"Time on the Cross" (Fogel & Engerman) Problems and HolesI

godofredus

Sergeant Major
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Apr 17, 2013
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Chicago
I wouldn't be posting this except this book is still being accepted as gospel, even tho holes - big holes - have been poked in it since its publication in 1974. The major summary for its errors was published in 1975

Haskell, Thomas L. "The True and Tragical History of 'Time on the Cross'", New York Review of Books, 22:15 (October 2, 1975), accessed 8 January 2012
There is also a summary article on Wiki:
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia





I actually worked with one of F & E's research assistants before the book was published and a more blinded view of American Negro Slavery I have seldom seen. In any case F & E revised their statistics somewhat in the second edition (1989/1995). Fogel also changed some of his observations in his book "Without Consent or Contract." The most important observation he changed was infant mortality - in ToC revised edition (pp 123-125), in Without Consent he revises this - almost unwillingly - to that at least 50 percent of all slave children died before age five. The section I have the hardest time with is Fogel's treatment of the exploitation of slave women.
Even in the revised edition he continues to say: "Even if all these reports were true (reports by visitors of the sexual exploitation of Black women) they constituted at most a few hundred cases. (p. 131 - rev ed)" This from a guy who uses the statistics of one plantation (Barrow) for whipping,.There follows (pp 133-137) some imaginary and fictitious data. 1. He imagines it would be cheaper to have a mistreess in town than to exploit a slave woman - without a single example. The example of James Henry Hammond of South Carolina who had a mother and daughter as slave mistresses is one example to refute his undocumented thesis. 2. He has one quote about a plantation owner (Charles Tait) (p. 134) who says don't employ an overseer who "will equalize himself with the negro women." And although he quotes Fanny Kemble elsewhere, he does not record her observation that the Overseers of the Butler plantation (father and son) had children by the slave women. 3.. He uses the prostitution statistics from Nashville to show their were no slave prostitutes. Gutman pointed out years ago that no slave occupation was entered; the few mulatto prostitutes in Nashville were free women.
A relatively new book on prostitution in New Orleans "Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women - Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans" by (2009) by Judith K. Schafer has enough data to totally trash F & E on this point.
4. He (they) use erroneous statistics on mulattoes to show that their must have been little miscegenation. F & E (10.4 percent in 1860). We simply don't know the exact percentage, but we do know that with current DNA sampling more than 50 percent of American Black people have some European ancestry. My own hobby horse is finding notable (I underline notable) white ante-bellum men who had children by slave mistresses. F & E's question is: are they the tip of the iceberg or the whole iceberg itself. They seem to vote for the second, I go for the first. I can add, there is always the fight about Thomas Jefferson - let's ignore him and look at the un-investigated claims of Walter White, former head of the NAACP who claimed descent from President William Henry Harrison and a slew of Black folk in Virginia who claim descent from President John Tyler. These have not been checked with DNA tests, but I understand that is because the white folks won't cooperate.

I could go on with my rant, but you get my point. To use ToC as a source for how "mild" slavery was is extremely dangerous. This is the major problem with "A Disease in the Public Mind," Fleming uses ToC to show how mistaken the abolitionists were about slavery, but the abolitionists were not mistaken at all.

Final point; I have lost the quote by Barrow, used by F&E to show how mild the whipping was (p.147, 0.7 per hand per year), where he (Barrow) speaks of how vicious his neighbor is; his neighbor castrated three slaves.
 
2. He has one quote about a plantation owner (Charles Tait) (p. 134) who says don't employ an overseer who "will equalize himself with the negro women."

Haven't read the book, other than looking at places here and there that cover topics I'm interested in, so can't comment on it as a whole, but in reference to the above quote...

Isn't that evidence for the opposite argument? In other words, if a plantation owner needs to advise his children to avoid a particular kind of overseer, doesn't it imply that that kind of overseer is common enough that they might employ one accidentally, unless they take care not to?
 
There is so much more to Fogel and Engerman's work... Fogel won a Noble prize with this type of work. He died a few years back...
Before Fogel & engerman ... http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/fogel.htm

Fogel and Engerman feel their research provides corrections to the traditional view of the economics of slavery. This traditional view involves the following assertions about the economics of slavery:
  • Slavery was generally an unprofitable investment and depended upon raising and selling slaves to be profitable.
  • Slavery was only profitable on new, highly fertile land.
  • Slavery as an economic institution was economically moribund.
  • Agricultural production based upon slave labor was economically inefficient.
  • slavery caused the economy of the South to stagnate, or at least retarded its economic growth, during the period before the Civil War.
  • Slavery provided extremely harsh material conditions for the typical slave.
After Fogel & Engerman...

The principal corrections that Fogel and Engerman felt needed to be made in this traditional view are:
  • Slavery was not an economically irrational system. The price of slaves was justified by the profits to be earned with slave labor.
  • Slavery was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War and there was no evidence that it would have ended without political intervention.
  • Plantation agriculture based upon slave labor was not economically inefficient. It may have been significantly more efficient than family farming.
  • The typical slave field-hand was not unproductive. On average the typical slave field-hand may have been more productive than a free, white field-hand.
  • Slavery was not incompatible with industrial production.
  • The slave family was the basic unit of social organization and slave owners encouraged the stability of slave families. Most slave sales were of whole families or of individuals who were ready to leave the family.
  • The material standard of living of slaves in the South compared favorably with that of free workers in industry.
  • Over the course of a field-hand slave's lifetime he received about 90 percent of the value of his production.
  • The economy of the antebellum South was not stagnating. In the period between 1840 and 1860 per capita income increased faster in the South than in the rest of the country.
Compare... them...

The Relative Efficiency of Slave-based and Free-labor Agriculture
Fogel and Engerman report the results of an extensive method to compare the efficiencies of free-labor farms, north and south, with slave-labor plantations in the Old South and the New South. Their conclusions are startling:
  • In 1860 southern agriculture was 35 percent more efficient, in terms of output for an equal amount of inputs, than northern agriculture.
  • Southern free-labor farms were 9 percent more productive than northern free-labor farms.
  • Slave-labor farms were 28 percent more productive than southern free-labor farms and 40 percent more productive than northern free-labor farms.
  • The slave-based agriculture of the New South was 29 percent more productive for equal inputs than slave-based agriculture in the Old South. The free-labor farms of the Old South equaled the productivity of the free-labor farms of the North. The slave-based agriculture of the Old South was 19 percent more productive than the free-labor farms of the North and the slave-based agriculture of the New South were 53 percent more productive than northern free-labor agriculture.
  • There were economies of scale in southern slave-based agriculture but these economies of scale may have been fully captured by moderate-sized, sixteen to fifty slaves, operations. Fogel and Engerman's conclusions were based upon economies of scale in production. There may also have been economies of scale in marketing.
  • Although southern lands needed more effort to maintain fertility there was not a problem of the land of the Old South being worked out and unproductive.
  • The differing size of plantations in the Old South and New South was based upon the nature of crops. Tobacco-growing in Virginia and Maryland and rice-growing in South Carolina and Georgia had differing economies of scale from cotton-growing in the New South.
  • The owners of slave-based plantations were not "idlers" but instead self-conscious entrepreneurs who gave great attention to the management of their operations.
  • Plantation operators strove for a disciplined, specialized and coordinated labor force. Labor was organized into something like the assembly line operations in the industry. This involved "driving" the slaves' efforts to maintain a pace of production. The "drivers" or foremen were slaves themselves.
  • Plantations had a much higher rate of labor force participation, two thirds, as compared with a free population, one third. This was achieved by finding productive pursuits for the young and the elderly and maintaining nurseries so that slave women could work.


The link goes into the formulas he used to come up with his thoughts... http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/fogel.htm
 
Here we go... notice one speculates and the other uses data


That slavery was profitable seems almost obvious. Yet scholars have argued furiously about this matter. On one side stand antebellum writers such as Hinton Rowan Helper and Frederick Law Olmstead, many antebellum abolitionists, and contemporary scholars like Eugene Genovese (at least in his early writings), who speculated that American slavery was unprofitable, inefficient, and incompatible with urban life.

On the other side are scholars who have marshaled masses of data to support their contention that Southern slavery was profitable and efficient relative to free labor and that slavery suited cities as well as farms. These researchers stress the similarity between slave markets and markets for other sorts of capital.


Snip...

This battle has largely been won by those who claim that New World slavery was profitable. Much like other businessmen, New World slaveowners responded to market signals — adjusting crop mixes, reallocating slaves to more profitable tasks, hiring out idle slaves, and selling slaves for profit.

Other scholars contend that slaves in fact kept less than half of what they produced and that slavery, while profitable, certainly was not efficient.
On the whole, current estimates suggest that the typical slave received only about fifty percent of the extra output that he or she produced.

The link has lot of info on slavery... https://eh.net/encyclopedia/slavery-in-the-united-states/
 
IMO, it's not worth the time and money to read it. We once hashed it over in a history seminar, and as I recall, nobody found it convincing.

I love it... You all refute, Fogel vision of slavery, even with the numbers to back it because it does not fit you all's a speculative view of slavery... You may like but find the numbers to refute and no one has for 40 years...
 
This sentence doesn't make sense.

I agree it seems I left out a word or two...

If you are saying that nobody has ever refuted F & E's numbers, you are mistaken.

It was never refuted only criticized but in the end, it held the field of battle.


Time on the Cross generated praise — and considerable criticism. A major critique appeared in 1976 as a collection of articles entitled Reckoning with Slavery. Although some contributors took umbrage at the tone of the book and denied that it broke new ground, others focused on flawed and insufficient data and inappropriate inferences.

Despite its shortcomings, Time on the Cross inarguably brought people’s attention to a new way of viewing slavery. The book also served as a catalyst for much subsequent research. Even Eugene Genovese, long an ardent proponent of the belief that Southern planters had held slaves for their prestige value, finally acknowledged that slavery was probably a profitable enterprise. Fogel himself refined and expanded his views in a 1989 book, Without Consent or Contract.


but also inefficient, maintained in the South for reasons of custom and prestige and based on a black workforce that exhibited low productivity and poor skills. Fogel and Engerman tried, in a back-of-the-envelope calculation, to work out exactly how inefficient slavery had been; to their initial great surprise, they found that it was in fact profitable. Time on the Cross and its successor Without Consent or Contract: the rise and fall of American Slavery (1989) bolstered and documented this finding through painstaking work on plantation and demographic records.

To reach this conclusion, he employed economic theory and statistics together with a close attention to historical sources, all hallmarks of what came to be called the "new economic history" or "cliometrics" - after Clio, the muse of history.

His primary achievement, cited in the award in 1993 of the Nobel Prize for Economics (jointly with Douglass North), was to integrate economic theory, quantification and history, but his work continued and broadened further, embracing demography, nutrition and ageing.
 
I wouldn't be posting this except this book is still being accepted as gospel, even tho holes - big holes - have been poked in it since its publication in 1974. The major summary for its errors was published in 1975

Haskell, Thomas L. "The True and Tragical History of 'Time on the Cross'", New York Review of Books, 22:15 (October 2, 1975), accessed 8 January 2012
There is also a summary article on Wiki:
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia





I actually worked with one of F & E's research assistants before the book was published and a more blinded view of American Negro Slavery I have seldom seen. In any case F & E revised their statistics somewhat in the second edition (1989/1995). Fogel also changed some of his observations in his book "Without Consent or Contract." The most important observation he changed was infant mortality - in ToC revised edition (pp 123-125), in Without Consent he revises this - almost unwillingly - to that at least 50 percent of all slave children died before age five. The section I have the hardest time with is Fogel's treatment of the exploitation of slave women.
Even in the revised edition he continues to say: "Even if all these reports were true (reports by visitors of the sexual exploitation of Black women) they constituted at most a few hundred cases. (p. 131 - rev ed)" This from a guy who uses the statistics of one plantation (Barrow) for whipping,.There follows (pp 133-137) some imaginary and fictitious data. 1. He imagines it would be cheaper to have a mistreess in town than to exploit a slave woman - without a single example. The example of James Henry Hammond of South Carolina who had a mother and daughter as slave mistresses is one example to refute his undocumented thesis. 2. He has one quote about a plantation owner (Charles Tait) (p. 134) who says don't employ an overseer who "will equalize himself with the negro women." And although he quotes Fanny Kemble elsewhere, he does not record her observation that the Overseers of the Butler plantation (father and son) had children by the slave women. 3.. He uses the prostitution statistics from Nashville to show their were no slave prostitutes. Gutman pointed out years ago that no slave occupation was entered; the few mulatto prostitutes in Nashville were free women.
A relatively new book on prostitution in New Orleans "Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women - Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans" by (2009) by Judith K. Schafer has enough data to totally trash F & E on this point.
4. He (they) use erroneous statistics on mulattoes to show that their must have been little miscegenation. F & E (10.4 percent in 1860). We
simply don't know the exact percentage, but we do know that with current DNA sampling more than 50 percent of American Black people have some European ancestry. My own hobby horse is finding notable (I underline notable) white ante-bellum men who had children by slave mistresses. F & E's question is: are they the tip of the iceberg or the whole iceberg itself. They seem to vote for the second, I go for the first. I can add, there is always the fight about Thomas Jefferson - let's ignore him and look at the un-investigated claims of Walter White, former head of the NAACP who claimed descent from President William Henry Harrison and a slew of Black folk in Virginia who claim descent from President John Tyler. These have not been checked with DNA tests, but I understand that is because the white folks won't cooperate.

I could go on with my rant, but you get my point. To use ToC as a source for how "mild" slavery was is extremely dangerous. This is the major problem with "A Disease in the Public Mind," Fleming uses ToC to show how mistaken the abolitionists were about slavery, but the abolitionists were not mistaken at all.

Final point; I have lost the quote by Barrow, used by F&E to show how mild the whipping was (p.147, 0.7 per hand per year), where he (Barrow) speaks of how vicious his neighbor is; his neighbor castrated three slaves.

I've read this, and while he does a solid job of the financials of the time (won a nobel prize for using historical statistical economic modeling), a lot of the rest of it isn't as well sourced.

It was groundbreaking in 1974. Adam Smith was who most people still went to when it was concerning the economics of slavery. His "The Wealth of Nations" was THE source to be used. The issue that Fogel found, was while Smith was working on perfecting his economic modeling of how slavery was inefficient, a man named Eli Whitney was working on perfecting his model of a piece of equipment that would change that, which Smith had no idea about.

When he released it, that book was attacked hard. It fought with factual data against the old claim based on Smith's work from 200 years earlier that slavery would have ended quickly after the war on it's own as it was bad economically. In the end, while attempts to criticize it haven't stopped, actual factual refutes haven't been found. And what is crazy is this is a nobel winning economist, who went into this study with the same exact preconceptions that those who criticize it on personal grounds have. The data was so clear and obvious it completely changed his world. What is interesting is when you see separate studies done on the same subject, such as those by Lee Soltow a professor of economics at Ohio University, who wrote research on all different types of historical economics, how the same results come out of them. Soltow started writing about histories of states like Wisconson's wealthholding in the late 1800's. But when he studied wealth in the mid 1800's of the US he came to the same results as Fogel.
 
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