The Economics of American Slavery

The thesis of the authors is that earlier scholars have not shown slavery to be as it truly was. The authors say that slavery was not as cruel to slaves as was believed. They also say that slavery was much more economically efficient than has been previously reported. They use statistics and computer-organized data as evidence to prove their theses. The book raised a raging debate because of its conclusions as well as its methodology. Critics attacked the book because its authors seemed to be saying that slavery was a good institution both economically and socially, that slaveholders were good and reasonable people, and that slaves had a fairly good life. For example, the authors make the startling claim that

Slaves were exploited in the sense that part of the income which they produced was expropriated by their owners. However, the rate of expropriation was much lower than has been generally assumed. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90 percent of the income he produced.

Critics of the work call such statistics into question, however. It is impossible for this reader to know whose statistics are correct or incorrect. It is impossible to know which side in the debate draws the most true conclusions from this battle of statistics. It is clear,

. . .
hose distinctions cannot be analyzed by high-speed computers. In the l989 edition of their book, Fogel and Engerman answer criticisms of the morality of their study. However, as they defend themselves, they also make clear that they simply do not understand the evils of slavery. They write that Perhaps the most serious deficiency in Time On the Cross is its failure to provide a new moral indictment of slavery that is consistent with the new empirical knowledge on the actual operation of the slave system. . . . The principal contribution of Time On the Cross to the reformulation of the moral problem was its identification of the "myth of black incompetence"; of the way that exaggerations of the material severity of slavery promoted the view that Afro-Americans were without culture . . . ; and of the way that exaggerations of the severity of slavery had been turned from an antislavery weapon into apologetics for the continued discrimination against blacks in our own time. In other words, even though they ignored the evil immorality of slavery, they are doing moral work by showing that the slaves were cultured and developed under slavery. They also say that by showing that slavery wasn't as bad as once believed they have som
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Approximate Word count = 1761
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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