Francis:  I finished your book a couple of days after we talked. Outstanding. Outstanding.  I particularly liked the historical settings that I believe to be highly accurate.  In 1959, I was lecturing.on American Economic History at the University of Washington, and was writing articles with Arnold Zellner who was there at the time.  In 1961, I moved to Stanford University to do the same thing.  [I also lectured on the Soviet Russian economy.]   At that time there was a big reappraisal going on of American economic history.  And, of course, William Fogel at Harvard was painting an entirely different picture of antebellum slavery in the South.   The fundamental economic insight developed at that time was that slaves were capital [costly to buy capital] and you'd be literally crazy if you didn't look after your capital.  And with restrictions on the supply of slaves, and an increasing demand for the products of slavery, the incentives to look after capital simply got greater over time rather than diminishing.

I look forward to the continuation of the novel and hope that the second volume is not going to take ten years as I very well could not be around then.

In any case, thank you, thank you for a great and entirely satisfactory read.

George Murphy
Professor Emeritus of Economics at UCLA
http://www.econ.ucla.edu/people/Faculty/Murphy.html