[x]

I suspect for most free people in those days if you were lucky enough to have children they could support you when you got old. If you were fortunate, you bought a farm, and your family could feed itself. So you didn't need to depend either on a state bureaucracy or on the whim of some master. There was the "poor farm" in those days, for those who didn't have other means of support, but you didn't want to go there. So things weren't as bleak for free people as slaveowners liked to claim.

Now maybe some research is called for, but I'm betting if you were a single slave with no family or relatives, you might be bounced through the system from one owner to another. Maybe you wouldn't actually be turned out to starve, but the notion that your masters would be extremely benevolent when you got to old to work is something I'd question. Having children and other relatives on the plantation that you could do things for and who could do things for you would probably make a master much more likely not to sell you off.

In any case, when emancipation came, many slaves took to the road. The conditions they found when their journey ended may not have been very different from what they left, but they very definitely wanted to get out from under the personal tyranny of particular masters and live their own, more independent and self-reliant lives.

It's funny how some people who are most adamantly for liberty and against government have a soft spot when it comes to the tyranny of slavery and make the same kind of paternalistic arguments that they spurn when it comes to present-day society.

[wardaddy]

I suspect for most free people in those days if you were lucky enough to have children they could support you when you got old

that was not much chance as a rule X, average lifespan in 1830 was less than 40

[Ohioan]

You want to treat this all as a clumsy policy debate, in which you equate the position of the dependent classes for thousands of years as reflecting what rooted American Conservatives deplore in present day Government. But it is far from being so simple. Now, I will frankly tell you, that if I did not have property & the means to take care of myself, I would prefer the paternalism of a feudal leader of the Southern Plantation style, in my own neighborhood, than what the Federal Government now offers. Take Obama care! Which is more invasive, the twice yearly exams by a doctor from the nearest small town, or some procedure mandated by the Federal Government, as defined via a bureaucratic check list?

As for your description of the safety net in the old days, I basically agree with you. Jefferson explains how well it worked in his Notes On The State Of Virginia, 1782. (I quote it in Reality.)

It is always better to solve local problems--and what could be more "local" than the needs of an individual--where you can maximize individual responsibility.

William Flax

[central_va]

In any case, when emancipation came, many slaves took to the road.

Most Freedmen farmed the same land they did as slaves, only they were now sharecroppers. Most freed slaves had zero animosity towards the former slave owners.

[Ditto]

I think it a fair proposition that if short fiber cotton had never become such a powerful influence in American economics and politics, slavery would have died out in the south just as it faded for economic reasons in the north, and there would not have been such a thing as the civil war.

The Cotton Gin allowed all that followed. But if Whitney hadn't invented it, someone else would have. It was the age of invention, for good or bad.