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Time on the Cross: v. 2: Economics of American Negro Slavery

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Fogel and Engerman's work turns to primary sources to figure out exactly what the economics of slavery in the American South were like. It turns out that the predominant views are wrong: slavery wasn't unprofitable, slaves were well-nourished and lived almost as long as free laborers, slave families were rarely split up, resistance to slave-owners was rare, and on and on. Farms worked by slaves were 1/3 more efficient that farms worked by free laborers, and slaves received on average more of that higher income than free laborers did. A small proportion of slaves worked as skilled workers in management, engineering, or various crafts. Some of these earned higher incomes than their free counterparts.

Since this is only a book on the economics of slavery (as the book's subtitle says), it cannot examine the psychological or ethical damage that slavery caused, as the authors acknowledge. They do acknowledge that while slaves received a higher proportion of the pecuniary income they produced as wages, food, clothing, housing, and medical care than free laborers did, they also acknowledge that the non-pecuniary costs of slavery to the slaves themselves was enormous. The higher productivity of slave-worked farms was made possible, obviously enough, by forcing the slaves to do what free laborers could not be paid to do: work longer hours in a more regulated, larger farm. Interestingly enough, the gain in productivity this resulted in, while conveyed in small part to the slaves themselves in the form of higher income, did not accrue entirely or even in the most part to the planters. Rather, about half of it accrued to the consumers of cotton. Since most of cotton was exported (primarily to Britain, where most of the cotton was made into clothing), the primary beneficiaries of American slavery were people who bought cotton goods. This is because producing and selling cotton was a competitive industry, where real profits tend toward zero. Thus, while the planters exploited the slaves in reality by whipping them and forcing them to work in ways free laborers would not, the resultant pecuniary exploitation of slaves was accomplished by capitalism.

But perhaps the most interesting thing the book discusses is how the myth of unproductive slaves has contributed to contemporary racism. According to the contemporary racist view, blacks are lazy, morally degenerate, and immature. Fogel and Engerman show that, under slavery, blacks were none of these things. In fact, the evidence shows that they were harder working and more sexually circumspect on average than their free white counterparts.

What the authors point out as a reason there were not more slave revolts is that, given the fact that both Northerners and Southerners were racists, free blacks had little economic, social, or political opportunity. Free blacks in the North were not permitted to do all kinds of things. It would seem that many blacks rationally decided they were better off as slaves. The slave artisans and engineers, however, who commanded the highest wages, were the ones best able to make a living in the economy of the free North and were therefore those most likely to escape.

The book's last chapter deals with the implications of the findings for contemporary race relations. The book shows, of course, that blacks are not biologically inferior to whites. And, in economic terms, blacks were worse off in 1890 than they were in 1860. This isn't because slavery is always economically better than being free, but because the U.S. abolished slavery without abolishing racism. Blacks remained second-class citizens without the power to better their lot economically or politically. At least under slavery their racist owners had an economic interest in their economic well-being. That is the one thing the book drives home in a thoroughly researched and completely convincing way.

One of the all-time classics in the genre of economic history, there have been very few more controversial books in the past half-century. There are still those today who call Fogel a racist or (as one other commentator did) an apologist for slavery. These people more than miss the point of this work. The profitability of slavery has nothing to do with the morality of it, as the authors point out. This is a survey and analysis of previously unresearched data. Fogel and Engerman take the first systematic look at data on slave movement, working conditions, life expectancy, and the economies of scale in both free labor and slave labor in the South.

Fogel and Engerman attack the thesis that slavery was impeding the economic progress of the South and would ultimately collapse under its own inefficiencies. Instead, they show investment in slaves was even more profitable than investments in free labor, and that owners had developed a wide system of incentives to induce quality labor from their slaves. Some claim that this means that Fogel and Engerman support slavery or that somehow this makes slavery palateable; to the contrary, their conclusion lends weight to the idea that only a Civil War would be able to end the evil practice, contrary to the hopes of many abolitionists who claimed slavery would fall apart due to its inherent weaknesses.

This work was originally shunned, but the force of its evidence and arguments has led it to become the mainstream interpretation in economic discussions of the Civil War period. Fogel recieved the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993 (not solely for this work of course) and his most famous book is still the standard for excellence in his field.

Fogel and Engerman challenge the traditional conception of slavery has being a non-productive system but a highly competitive system of human labor. The authors challenged the traditional notion that the Southern aristocracy engaged in sexual conduct with Slaves but according to their research based on Southern Brothels that most whites engaged in illicit sexual activity with other white women. The notion of sexual liberalism in 18th and 19th Century South is contradicted by their body of research. The idea of white aristocracy having sexual relations with the slaves is contradicted by the fact that very few statistics show this relationship through Southern demography. The second fallacy of slavery is that the immigrant community in the north had a higher standard of living than the slaves of the South. This is contradicted by several indicators researched by the authors. A very stimulating book that can be classifed in the Davies slavery genre.

It explodes every myth, and there are scores, about slavery. Using the raw data lying dormant and too cumbersome prior to the appearance of high speed computers the Nobel Laureate Economist from the University of Chicago applied the then new technology to census,plantation, and other records with results no one could have anticipated. Among the myths dismantled by this scholarly but readable book; sexual exploitation was rare, familys were rarely broken up by sale and "breeding" plantations simply did not exist. This book,if made mandatory reading at all universities could even restore some sanity to discussions on race, something that has been missing in ths country for 30 years.

The problems with this book are not about it being "racist" or "apologist" for slavery. They have to do with basic assumptions, logic, and methods of interpreting the data. Read Herbert Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (1975; republished 2003) alongside this work. Gutman undoes virtually all of Fogel and Engerman's data and claims regarding the social (and yes, psychological) aspects of slavery (violence, punishments, family separation, etc.). Fogel & Engerman's data, in many cases, was extremely thin, as was their logic in interpreting much of the data, as Gutman demonstrates. None of Fogel and Engerman's social (and, again, psychological) claims (minimal punishments, minimal separations) stand up, though many of their economic claims (profitability, flexibility) still do. Fogel revised some of their work in Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. Time on the Cross should be read as a first draft attempt at a quantitative history of slavery, not the final word.

This is one of the best books I've ever read on American negro slavery. What makes it a valuable edition to the academic literature is that the authors did not go into this with any ideological axes to grind. Indeed, both are political liberals who thoroughly deprecate the institution of slavery as a social and moral evil. They simply wanted to attain a better understanding of the actual economics of slavery in the Old South by analyzing the Plantation Books (i.e. the financial logs of Southern planters) and other relevant statistical resources so as to be able to accurately assess what slavery was like and how it affected the slave, the master and Southern society as a whole.

Much to their surprise, the authors concluded that slavery, as it was, bore little resemblance to the fictional, fever-swamp, nonsense that is peddled by the NAACP, the liberal media, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and left-wing academics. They found that slaves had a better diet and better housing conditions than their wage-slave, immigrant counterparts in the North. They also found that slave families were rarely broken up and that miscagenation between masters and slaves was exceeedingly rare -- indeed, almost nonexistant. They also found that many slaves earned substantial incomes - a fact that surprises many people who believe that slaves did not earn money for their labour. I could go on and on but that would give away the book and ruin the joy of reading a text that absolutely blows away virtually all the "conventional wisdom" you've ever heard repeated about slavery in the Old South.

Anyone who really wants to learn the truth about slavery owes it to themselves to buy and read this book.

Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross is an extensive thorough examination of slavery in the antebellum era of the United States using the tools of cliometrics and economics to rethink previous interpretations of the slavery system. Fogel and Engerman took on the monumental task of proving ten points they believed to be true in light of new data compiled and analyzed by cliometric research. The book set out to prove that slavery was profitable and just as profitable as manufacturing operations in the North. The system of slavery was not on death's door and was still economically sound by the beginning of the Civil War. Slave owners had a positive outlook on the future of their slave economy. Slave agriculture was efficient when compared to free agriculture. Slaves were more hard-working and efficient than white agricultural workers and compared evenly to white workers in industry. The demand for slaves was increasing not only in agriculture but industry as well. Most slaves lived in close family units and slave owners mostly kept the family unit together in sales of slaves because it was in their best economic interest to do so. The standard of living in the material form was comparable to free workers of the time period. Slaves were able to keep ninety percent of their income they generated. Lastly, The South's economic growth was increasing and the South had a high level of per capita income compared to not only the rest of United States but also the rest of the world during the time period. The authors mainly used mathematics and statistics which they referred to as systematic data to analyze the records from the time period to prove these ten points they proposed as correct. The authors admittedly attempted to stay away from what they called fragmentary evidence which they defined as "is based on unverifiable impressions of individuals whose primary aim was the defense of an ideological position." (p. 10) However they did acknowledge that sometimes they used this fragmentary evidence when as they stated, "to illustrate and make more vivid results that have been established by more precise methods, and to fill in gaps in evidence where it has not been possible thus far to obtain systematic data." (p. 11) This book was published in 1974 so both authors were approximately in a decade of their professional academic careers when the book came out and apparently they succeeded in achieving through this book a "wide-ranging and radical reinterpretation of American slavery." (p. 8) Both authors have the academic background and experience to write a book about this subject, but never the less it was a bold to attempt to reshape the entire previous thought and interpretations of the subject of slavery.

Fogel and Engerman both have had successful careers in the academic world. As Robert Fogel stated in his autobiography, "My professional training began at Cornell University (BA 1948) and continued at Columbia University where I obtained my MA (1960), and at Johns Hopkins University, where I obtained my Ph.D. (1963). It was at Cornell that my scientific interests shifted from physics and chemistry to economics and history. The switch in focus was precipitated by the widespread pessimism about the future of the economy during the second half of the 1940s, when forecasts about the imminent return to the massive unemployment of the Great Depression were rife." Engerman graduated from John Hopkins University as well and has been a professor at Rochester University since 1963. Both authors have collaborated on many other works together in addition to Time on the Cross.

Time on the Cross does a superb job in analyzing the data for the reader although at some points in the book it starts reading like a math book, but for the most part the authors were successful in not inundating the reader with technical math formulas. Time on the Cross calculatedly focused on issues of economics and did not delve into the moral ramifications of slavery. According to Fogel and Engerman some people in the academic community were outraged or at least very confused by the lack of treatment by the book on the moral implications of slavery. Fogel and Engerman noted that when they went to conferences some of their colleagues would come up to them afterward and ask, "What are you guys trying to do? Sell Slavery?" (p.258) They answered no to that question because that was the truth, however, the authors themselves seemed to have felt a tad guilty about not addressing the issue of the morality of slavery in the book. They stated, "Perhaps the most serious deficiencies in Time on the Cross is its failure to provide a new moral indictment of slavery that is more consistent with the new empirical knowledge on the actual operation of the slave system, as we understood it in 1973." (p.273) From the perspective of this reader, the best course was to stay away from the moral issues surrounding slavery as Time on the Cross did because moral issues are emotionally charged. The emotional nature of the morality of slavery would have detracted from and clouded the strength of the book that used non-emotional mathematics and statistics to prove the ten points. Time on the Cross was about the economics of slavery and analyzing the relevant data with regards to illuminating the economic picture of that time and place and it accomplished this task very well.

Messrs. Fogel (a Nobel laureate) and Engelman report on the most massive, in-depth study of slavery ever conducted. They quantify the diet of the average slave (4100 calories per day), determine that his living space is greater than his white northern facory worker economic counterpart, and show convincingly that the slave life span is substantially greater than white workers in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia in 1850. The authors were likely as surprised and perplexed at some of the findings as are their readers. Nonetheless, they report their data in an intellectually honest and interesting work. The book is a MUST for any serious student of 19th century America, slavery, or the American Civil War.

This book is a must read for any students of Economic History. Rather than using a traditional approach to history, the book uses a particularly mathematical approach to the economics of slavery. Its conclusions are based collected data. Some of the books conclusions may bother people. Such as the implications that explotation of slaves can be mitigated by the money they receive during the course of their life. It also offers evidence that certain henious practices such as breeding, and sexual relationships between master and slave, were not as wide-spread as is commonly believed. It also attacks the notion that any modern family problems, specifically the commonality single parent homes, can be attributed to the purposeful degredation of the family unit by slave holders. This book does not try to convince people that slavery was an acceptable economic system. I believe its intent was to make the readers better informed about slavery. I would hope that the reader realizes the true evil of slavery was not the conditions associated with it, but rather depriving others of their freedom for economic gain.

This is an excellent study of the economics of chattel slavery, and shatters a number of cherished liberal myths.

While I'm on the subject, I'd like to ask Brad Fuller a question:

If the author's methodolgy is so flawed, why is he a Nobel laureate in economics, principally for his work on this book?