Suppose that in 1789 the slaves had been freed, given land warrants for forty acres and credit for a mule or, more likely, an ox. Some might have taken up the land – perhaps in Ohio or Tennessee – and farmed it; others, like many of the Revolutionary soldiers, might have found ways of selling the warrants and have become wage laborers on farms or in the few coastal towns near their point of emancipation. Some perhaps would have taken up a trade or used their small capital to open a store. Such free laborers and minuscule capitalists would have infiltrated the economic streams of their white fellow countrymen. It is possible that their rate of population growth would have been the same as it was under slavery before 1860 since even then it was roughly that of the free population. And no doubt color prejudice would have remained to limit the occupations and social situations among the white population to which black men would have been admitted. No doubt they would have remained largely restricted to manual labor or to a few trades and professions where chance or some special circumstance favored them.

Under such a labor market it is possible to suppose that three effects might have been felt on the course of southern development.