Sambos in.
the sun?
Skip Gates
Time on the Cross. The Economies of American Negro Slavery, and Supplement: Evidence and Methods Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman (Wildwood House £4.25 and £5.50) It is a commonplace by now that, of 'the whole of American historiography, slave scholarship has most reflected the temper of its times. Infected with the present, iconoclastic theses march their way through academe, purporting to supplant all such theses that have gone before, with the long-awaited truth of the latest black slave and the latest antebellum South to contain him.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the latest book on lordship and bondage "exposes" the hypocrisy of the abolitionists (read North ern white liberals), redeems slavery as a viable economic arrangement, and all the while manages to give the slaves a hearty pat on the back. Written with the deft and graceful movement of a club-foot, Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross promises with uncharacteristic bombast to clobber its precursors with cliometrics the use of statistical aggregates and the quantification of masses of empirical data to elucidate, and indeed recreate, history; "science" wed to "humanism," purportedly to dispel the myth of black incompetence and cultural oblivion so that we might "recover" black history. Their "revolutionary" conclusions, they inform us with •a disconcerting degree of self-consciousness, include the following assertions. Offering psychological liberation for a way of life known as "the South," they demolish the "mint julep" mentality too often attributed to a supposedly inane planter class, who supposedly failed to perceive their best economic interests. Slavery, they find, was by no means an irrational structure fed by conspicuous consumption or racist blood lust, it was highly profitable, attaining a level of per capita income that Italy would not match until 1940.
Offering psychological liberation for the black man, they find that "the typical slave was not lazy, inept, or unproductive," nor were his material conditions harsh. Indeed, much of the Plantation management was in the hands of black slave overseers, while planters encouraged both individual initiative and a stable nuclear family. Not only was the day-by-day treatment of the slave not all that bad, but an average field hand "received about 90 per cent of the income he produced." Slavery, in sum, would not have crumbled as a bad economic bet after 1860 but, if it had not been for the War between the States, would have grown prodigiously.
These are startling conclusions, which promise to generate controversy for the next generation of slave scholarship. Indeed the Primary significance of the work will be that it establishes the parameters of discussion of the state of slavery and the state of the slave; anyone seriously concerned with addressing the issue will have to become a cliometrician a task the Marxists shy from because statistics tend to show that things weren't nearly as bad as we thought, just before the Revolution.
Already there are methodological rebuttals in the computers. At least one cliometrician, Professor Richard Sutch, a Berkeley economist, told Fogel and Engerman recently at a conference that he had reanalysed much of the data and found the evidence "weak," resting on "selective data and dubious assumptions." Even the layman has methodological doubts about certain assertions and their underlying assumptions; that the field hand received 90 per cent of the planter's investment is naively over-simplified; that beatings and punishment were marginal is based on one plantation owner's diary; that family life was nuclear and sexual exploitation at a minimum strike one as difficult to quantify. The logical and rational world Fogel and Engerman describe seems just a bit too neat and tidy to have been a human institution full of alive and breathing human beings.
But let us suppose their assumptions valid; what of their ramifications? The test of statistical scrupulosity, argued R. D. Havens in a classic argument for minute history, must be "that sharp lines disappear, strong' lights and shadows are modified, uniqueness and isolation melt away, the man is seen to be more like other men, the age like other ages." The period, as it were, reduced to statistical smudge. And insofar as Fogel and Engerman have forced us to see slavery as just another system of labour, their achievement is of paramount importance to slave historiography. But what of their avowed intention to "recover" black history and "to reveal not only to blacks but to whites as well, that part of American history which has been kept from them the record of black achievement under adversity"? It is here that Time on the Cross fails.
The metamorphosis of the slave from a grinning golliwog into a black embodiment of the Protestant Ethic will not salvage black history or, concomitantly, the black man's • psyche. Slavery was not America's 'Time on the Cross," it was an integral aspect of an economic system which catapulted an emerging nation to the height of growth and expansion. It was not an aberration. More than this, however, it was the seminal period for the welding of myriad African cultures with myriad European cultures into a distinctively black American culture but also a miscegenated American one. Remarkably enough, no black writer has undertaken the imaginative recreation of this crucial period in the development of his culture; of his racial memory; surely this is more than oversight. There are deepseated psychological reasons for it. To seriously suggest that a people could emerge unscathed from two hundred and fifty years of bondage is either idle foolishness or unimaginative polemic. ask
Who was the black man in 1619; who indeed in 1865? This is the first question we subtlety fth
Fogel oEe blnpgerormaeinnhave not recognised the
they set out to correct.
They confuse the existence of a rich and vt he absence a r ega culture to fch psyo "behind slave doors" with logical impairment. It is a mistake others have made as well. The two, very obviously, are not mutually exclusive. Who can deny the sublime culture of the black man? Yet, who at all familiar with the bitter discussions among black literati in the 'twenties over the public face of the race over Art and art can deny the trauma of slavery on the Negro's mind?
Finally, if Time on the Cross is correct in its portrait of life on the old plantation, then the slave himself should confirm their assertions. And what of the slave? One, Stephen Pembroke, said in 1854, recalling his years of bondage, "Such is the condition of Slavery: it is a hard subgtance; you cannot break it nor pull it apart, and the only way is to escape from it." Time on the Cross would have done well to have asked the slaves, much as John Blassingame did in his seminal work, The Slave Community, as has Eugene Genovese in his new Roll. Jordan, Roll. Still, this is an important book in the history, if you will, of slave histories, for it catapults cliometrics into a vital indeed essential role in American historiography. Skip Gates, a black American born in Virginia, is now 0 Mellon Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge
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