godofredus
Sergeant Major
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2013
- Location
- 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.
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.