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From: "Tony Hoskins" <>
Subject: Re: Abraham Lincoln waged The War Between The States to SAVETHE UNION and not to free the slaves!
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:50:21 -0800


This subject is of course very OT. But, having just re-read my alumni
magazine, _University of Chicago Magazine_ , (May/June 2007), it occurs
to me to recommend Fogel's work on the subject of slavery to any
unfamiliar with it. From the article:

In 1967—after the dust cleared and other scholars, often to their
surprise, confirmed the basic findings of Railroads—Fogel embarked on
what became a controversial study of American slavery. Unearthing
thousands of plantation records, probate documents, and slave-ship
manifests, he and coauthor Stanley Engerman, a University of Rochester
economic historian and former doctoral classmate, published Time on the
Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Little, Brown and
Company, 1974). The book portrayed antebellum slavery as a lucrative,
robust, and rational economic system, not the moribund institution
historians traditionally perceived. Between 1840 and 1860 the South’s
economy outpaced the rest of the country’s, Fogel and Engerman
reported, and the demand for slaves was rising in urban areas
nationwide. Slave agriculture, meanwhile, was 35 percent more efficient
than Northern family farming. Materially, if not psychologically, slaves
lived healthier and longer lives than urban industrial laborers. Over a
lifetime a typical slave field hand might receive back as much as 90
percent of the income he produced as food, clothing, housing, and
medical care. However morally reprehensible it was, slavery proved, they
said, an economically efficient market solution.

Condemnation of Time on the Cross was immediate, relentless, and
withering. In the New York Review of Books, historian Thomas Haskell
advised consigning the book to “the outermost ring of the scholar’s
hell, obscurity.” Economists Paul David and Peter Temin declared it
“simply shot through with egregious errors” and with four other
scholars produced a 400-page volume to “refute its every word.”
Fogel and Engerman were called careless, clueless, mendacious. They were
accused of being Confederate apologists. The rancor and cries of racism
bothered Fogel (whose wife, Enid, is black), but, he says, he meant to
pick a fight. “We wanted to show traditional historians that they
could ignore quantitative evidence only at their peril”: the data
offered a different view of slavery than the one scholars were used to
seeing.

In the end, Time on the Cross weathered the critical storm, emerging
with its conclusions largely intact. In 1989 Fogel reexamined and
expounded on the economics of enslavement in Without Consent or
Contract: the Rise and Fall of American Slavery (W. W. Norton),
following it up in 1992 with three volumes of supporting evidence,
statistical methods, and technical papers. The next year he won a Nobel
Prize in economics. Presenting the award, Swedish Academy of Sciences
professor Lennart Jorberg credited Fogel and fellow prizewinner Douglass
North with revitalizing economic history with their use of quantitative
methods. Fogel’s work, Jorberg said, had helped make the field “more
stringent and more theoretically aware.” Fogel offers a plainer
assessment. “We’re mainly empiricists,” he says. “We’re just
looking for evidence.” Where it leads, they follow.

----
Also, if interested, see:

http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/weiss


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