The question posed to me as a landowner in 1861 was how to free my slaves, while allowing them to keep paid employment by me doing what they knew how to do, and both them and me make more money after the change than we had before. I already made good money, but they were not allowed to use money in town, so I had to use myself as a go-between and buy for them in town, since I did have that right. My solution was to allow them to write a contract by which they had parity with me in which of us legally owned the land-- a dual deed arrangement, and to let them use their brain power to write the contract, and let them use their brainpower to figure out how we would increase the productivity of the land area enough to make them full incomes and me a little bit of spare change for allowing them their side of the deed over the land. The extra change that they earned me would, in how much time would depend on the interest rates over that time, pay for the rights that I would be giving them over the land. The tricky part is that I would already have to let them write their side of the deed (in a way fair to me) at the beginning, so that they would be able to own the rights to the money from their production on it, so that they would be able to pay me for the land. Their payment would compensate me for my loss of the unlimited power to sell the land if I wanted to-- I would be more tied to that specific tract because of the obligation that I took on giving them a competing deed to the same land.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 13:38:20 +0000
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