Roll, Jordan, Roll and Time on the Cross
Goldberg, Joyce
Book Review/Joyce Goldberg Two Views of Human Bondage •• ...Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said; "One can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much...
...Rather than Samba, the slave became a black Horatio Alger...
...overseers and drivers who often ran the plantation in absence of the master, and who as "the man between" tried to mediate between master and slave to keep order as humanely as possible...
...They claim to refute the notion that "blacks were the pitiful victims of a system of slavery so repressive that it undermined their sense of family, their desire for If Media Bias Upsets You . . . . Do Something About It: SUBSCRIBE TO THE AIM REPORT (Special Price to the Readers of The Alternative—Only $10) ACCURACY IN MEDIA, INC...
...The authors have invented a model in which slave behavior uniformly responded to uniform planter-sponsored stimuli...
...With regard to clothing, Fogel and Engerman insist that slaves were well clad and dismiss accounts to the contrary as abolitionist propaganda...
...They anticipated even greater prosperity...
...Partly by internalizing and partly by modifying the paternalism practiced by whites, Genovese claims the slaves accepted the system but preserved their dignity, asserted their humanity, rejected slavery...
...Unhappily the subtitle of the book, The Economics of American Negro Slavery, suggests more limited treatment of the subject than the reader will encounter...
...Because their data base is narrow, because they fail to consider contrary statistical evidence, because the literary evidence is often overwhelmingly in opposition, their suppositions can be considered questionable...
...The authors make assumptions about motives and intentions of slave-owners solely on the basis of numbers...
...And like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, the reader will find it absurd to believe impossible things...
...5.) The typical slave fieldhand was not lazy, inept, or unproductive...
...The authors claim that the typical slave was not poorly fed because caloric intake in 1860 was about ten percent greater than that of the entire American populace in 1879...
...But his analysis is brilliant if verbose, creative if ponderous...
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...As Christianity emphasizes spiritual freedom and equality before God, the slaves' religion set limits to rendering unto Caesar that which was Caesar's, giving the slaves "an awareness of the moral limits of submission" and preventing their conversion into a race of Sambos and Toms...
...Do not the small number of slave uprisings show that freedom could sometimes be forestalled by benevolence...
...3.) Slaveowners were not pessimistic about the future of slavery...
...Missing from their religion was the sense of guilt, sense of mission, and original sin that haunted white Christianity...
...Sometimes this has resulted from white liberal feelings of mea culpa, sometimes from attempts to foster cultural pride in a black heritage, or to defend American and particularly Southern history...
...Here no amount of statistical ingenuity will suffice...
...For whites it led to, a self-conscious ruling class with exaggerated notions of responsibilities, perpetuating an ideology protective of its own interests...
...He sees it as a life, or an attitude toward life, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese Pantheon Books $17.50 Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman Little, Brown and Company Volume I, $8.95 Volume II (Evidence and Methods) $12.50 which "made an indispensable contribution to the development of black culture and black national consciousness as well as to American nationality as a whole...
...The typical slave received about ninety percent of the income he produced in the course of his lifetime...
...Surprisingly for Genovese, who was once so Marxist in his outlook, slavery is not solely an economic relationship...
...Slaves learned only to respond to the economic considerations from which they gained money, privileges, leisure, or occupational advancement...
...The 665-page tome by Genovese, in preparation since 1962, maintains that slavery "laid the foundations for a separate black national culture" because even the lowest social class must have experiences, cultural identity, a world outlook which overshadows immediate material necessities...
...ft did encourage kindness and affection but it simultaneously en26 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 couraged cruelty and hatred...
...Believing that the care of slaves was "a burden and a duty," masters saw themselves as authoritarian fathers...
...The reader can question each issue discussed by the authors in their attempt to correct the traditional characterizations of slavery...
...As an economic system it was experiencing unprecedented prosperity...
...Genovese sees stealing, lying, malingering, sabotage, running away, arson, even abortion as "pre-political" and nonrevolutionary yet indispensable to establish limits to degradation and submission...
...At best, paternalism exacted recognition of the slaves' humanity...
...2.) Slavery was not moribund by the time of the Civil War...
...The demand for slaves in urban areas was increasing faster than their demand in rural areas...
...Planters recognized it was in their economic interest to encourage the stability of the nuclear family...
...Like Genovese, Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman in Time on the Cross strive to reveal "the record of black achievement under adversity...
...the Mammy who served as executive, cook, nurse, and housekeeper of the Big House...
...Herbert Gutman already has written a massive adverse review of Time on the Cross for the Journal of Negro History (now published as a book, Slavery and the Numbers Game, University of Illinois Press...
...Americans have had plenty of practice believing impossible things about slavery...
...It has gained national attention because of its highly professional approach and its fearlessness in tackling such media giants as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CBS, NBC and ABC...
...He dismisses myths of slave promiscuity and emphasizes Victorian moral codes, concluding that slaves treated one another with "tenderness, gentleness, charm, and modesty...
...The slaves' view of paternalism was not always compatible with that of slave-holders...
...A serious attempt to apply "cliometrics"— quantitative methodology—to the economics of slavery, the book suggests that the traditional interpretation of slavery has been in error on many counts: 1.) Slavery was not irrationally kept in existence by plantation owners who ignored their economic interests...
...But how did slave diets vary among regions and over time...
...Ignored are slave culture and community, interaction between slave and master, what planters internalized from their slaves, how slaves responded to each other...
...Zip Name Address City State L The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 27 achievement, their propensity for industry, their independence of judgment, and their capacity for self-reliance...
...If slaves accepted their masters' Christianity, they shaped it to their sociological and spiritual needs...
...This book, then, is not justanother study of the peculiar institution but an examination of Southern society reflected in the institution of slavery...
...But Genovese insists that this separate black national culture "has always been American, however much it has drawn on African origins or reflected the distinct development of black people in America...
...Suggesting an alternate view of slavery to the traditional inference of oppressiveness and brutality, the authors hope to disprove the "myth of black incompetence," of slavery as irrational and unproductive...
...Not only do the authors reject theories of slave docility, but they have created the notion that it was almost inappropriate for blacks to have resisted such beneficent treatment...
...Genovese offers an analogy for slavery: a quasi-feudal relation between lord and serf, king and noble, based on mutual dependency...
...The system which developed could be despotic or benevolent, tyrannical or humane...
...Fogel and Engerman apply quantitative methods to ideas, perceptions, intentions, motives which cannot be measured...
...AIM) was founded to combat inaccuracies and distorted reporting by the major media...
...Time on the Cross is as much concerned with the social and psychological nature of slavery as with its economics...
...The slaves' most important defense, as the author writes, was "a religion that taught them to live and value each other, to take a critical view of their masters, and to reject the ideological rationales for their own enslavement...
...By complying with their work obligation, slaves seized the privileges they were granted and turned them into rights because they believed their labor deserved service and respect...
...Their is no discussion of the slave community or black culture...
...4.) Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture...
...Effective management made slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than Northern farming...
...Whether from expediency, self-interest, or humanitarianism, slaveholders accepted "much of their slaves' culture and sensibility while imparting to their slaves much of their own...
...Was not the price of even the ideal type of paternalism a capitulation to servitude...
...The slavery of the South was a "historically unique kind of paternalistic society" in which whites and blacks were linked by duties, obligations, demands, expectations, rights...
...It makes generalsense...
...Genovese rightly illustrates the stability of the family as well as the system of community values and cultural autonomy which persisted under slavery...
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...However precise, rigorous, scrupulous, or skillful the behavior patterns shown in figures or graphs or tables, they cannot supply answers tobroader questions...
...According to their model, neither slave nor owner had freedom to exercise choices as producers or consumers...
...But at times it is difficult to distinguish accommodation from acquiesence—how resistance can be defensive...
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...But they cloak debatable historical points in a veil of mathematical certainty...
...The result was a full black community, of living traditions, customs, and a people who appreciated them...
...Fogel and Engerman, one must say, have created a world in which neither slave nor slaveholder could have existed...
...They believe there is an absolute truth to past social realities, that it can be determined most precisely by the "new economic historians," and that once discovered this new truth will replace old myths perpetuated by crudely trained historians who have not recognized "the role of mathematics and statistics in historical analysis...
...Can quantitative data reveal life as it was for the slave more than literary evidence, which indicates a less agreeable picture...
...Were rations ever cut...
...He even claims "the finest, if rudest, examples of the southern lady and gentleman were to be found in the quarters even more readily than in the Big House...
...In demonstrating how slaves made a livable world for themselves, Genovese also has found that the South was as much "the world the slaves made" as slavery was an institution molded by the South...
...7.) Slave breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity did not destroy the slave family...
...28 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975...
...One may admire the authors' efforts, even their interdisciplinary approach which tries hard to be novel...
...house servants who were "integrationalists" of plantation society, transmitting black traditions to the Big House and carrying white culture back to the quarters...
...Can the number of slaves bought and sold, of families broken up by sales, the average age of black women at birth of their first child—can such figures tell us much about sex mores, the stability of the black family, dominance of male authority, social ties between races, what it meant to be a slave...
...All these were sources of strength, of collective identity and pride...
...Purchasing slaves was highly profitable in terms of return on investment...
...What is at issue, and what is conveyed by the title, is the impact of slavery upon the slaves themselves and upon the entire society...
...Discounted by the authors is forcible exploitation which masters could apply whenever more peaceable inducements were unsuccessful—the wielding of absolute power which ultimately degraded both master and slave...
...Roll, Jordan, Roll offers an original, provocative, and possible picture of the world the slaves made...
...He was harder working and more efficient than white farm workers...
...The reader cannot accept his argument as the last word...
...The author provides no answer to why freedom was less precious than life in bondage...
...Time on the Cross, whatever its importance as scientific and economic history, is poor social history, misleading in its analysis of slave behavior...
...Slave sales were usually of whole families...
...The per capita income of the South between 1840 and 1869 increased more rapidly than that of the rest of the nation...
...Slavery, he correctly writes, can have no defense...
...They expected material well-being, reasonable discipline, and enough autonomy to maintain cultural independence...
...Slaveowners were purely economic people whose actions were rewarded or punished by the market...
...9.) The rate of expropriation of slave earnings was lower than generally assumed...
...Fogel and Engerman are, in a word, dogmatists...
...Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene D. Genovese and Time on the Cross by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman sometimes support and sometimes contradict each other, but they both offer new ways of looking at slavery...
...He argues that slaves were more just, moral, dignified, and courteous in behavior than were their masters...
...There is no indication that actions or attitudes of slaves changed...
...But clothing, like food, depended on the master, and both master and slave were subject to the market...
...Was the price of benevolence worth the cost then and later...
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...Genovese's major point in the book, that slaves accepted paternalism while rejecting accommodation to slavery, is essentially believable...
...Their religion developed into a way for explaining and ordering, as well as judging, the world...
...It was "the land-oriented world of medieval Europe" which produced "the traditional paternalist ideology to which the southern slaveholders fell heir...
...Here the historian must call upon every resource available to him, whether or not it can be fed into a computer...
...Rather, the slaves celebrated a traditional African joy of life in the face of trials...
...In return for protection for dependents they expected gratitude, loyalty, respect, service...
...Only one takes us from the impossible to the possible...
...Time on the Cross, she notes, has "a religious, at the very least a moral, dimension that defies measurement, however subtle or sophisticated the tools of measurement...
...they remain constant from 1619 to 1865...
...A second defense against slavery was the black community itself...
...It was one of history's greatest crimes, and the struggle of blacks to survive physically and spiritually illustrates the "beauty and power of the human spirit under conditions of extreme oppression...
...I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen...
...Was slavery anything less than slavery...
...6.) Slaves in industry were as productive and diligent as free workers...
...He states that as a people blacks preferred to live, not to die heroically...
...Can quantitative methods lead to generalizations about the quality of life and existence...
...From discussion of the physical standard of living, exploitation and expropriation, sex and the family, the system's "rationality," to discussion of abolitionists, he and other critics have raised the most basic questions about Time on the Cross...
...It grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation...
...To the reader's dismay Genovese equivocates on this moral question...
...They retained African customs through the rhetorical flourishes of black preachers, the rhythms of spirituals, the rituals of funerals and weddings...
...All 777 14th St., NW Washington, D.C...
...Genovese provides a full analysis of personality types: masters and mistresses who became dependent on their servants, and shared familial intimacies...
...Genovese skillfully explains the slaves' acquiescence but he does not convince the reader that accepting what could not be avoided was the only rational course...
...Theft generated its own moral code: "They stole from each other but merely took from the master," because that "only transformed his property from one form to another...
...Gertrude Himmelfarb in a recent essay ("The 'New History' ," Commentary, January 1975) explains that "a mechanistic approach to history implies a mechanistic view of man...
...AIM) is a non-profit, non-partisan, educational organization 427 Wyatt Bldg...
...Genovese describes master-slave relations in terms of the cultural hegemony of the ruling class...
...8.) Material conditions of slave life compared favorably with those of free industrial workers...
...Book Review/Joyce Goldberg Two Views of Human Bondage •• ...Alice laughed...
...It was paternalism, not slavery, which blacks and whites accepted, rationalizing servitude as payment for material provisions and social control...
...Day-to-day resistance" was a third defense against the docility which slavery might have fostered...
...Unlike Genovese, the authors infer that slaves only learned and imitated their masters orconformed to the planters' incentives...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
