nascent industries and, in addition, to provide them with less decentralized and better informed entrepreneurial guidance; the more backward the country, the more pronounced was the coerciveness and comprehensiveness of those factors.

The application of the notion of learning by doing to account for the measured input efficiency growth of an aggregation of production units admittedly creates worrisome ambiguities about exactly what was being “learned,” how, and by whom. (David, p. 562)

In a recent Journal article Professors Ransom and Sutch (R & S) suggest “debt peonage” as a broad explanation for the course of southern economic development after the Civil War. They summarize their general thesis in the following three statements:

“(1) That because of the readjustments in agriculture and the difficulties in forming new banks under the banking laws, the South was unable to re-establish a viable network of commercial banks to serve her agricultural economy.

On the eve of the Civil War southern per capita real income was eighty percent of northern. Treating slaves as property, real income per free southerner was four percent greater and growing at the same rate as its northern counterpart. Southern per capita income was but fifty-one percent of the national average in 1880, and only slowly began to relatively advance after 1900.

Immediately after the Civil War, southern landowners attempted to preserve the plantation system by offering to hire the newly freed ex-slaves on an annual contract for wages. However, serious problems soon developed. Foremost among these were difficulties engendered by views of white landlords and white overseers regarding the performance of the free black labor. Because they insisted that blacks were incapable of working productively without strict controls and corporal punishment, the landlords were convinced that only the workgang-overseer organization of the slave regime would be feasible. Many freedmen, quite naturally, were reluctant to work under conditions approximating those of slavery. Perhaps the landlord who would have preferred to hire wage labor might have succeeded had he been willing to offer higher wages. However, his views of black productivity inhibited him from doing so, and this approach was soon abandoned.