Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery Paperback – January 23, 2013

Excellent research work on Slavery using Economics!

Full of history and statistical information.

Cut the emotion; how did slavery-based agriculture work? Were slaves really "free labor"?
Slaves were expensive to buy and to maintain; only a few highly valuable agriculture endeavors could support their cost.

slavery would have eventually died an economic death, if the politics had not ended it first.

Offers information that is not readily available compiled by scientists over many years and helps shape a very different picture of the Antebellum era from what little we are taught in school.

Good book a little repetitive on some topics, gives a new perspective on that era in time and the economic perspective.

This book gives you a economical perspective of slavery and the world of human capital as it relates to the economics of country and world development.

This was a very controversial book when first announced, and as certain of the reviews here attest, to some extent it still is. Back in the day, the author was unfairly maligned as a racist, fascist and worse based on his findings: surely a darkly ironic fate for a Marxian professor whose express purpose in writing his study was, in addition to the mere promotion of historical truth, to improve black self-esteem. In fact, so far from being a racist, Fogel married a black woman, and dedicated his book to her: "To Mary Elizabeth Morgan's first daughter: She has always known that black is beautiful."

Others still were irritated by our author's new methodological approach. Traditional history, up until fairly recent times, tended to focus on individual sources. A diary, a newspaper article, a military report or diplomatic telegram -- Or any two, three or few dozen dozen similar accounts -- were analyzed, either individually or together, and held to be largely representative of the greater whole. Now, for most genres of history, this is a perfectly valid method of inquiry, but for one it falls short: macroeconomic study. Since this requires statistical compilation of large amounts of data, it was long deemed too difficult to study economic history with any precision; generous assumptions had to be made in all writings touching on such subjects.

Robert Fogel changed that by applying modern (for the 1970s) technology to the field. His research assistants scoured public and private archives for every scrap of useful economic data on the Southern economy of the first half of the 19th century, from the more or less amateurish "scientific" surveys and official statistics of the time to the account books of single farms and plantations. They then fed the sum of their research into the University of Chicago's mainframes, which organized, tabulated and digested this untidy mass of numbers in a way no unassisted group of human inquirers could ever have managed. Suddenly, it was possible to subject the antebellum South to the same sort of scrutiny as our modern economy typically has to endure. This was done with a particular view toward the "peculiar institution" which dominated the era -- Negro slavery -- and the result was "Time on the Cross" and its companion volume.

Fogel's new methodology allowed him to break much new ground in the field, asking pertinent new questions and coming up with new (and often quite surprising) answers to many old ones. In particular, he was able to demolish several persistent myths of 20th-century historiography. Unfortunately, Fogel was too ambitious in some of his specific arguments, making a few statements that turned out to be based on too tentative findings. Naturally, these were leaped upon by enemies of his greater thesis, who did their best to imply that mistakes about particulars meant that his whole approach was bankrupt. Still, later and more even-handed inquiry has largely vindicated Fogel, as is indicated not least by the Nobel Prize he was later awarded for his revolutionary "cliometric" work. (He would later expand on, and in some respects amend, his work in a follow-up volume: "Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery" (1989).)

The traditional assumption of the liberal, free-market anti-slavery paradigm is that a well-motivated free worker will always outperform a slave. Fogel showed that this is not, in fact, the case, at least in 19th-century agriculture. On the contrary, Southern plantation slaves actually worked shorter hours, but were compelled to work far more intensively (and thus, efficiently), than free Northern smallholders who set their own pace. He ascribed this partly to economies of scale, but above all to the labor-maximizing device of the field gang: A form of organization which allowed both for efficient division of labor and for optimum supervision of the workers. In fact, Fogel went so far as to consider the gang-system the precursor to later forms of "scientific" labor management in the highly mechanized factories of the late 19th century onward. He also showed that the South, far from a "rural" backwater, was in antebellum times a very dynamic and prosperous economy, among the richest in the world, and one (if not *the*) major factor in increasing prosperity and growth in the early United States overall.

At the same time -- And this was what mainly occasioned controversy and drew the politically motivated hatred of his work -- Fogel documented that the material living standard of Southern slaves was not, for the time, a very low one. Of course, it was nothing like luxury, or even comfort, by our present-day standards; but only the rich enjoyed anything approximating these during the Industrial Revolution. Compared to oppressed underclasses in other societies of the mid-1800s, Southern slaves were not exceptionally disprivileged as far as purely material factors went. In fact, the food, quarters and medical care available the slaves were comparable to those of free workers in most developed countries at the time, and superior to many such classes. Tellingly, the life expectancy at birth for a Southern slave in 1850 was the same as that of a contemporary average Frenchman; it was several years higher than that of an average Austrian twenty years later. (p. 125) The slave diet, administered by planters who were typically shrewd businessmen and who fully realized that well-fed laborers work best, averaged some 4,200 calories a day and was well-balanced, rich in protein and essential vitamins and minerals even in excess of recommended modern intakes (pp. 109-15). Fogel also argued, on less solid evidence, about the stability of slave families and similar social phenomena.

While his critics did succeed in showing that Fogel had conceived of slave family life as somewhat more orderly than it in truth likely was, they were in the main unable to dent his major, quantifiably "economic" arguments. Obviously, as Fogel's was a pionering study in an almost wholly new field, some of the precise figures and ratios he cites have been amended somewhat in the half-century since "Time on the Cross" was written. But these adjustments rarely suffice to affect the validity of Fogel's broader appraisal -- And where they do, they often support him more emphatically than did his original numbers. We may thus still take his evaluation largely at face value, even if we ought to disagree with some particulars.

* * * * *

One may well believe that the late Professor Fogel's treatment should have included more attention to the psychological effects of unfreedom and the arbitrary authority of the master on the slave, and the abuses (potential and real) that the ruthlessly efficient economic system of slavery enabled and abetted. For surely, being well fed is not all that matters to human happiness. As an economist, Fogel wrote on the "Big Picture" of quantifiable material factors and macro-scale economic and demographic analysis, not the inner lives of individuals -- Which offers some advantages, but also constitutes a profound limitation. While it is anything but the truth that he produced an apologia for slavery, his dispassionate prose and scientifically objective examination will irritate those readers who prefer a clear and outraged moral denunciation of slavery. But, whatever one's feelings, it is foolish to ignore his monumental contribution to our historical understanding of the dynamics of the "peculiar institution" and the society it produced. Forty years after its first publication, "Time on the Cross" remains a brilliantly useful and informative study, valuable to the scholar and the interested layman alike. I heartily recommend it to any and all readers interested in its subject.

This book was written in the early seventies and must have been highly impactful at that time. Were a similar book to be written today there would be some different emphases and some different conclusions.

In the late sixties and early seventies black-white issues were handled in pop films like "In the Heat of the Night". Today we have movies like "Django". In the earlier film we had Sidney Poitier as a kind of black moral superman who showed the ignorant southern whites what it was like to be a civilized, intelligent and noble northerner who just happened to be black.

More recently the south as depicted in film in Django is hardly an improvement. Django is a kind of horror movie with Leo Di Caprio playing Leather Face. If this is how Americans after three quarters of a century of the civil rights movement are supposed to understand the plantation system in the antebellum South, then we need this book more than ever.

The main purpose of this book is refute the odd notion that slavery made no sense economically. In the last chapter they state that the antislavery rhetorical thrust changed from being primarily religious to being economic in the short period of 1854 thru 1856. Apparently the 'slavery is bad economics' argument was very effective and has held sway over popular and academic thought ever since. But of course it makes very little sense.

Slavery I think is wrong because it's contrary to human biology. I'm a modern secularist so that's how I think. A nineteenth century Christian would undoubtedly cast the same argument in moralistic terms. But the idea that slavery was widely practiced even though it was economically disadvantageous is a bizarre notion.

I would put it this way. Visit the zoo and go to the lion's cages. The lion you see will have a full mane and be large, healthy and crazy. The big cats when in captivity live longer and are better fed than their wild cousins. But many of them pace their small cages incessantly. This is a sign that they are being tortured by confinement. If the cage door opens by mistake they immediately escape. They do not run back into the cage where they were well fed and treated. They want freedom.

You can of course domesticate animals - my cat doesn't try to escape - but animals in the wild want to be free. So it is with human populations. Fogel and Entermann show us that black slaves ate better, and lived longer than their free cousins too. When the gang slave system in the South was abolished by Emancipation the blacks became share croppers for themselves. They then died younger, ate more poorly, and had fewer economic opportunities in the cities than formerly. But they still wanted to be free. Human nature.

Fogel and Entermann make an excellent case that the gang slave system on the big plantations was comparable to similar 'division of labor' strategies in the more industrialized North. In the North artisanal manufacturing was being replaced with 'interchangeable parts' and 'assembly lines'. In the South multiple slave gangs who only did one specialized agricultural task were likewise more efficient. I found their argument to be completely convincing. Slave agriculture was very efficient for certain crops in certain areas.

I think Fogel misses the point however when he argues that the abolitionists who claimed that slavery would soon disappear on its own were wrong. He presents a convincing case that slavery was not likely to collapse under its own weight in only a decade or so. The import of this argument is obviously that the Civil War could probably have been avoided if slavery was on its last legs. I can't argue with his figures but I think he got the time period wrong.

Fogel doesn't so much discuss slavery in general as the specific and particular highly organized slave gang system that existed on large Southern cotton plantations. In fact this system was doomed in the long run. Fogel just didn't look far enough ahead. The slave gang system operated for only a very short period of time at the very end of chattel slavery. There had been all sorts of slavery all over the world since the binning of the Neolithic period six thousand years earlier. The 'Time on the Cross'- America's experience with black slavery was only about 250 years or 350 if you include the Spanish colonies. The actual period for the kind of slavery that most think of when they think of Southern plantations is shorter yet. It is only about a century between Whitney's invention of the Cotton Gin and Rust's invention of the Cotton Picker. The Civil War was about in the middle of this period.

Gang slavery for cotton growing was still the most efficient way for it to be done at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation - but it wouldn't have been for much longer. We know this we complete certainty because the cotton picker introduced in the early twentieth century did the work of forty field hands. This mechanical innovation kicked off the 'Great Migration' from the Mississippi cotton fields to Detroit and California. The slave gang system was going to die but it was probably goings to take much longer than anyone in the North was willing to wait. You could probably have held off hostilities if slavery was only going to last another decade, but not another five or six decades.

Fogel presents a picture of the large plantation as a well run business enterprise - and it is a convincing picture. If I were to run a plantation I imagine I would be humane and paternalistic. Most people probably think they would do the same. But we don't trust some others. Maybe they would be as nasty as Leonardo Di Caprio was in Django. But that's not very likely. Fogel emphasizes that plantation owners had an economic incentive to maintain slave morale through solid family life, suppression of promiscuity, teamwork and justice. Di Caprio rapes and murders his slaves at a whim. Fogel points out that even very large plantations seldom had more than six whites. That would be three white males who maintained discipline largely without firearms. But of course in the Tarantino fantasy plantation where they rape, murder and torture slaves routinely they have dozens and dozens of heavily armed men. These gratuitous gunmen all get shot in the last reel by Django.

The point is that the slave plantation had to be paternalistic and largely self governing. No business could afford all the guards, runaways and revolts as popularly imagined. Cotton is a uniform product. If your plantation is inefficient buyers can find a substitute. Fogel makes a good case that the dynamics of the market strongly favored humane and enlightened plantation management .

But of course there were certainly abuses. You might say that the fatal flaw of slavery was the lacks of lawyers. Slaves had no or almost no rights. If your master whipped you, you couldn't sue. Mere market forces in favor of good treatment were not sufficient.

Fogel writes at some length about racism and he's against it. He accepts without discussion that the nearly universal opinion at the time that blacks were racially inferior was a mistake. He likewise never discusses areas where blacks might be superior. For example, he has a few paragraphs on health and disease. He discusses nurses, doctors, and hospitals available on the bigger plantations. I was surprised to learn that slaves on the better plantations generally got excellent medical treatment by the standards of the day. He discusses the state of medical knowledge such as it was and thinks a slave might be better off without access to a doctor. I agree. Bleeding doesn't help.

Slaves, he shows had comparable life expectancies to the whites of the day. He doesn't mention it, but it's clear from his figures that black slaves in America had longer life expectancies than similar people back in Africa. Slaves got more calories than whites and ate similar foods. They got a lot of meat, vegetables and fruits. Many slaves of course had their own gardens. So if a white man was kidnapped into the slavery of naval impressment as was common in those days he was likely to soon suffer from vitamin deficiencies (scurvy). Solomon Northrup (12 Years a Slave) didn't have that to fear when he was kidnapped onto a Southern farm. American slaves ate well. That only made economic sense since they were expected to work hard everyday and after 1808 they could not be replaced from Africa. Slaves as Fogel points out in the Caribbean or Brazil ate much less well.

But one vital disease issue of slavery is not discussed in Fogel at all. Historically Abraham Piersay in Jamestown found that the indentured white Londoners he brought with him died quickly in the Jamestown fields. He was asked by the colony government to get some black slaves who might last longer. White slaves had also been tried in the Caribbean sugar fields but had again not proven to be able to survive. Amerindians also proved to be poor at being field slaves. I would have liked to have seen more detail on this often observed phenomenon. Blacks seem to have an economic advantage in their greater capacity for hard work in subtropical fields.

But Fogel steers well away from any discussion of issues that might suggest that there are any kind of genetic differences among the races. He attributes the higher infant mortality and lower birth weights among slaves as consequences of slavery. More recently Rushton has shown that these effects are probably consequences of differing r/K biological strategies. Blacks and whites differ on a host of characteristics that stem directly from race not economic circumstances.

Fogel has two personal/professional characteristics that should be kept in mind. First he's a Nobel Prize winner. He also received other honors in his long career. He is not just another self appointed expert. He is one of the founders of 'cliometrics' - quantitative economic history. Secondly he married a black woman and they had two mixed race children. Some critics have called him an apologist for slavery and by implication a racist. I don't think that characterization fits.

Fogel also attributes the common imputation that blacks and white rednecks are lazy to simple prejudice. In fact these common attitudes are probably based on fact. Until the Rockefeller foundation helped eradicate hookworm in the South, both races were lethargic and shiftless. Parasite infestation was a major economic burden in the semi tropical south east part of the nation ever since they were introduced from Africa as part of the slave trade.

Finally I have to warn people about the very inferior printing of this volume. The text is readable if a bit crude but the many graphs and charts are really terrible. Somewhere in the reproduction process all the graphs got printed on dark backgrounds. In many cases they are simply unreadable and even when you can make out what the message is it is very hard on the eyes.