People can arguably claim that the economic incentives for slavery over time produced racist individuals in the slavery region. That is, intial economic incentives led to the formation of normative belief that black people are inferior to white people, which in turn justified the existence and perpetuation of slavery for people holding that belief.

Setting this argument aside, I'm interested in knowing the extent to which people self-selected into the slavery/no-slavery regions according to their initial racist dispositions. In other words, is the argument that inherently racist people settled in/moved to the slavery region plausible/valid?

Moonhawk, my gut feeling is that understanding the abortion, gun, tax, and other conservative movements would provide a great deal of understanding. There was alot of advocacy for and against slavery in the early days. Georgia, when it was founded by Oglethorpe was a slave free state, while other states in the north were slave states. Things changed, and definitly changed when Great Britain outlawed slavery on the high seas in 1808.

After that, slavery was something that you either were for or against, and the pro-slavery movement was particularly intolerant. I think in general, plantation culture people moved into other areas of the South from the carolinas and virginia and made an effort not to allow local competing, especially white populist sentiments to continue.

Studying the Missouri and kansas conflicts are probably a good way to get an aswer to your question as well.

The early selection was more on the part of the British Isles and social class. IIRC, all the colonies tolerated slavery up into the Eighteenth Century. As of about 1675 the population of VA was only about 10% slaves. OTOH, one of the sons of the gentry, Edward Randolph, became a sea captain and married an English woman who refused to even visit Virginia because slavery offended her Quaker beliefs. So there was certainly a selection by a small number of people who thought slavery was wrong in principle, but this was a tiny minority.

A more fruitful question might be patterns of emigration out of Virginia. Some members of the gentry headed south. But the Harrisons split for the Midwest. The family had a large plantation on the lower James. William Henry Harrison was from that part of the family, but Benjamin was from Ohio. One Byrd moved to Canada. General Marshall's family were from northern Virginia where Chief Justice Marshall grew up. But by the Civil War the General's ancestors had moved to Pennsylvania and fought for the Union. It might be possible to find evidence in letters that attitudes to slavery had some selective effect on the paths of emigration.

one part of my family moved with many other similar slave holding families from Western Virginia to Southern Missouri in the 1830s.

Two factors drove this migration: exhaustion of land and opportunity in Virginia and the opening of the locks around Louisville. Such, with the fugitive slave laws made it possible to travel down the Ohio and up the Mississippi to Missouri on one steamer, with no overland portage

"So there was certainly a selection by a small number of people who thought slavery was wrong in principle, but this was a tiny minority."

And were they all Quakers? The non-swearing, pacifist churches seem to have had a leading role. I am curious as to how far back this goes, and where the first anti-slavery organizations were located. Pennsylvania?

Here's a document from 1744, thanks to the PBS website:

http://tinyurl.com/4u2jm

This is where I saw it:

http://www.livelyroots.com/gerald/15879.htm

For scholarshp, it flunks. It is highly doubtful that Edward had a knighthood. One of his brothers, John, is said to be the only colonial Virginian to have that honor. The first marriage reported is shaky, in view of his age. And the Quaker stuff is hearsay after some generations. Genealogists do a perfunctory job on William Randolph's younger children because they are in a hurry to get back to the ones with the famous descendents and distinguished marriages.

Genealogists tend to ignore the misgivings of the Randolph descendents about slavery, possibly because they tend to be Southerners with Confederate nostalgia false consciousness (like my grandmother). Jefferson had mixed thoughts about slavery, as he did about most things. He did free his slaves in his will, but died bankrupt so his creditors seized them. Richard Henry Lee stated flatly that the institution was wrong, but that he had to sell his slaves to support his family. John Randolph the eccentric politician did free his slaves in his will, remarkable because he was a rabid States Righter. The most interesting was perhaps St. George Tucker, who married Frances Bland Randolph, a Randolph descendent and widow of a Randolph. He was a lawyer and law teacher at W&M, in Williamsburg. He is still cited for a treatise on common law which is an important source for its status at the time of the Founding. Around 1790 he wrote a survey of the law of slavery, with case citations. The general conclusion was that in practice slaves had zero rights and essentially no protection from rampant mistreatment. He also came up with a proposal for getting rid of it. This was hopelessly impractical, with a phase-out over decades. And he didn't know that the contemporary invention of the cotton gin would lead to an explosion of the slave population. Still, it is interesting to see that generation of the Randolphs and their relations express Enlightenment ideas that went against their economic interest.

Tucker wrote at possibly the most interesting moment in the history of American slavery. At the time, the general opinion was that slave labor was only suited to tropical plantation crops and so could never spread far out of the Tidewater region. Somewhat belied by use of slave labor to grow wheat in the Chesapeake and New York, this idea was, of course, definitively blasted by the cotton gin. (One reason Whitney was so widely hailed was because his invention made slavery profitable again.)

This opinion was one reason why southern representatives were willing to accept the Northwest Ordinance's prohibition on slavery north of the Ohio River.

Quakers were the first to overtly oppose slavery in the colonies, IIRC in the 1750s and 1760s. This was a difficult matter for them because many Quaker merchants in Newport and Philadelphia were involved in the extremely lucrative trans-Atlantic slave trade, and such people were threatened with excommunication or its equivalent.

Philadelphia Quakers formed the first anti-slavery society in 1775 and got Franklin to lend his name to it in 1787. In the meantime PA put through the first law to abolish slavery in any US state in 1780 (it was always officially forbidden in Vermont, but VT wasn't part of the union yet), so the society's aim was to abolish slavery in at least the US. The movement as a whole was trans-Atlantic.

Virginia obviously didn't end slavery in this period (though it almost did in 1831), but it did pass a law allowing slaveowners to free their slaves in, I think, 1792, if owners posted bonds. Before that it was illegal, probably to prevent them from becoming public charges. A lot were freed; about 10% of the Chesapeake's black population were free by 1800, IIRC. Significant numbers of them probably were freed because they were too old or infirm for productive labor, however.

The northern states followed PA's lead. NY was the last to do it, in 1804. In colonial days slave labor was quite widely used in the North; house slaves were a kind of status symbol in the New England ports, but especially in NY, CT, and RI there was pretty extensive agricultural slavery. But it was never anywhere near as central as in the southern colonies, and most colonials, slaveowners included, plainly understood the contradiction between slavery and a revolution for liberty.

The conviction that slavery wasn't suited to the inland parts of the country allowed a lot of these slaveowners to live with the contradiction by passing the decision on to another generation. The defense of slavery as a positive good came along much later, after the Missouri crisis.

But there were always people who had no problem with it, or at least not enough of a problem to stop it, and this wasn't a monopoly of the southern-born. Lots of the early planters in AL and MS were northerners whose families had access to the capital needed to buy land and slaves. Much or most of that was done on mortgages.

On the other hand, plenty of white southerners didn't agree with slavery. Lots voted with their feet in the earlier part of the 19C, most famously the Lincolns; uplanders probably were more inclined this way than Tidewater-bred. Later, in the 1840s and especially after 1850, there was an active purge of whites who wouldn't defend slavery in public. Even from the universities.

So it's a complicated picture, and the economic and moral aspects of things may not be as straightforward as they seem today. First, until steam engines, mobile power was basically muscle-- human or animal-- and there were many different kinds of bound labor. Second, even if you were a planter opposed to slavery in principle, slaves represented an enormous percentage of your family's capital. Would you be willing to impoverish your children for the sake of a principle? Maybe not such an easy call?

The need for slaves goes beyond economics. There's often a social need for people who are bound to one, who are dependent, who can perforce be depended on. And most of all who can be treated as social inferiors.

My two great+ grandfathers were antislavery, one a Philadelphia Quaker and an organizer of the Railroad and the other the New England hothead abolitionist, Garrison. The ownership of slaves comes in many forms. There was a wonderful review of an old play in the New York Times a couple of days ago which I recommend: http://theater2.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/theater/reviews/09cher.html?

So, who are the slaves today?

Slavery existed for thousands of years, and virtually everywhere--the word itself is a variation of 'Slav'. So, the interesting question is; why did the English speaking people move to eliminate it worldwide?

"why did the English speaking people move to eliminate it worldwide?"

For very complex reasons (political, cultural, religious, psychological), among which is that the British found an even cheaper source of labor that was less troublesome to procure.

The non-economic features of slavery can be supplied in other ways and don't affect public policy or history so much. It comes down to a calculation of the difference between market wages and slave upkeep. If there is no social taboo, people will do the math and attend the next slave auction. The corollary is that the burden of abolition fell mostly on the owners of large plantations.

You are of course correct on the general point about psychological aspects of slavery. There is a wonderful passage in William Byrd's diaries where is upset by his wife's upsetness about a love triangle involving the house slaves. Everyone involved is throwing scenes, sulking, trying to manipulate. Byrd is puzzled and bemused, but perforce caught up in the psychodrama. You realize that Byrd and his wife are using the slaves as toys, perhaps to act out some of their own conflicts. But they are also being used. Part of this derived from Byrd's being a first generation slaveholder. Later, rules were worked out to prevent this kind of thing.

It's fun to discover these nuances in the formal, 18C prose. But economics is a steamroller for nuance. The Civil War wasn't fought over house servants.