Slavery in a New Light

...The profitability of cotton production also encouraged planters to foster stable slave families...

...conditions, they conclude, compared favorably with those elsewhere...

...Some 25 per cent of slaves were artisans or managers, and it was not at all uncommon for planters to reward efficient workers with more pay, better housing and favorable job assignments...

...The quantitative data assembled by Fogel and Engerman point to a remarkably strong black family...

...267 pp...

...After 1860, Fogel and Engerman point out, the material position of blacks underwent a rapid decline...

...At least part of the answer must rest with racism—discrimination against blacks as blacks, closed doors, sealed-off opportunities—and surely the legacy of a slave system must have some relevance here...

...American slaves, they will tell us, were in one regard or another better off than Germans, Swedes, Chileans, and Indians...

...For example, do differences in life expectancy for the two populations narrow when one calculates longevity just for those who reached age five, or age ten...

...Impatient with qualifications, Fogel and Engerman draw their images starkly...

...Given its dependence upon quantitative techniques, one might have expected a rigorous but plodding account...

...According to Fogel and Engerman's calculations, Southern agriculture in 1860 was 35 per cent more efficient than Northern agriculture...

...How "typical" were these normative statements, and do they bear the relationship to practice implied by the authors...

...Those abolitionist images of slave traders frequently breaking up families, or of owners resorting to slave breeding or indulging in sexual adventures in the cabins may have been effective propaganda...

...The energy level of the slave diet exceeded by 10 per cent that of free Americans in 1879...

...The very nature of the question makes abundantly clear just how important a book Time on the Cross-is...

...Since the point does not fit their thesis, they give it short shrift...

...Fogel and Engerman also insist that corporal punishment on the plantation was the functional alternative to incarceration in the North...

...Again, they sometimes seem more eager to score points than to present an issue in all its complexity...

...Nevertheless, a full treatment of the relationship between economic growth and slavery remains to be done...

...Southern slave farms were 28 per cent more efficient than Southern free farms...

...If slave conditions compare favorably with free ones in the North, they settle for that statement...

...they can work in archives as well as in computer centers, with words as well as with numbers...

...But Barrow was a very special sort of a planter, self-consciously dedicated to the proposition that the plantation should run as a factory...

...Does anyone think that the warden's book of discipline reveals much about the actual nature of prison discipline in contemporary America...

...The very profitability of slavery generally protected blacks against abuses...

...First plowmen turned the earth, then harrowers broke up the clods, next drillers made the holes, then droppers planted the seeds, and finally rakers covered them up...

...demographic data show black mothers nursing their young just as long as white mothers...

...It was an effective procedure...

...Their slave is not the Sambo of Stanley Elkins' Slavery, nor the crafty and mischievous plantation saboteur of Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution...

...it would be regrettable if it was so misunderstood...

...In the end, it would senselessly deprive the discipline of a grand opportunity to illuminate in still more powerful ways the nature of our past...

...Time on the Cross: Evidence and Methods By Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman Little, Brown...

...What it does is provide compelling evidence that capitalism protected the slave, guaranteeing him a decent standard of treatment...

...Although per capita income was lower in the slave states than in the North, in 1860 the South by itself would have ranked fourth among the world's richest nations, poorer than England, yet more prosperous than France, Germany and Denmark...

...Since so much of the argument in Time on the Cross depends upon highly technical formulas and equations, some lay readers, and here I would include historians not trained to these techniques, may assume that the work is "objective," or "scientific," and that only other quantitative historians, cliometri-cians as they are called, can verify or quarrel with Fogel and Engerman...

...To insist upon maintaining a rigid dichotomy between the newer and the older styles of research is self-defeating...

...Indeed, it may be that the real sin of the plantation was not the physical toll it took of blacks, but the way it promoted and legitimated racist thinking and practices...

...Reviewed by David Rothman Professor of History, Columbia...

...They refuse to address the question, even to make the kinds of calculations that might clarify the finding...

...Make no mistake, Time on the Cross does not sell slavery...

...they ought not to be mistaken for historical reality...

...On the basis of hundreds of plantation records and census data, Fogel and Engerman compute the average amounts of food, clothing, housing, and medical care that the slaves received...

...One of the oldest and most widespread charges leveled at slavery is that it retarded Southern industrialization...

...To a surprising degree, Time on the Cross is a passionate work...

...They, and not hired overseers, supervised the great majority of large plantations, where rates of return for growing cotton were 10 per cent on the average, a figure identical to the returns earned by the nine most successful New England textile mills from 1844-53...

...Then, too, the authors have a nasty habit of pulling out comparisons like rabbits from a hat...

...But this is an odd strategy from two cliometricians—it almost seems a way of avoiding the problem...

...Both these postures amount to an abdication of intellectual responsibility...

...Besides, does an owner's formal record of whippings really tell us how often slave drivers gave the lash to a slow-moving slave...

...they will insist that "averages" tell us nothing, that the true nature of slavery cannot be understood from statistics...

...This is not an entirely unreasonable approach, but it is suspect...

...Decade by decade their health deteriorated, the skill-composition of the black labor force dropped, and the gap between the wages paid to them and to whites increased...

...In a sense, we must be thankful that one of the first and most outstanding works in cliometrics does have the quality of polemic about it...

...and in light of the history of blacks in the U.S., a formulation that does not incorporate racism into its perspective must stand as incomplete...

...Most notably, slave artisans came disproportionately from the older groups of blacks—owners preferred to use entry into the skilled occupations as a stimulus for superior field work...

...They devote an extraordinary amount of space to exposing the logical fallacies and statistical errors in the charge, at least as it was made in the mid-19th century...

...So the Civil War was not an unnecessary or easily avoided conflict...

...Fogel and Engerman make no effort to account for this fact...

...And while life expectancy for all slaves in 1850 was 12 per cent lower than for white Americans (36 years compared to 40 years), still it was higher than that enjoyed by the populations of Italy in 1885 (35 years), of Manchester, England in 1850 (24), and of New York, Boston and Philadelphia in 1830 (24...

...And they have presented their material in a novel way...

...In keeping with the factory model, field work was carried out by slave gangs divided into specialized groups...

...Naturally, this level of productivity meant that the South was not an economically stagnant or poverty-stricken region...

...It too closely resembles the strategy of welfare officials today who would comfort us by noting that the American poor live better than most residents of Calcutta...

...Slavery would not have withered away through an internal dynamic...

...To insure productivity, owners built incentives into the plantation system...

...He fits the Fogel-Engerman model too well to stand as representative of the system...

...To confuse equations with objectivity is foolish...

...Finally, the economic model used by Fogel and Engerman has the major limitation of not taking into account the critical and troubling links between slavery and racism...

...With the publication of Time on the Cross, one simply cannot talk any longer about psychologically damaged or unskilled ex-slaves incapable of succeeding as freemen...

...The authors themselves are unusual...

...Similarly, Fogel and Engerman offer a very weak analysis of physical punishments on the plantation...

...should the measurement prove unfavorable to slavery, they move to Western Europe, or South America, or the Far East...

...Curiously absent from Time on the Cross, moreover, is a sustained and rigorous analysis of economic development in the South...

...Slave-trade records reveal very few separations...

...At its core, say Fogel and Engerman, the plantation was a factory...

...Slave women had a lower death rate when giving birth than white Southern women...

...And to assume that a random reading in sources is superior to systematic measurement is no less absurd...

...slaves lived 5.2 members to a household, when the number of free persons per household was 5.3...

...In sum, slavery as of 1860 was anything but a dying institution...

...Plantations were not incidentally a good business—they were first and foremost a good business...

...To be sure, they do show that income in the South was greater than has been supposed (lower than in the North but higher than in Canada), that Southern railroad mileage was extensive (less than in the North but more than in Great Britain), and that some Southern textile manufacturing did go on (less than in the North but more than in Sweden...

...One owner, Bennet Barrow, did keep some records, and these are tabulated—an average of 0.7 whippings per hand took place per year...

...Alternately, some readers will dismiss the entire enterprise precisely because it deals with numbers...

...The findings of Fogel and Engerman can be, and must be, explored, debated, tested, and extended, by traditional historians as well as by cliometricians...

...To insure a fast pace, the strongest hands served as plowmen and harrowers, while drivers exhorted or did whatever else was necessary to keep the rest of the team moving...

...Yet by omitting racism from their analysis, Fogel and Engerman give us little help with perhaps the most important question to emerge from their study: If capitalism protected the slave so well before the Civil War, why did it not protect the black equally well after the Civil War...

...author, "The Discovery of the Asylum" This is a marvelously innovative achievement, with revolutionary implications for the subject it analyzes and for the discipline of history...

...Not only does it directly challenge traditional methods of historical research, it also argues consistently for a special view of slavery...

...In part, this is the result of a paucity of quantitative data on whippings...

...Indeed, "black plantation agriculturists [that is, slaves] labored under a regimen that was more like a modern assembly line than was true of the routine of many of the factories of the ante-bellum era...

...The owners were not leisured, julep-sipping gentlemen, prone to conspicuous consumption, but hard-headed, methodical businessmen, as shrewd as any Northern capitalist...

...For it invites, rather than inhibits, controversy...

...Rather than intimidate or discourage readers with a display of equations, they divide their study into two volumes—the first, a literate presentation of their findings, the second, a technical review of the data, formulas and tables underlying the generalizations...

...Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman are at home in both history and economics...

...By every economic standard it was thriving, and in view of the high price that cotton brought through the 19th century, it would have continued to thrive for many decades...

...Take the issue of life expectancy ?2 per cent lower for slaves than for white Americans in 1850...

...it had to be put out of business by external intervention...

...From that essential fact flowed all the characteristics of slave and planter life...

...Their labor was too valuable, the economic rewards of efficient production too great, to allow for mistreatment...

...Fogel and Engerman deny this, though not systematically or persuasively...

...the number of infant deaths was the same for children born in slavery as for the South in general...

...Planters simply would not risk upsetting or demoralizing their hands...

...Whippings persisted in the South because the cost of substituting hunger and incarceration for the lash was greater for the slave owner than for the Northern employer...

...If, as they insist, slaves' food, housing and medical care were at least as good as whites', why did this difference occur...

...Because Fogel and Engerman are so intent to reverse traditional ideas on slavery and to demonstrate, almost to flaunt, the powers of quantitative analysis, they do overargue their position and choose their data selectively, pursuing some findings and not others...

...Instead, it has the strengths, and some of the drawbacks too, of a polemical tract...

...12.50...

...Nor will it do to point the finger at capitalism itself...

...Is it necessary to remind them that incarceration was not used as a sanction against slow-moving free workers, that punishment demanded the commission of a crime and the satisfaction of a whole network of protections which did not exist on the plantation...

...All of this Fogel and Engerman ignore...

...Sixty per cent of slave mothers had their first child at the age of 20 or over —in a society lacking effective contraceptive techniques such a distribution points to a prevalent standard of chastity, not profligacy, on the plantation...

...He is no more and no less than a competent, hard-working, efficient, industrial worker...

...To buttress their case, Fogel and Engerman resort to the imprecise techniques of the traditional historian, quoting at random from a few instruction sheets to overseers...

...Instead of all this textual criticism, why not use data to explore the issue directly...