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.
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This copy was so marked up with purple marker it was very distracting to try and read.
Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2022
Very hard to read. I'm buying anew copy
Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2022
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Nobel Peace Prize Winner in Economics Professor Fogel came to the amazing conclusion that on the whole
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S. Smith
A too favourable view of Slavery
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 20, 2012
