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Chapter io. The Tradition of Slavery 225
an intellectual experiment defines our norms and gives perspective to what
actually took place.
After the Civil War, the overwhelming majority of Negroes were
concentrated in Southern agriculture. Consequently, the greatest problem
was what to do with these great masses of Southern Negroes, most of
whom were former slaves. Even the Negroes not in Southern agriculture
were influenced by the patterns set, since the Northern Negro laborer was
recruited, in later decades, from the rural South.
A rational economic reform of Southern plantation economy, which
would preserve individual property rights to the maximum (always of
greatest importance for a smooth readjustment) but also utilize the revolu-
tionary situation for carrying into effect the aims of Reconstruction, could
have included the following points besides freeing the slaves:
1. Remunerating fully the slave owners out of federal funds.
2. Expropriating the slave plantations or a larger part of them and remunerating
fully their owners out of federal funds.
3. Distributing this land in small parcels to those cultivators who wished it, against
mortgaged claims on their new property, and requiring them to pay for the land
in yearly installments over a long period.
4. Creating for a transition period a rather close public supervision over the frced-
men and also certain safeguards against their disposition of their property; also
instituting an effective vocational education of Negro farmers, somewhat along
the lines of the F.S.A. of the 1930’s.
5. Instituting a scheme of taxation to pay off the former slave- and land-owners and,
perhaps, to allow repayments for the land by the new owners to be kept down
under the actual expropriation costs.
6. As a partial alternative, in order to relieve the Negro population pressure in the
South and in order to help keep down the scope of the reconstruction program:
helping Negroes take part in the westward rural migration.
The cheapness of land in America would have been a factor making a
land reform easier to execute than in most other countries where it has been
successfully carried out when abolishing serfdom. Even if the burden on
the public finances were reckoned as economic costs—which, of course, is a
totally wrong way of calculating costs in a national economy, as they are
meant to be profitable investments in economic progress—those costs
would have been trifling compared with what Reconstruction and Restora-
tion, not to speak of the Civil War, actually cost the nation. What hap-
pened, however, -was that the slaves were freed without any remuneration
being paid their former owners} and that, with few exceptions, the freed-
men were not given access to land.
The explanation of why there was no land reform in America to comple-
ment the emancipation of the slaves, during the short period when the
South did not have much of a say and had not yet deeply fortified its own
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