The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective.

The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective. By Robert William Fogel. The Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. [xii], 106. $22.95, ISBN 0-8071-2881-3.)

Robert William Fogel tells us at the beginning of this slender volume that what follows is "a personal, retrospective meditation on a series of debates that extended over most of my adult life" (p. ix). The author, of course, played a critical role in the intense scholarly debates over slavery that took place between the early 1950s and 1990, and he deserves a careful hearing from all of us who try to understand the complex and tangled history of human bondage in the American South. But readers should be aware that the format in which he presents his views, the 2001 Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University, forced him to be highly selective in his choice of debaters.

After opening with a discussion of the long-lasting impact of Ulrich B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918) and Kenneth M. Stampp's opening salvo against Phillips, "The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery" (American Historical Review, 31 [April 1952], 618-24), Fogel moves quickly into a discussion of the "New Directions in the Study of Slavery" launched by the cliometric revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s (p. 18). Cliometrics, which Fogel defines as "the systematic application of the behavioral models of the social sciences and their related mathematical and statistical methods to the study of history" (p. 19), burst onto the scholarly stage with Alfred H. Conrad's and John R. Meyer's article "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South" (Journal of Political Economy, 66 [April 1958], 95-130).

"I was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins in 1958 when the slavery paper was published," Fogel writes. "The debate in our department raged for weeks and embraced most of the graduate students and faculty of economics" (p. 21). This battle in Baltimore was a precursor to a veritable cultural war between the young cliometricians and the more traditional practitioners of the historian's craft (p. 20). The combat swept forward into the 1960s and 1970s. Fogel entertains little doubt as to which side emerged victorious. "The cliometricians ... refused to be bound by the established rules of engagement, and they blithely crossed ideological wires," he notes approvingly, and in the process "they opened an important and enduring new page in the slavery debates" (p. 19).

No page was more significant or more controversial than the one turned by Fogel and his co-author, Stanley L. Engerman, when they published Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974). The project began in 1968 when the two young cliometricians set out "to measure just how much less efficient southern slave agriculture was than the northern system of free family farming" (p. 29). Much to their dismay, they discovered just the opposite to be the case. Their findings about slavery's efficiency, profitability, and the slaves' living conditions, including some carefully measured statements regarding the infrequency of whippings on southern plantations, set off a firestorm of controversy. Entire volumes were devoted to challenging their methods, statistics, and conclusions. One of these critical books carried on its cover a cartoon in which a white overseer, whip in hand, tells a slave cotton picker, "You might take comfort in the knowledge that some day a revisionist historian will make all of this seem like it didn't exist" (Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross [Urbana, 1975]).

Fogel's comments regarding these critics are remarkably generous. "The public debate set off by the publication of Time on the Cross greatly accelerated the pace of research on the economics and demography of slavery," he notes. "It was a debate in which there were no losers" (p. 32). Cliometricians, their ranks augmented by fresh graduate-student recruits, expanded, refined, confirmed, and sometimes corrected many of Fogel's and Engerman's earlier findings. Fogel himself revisited many of the critical issues in Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989). In the process, their collective efforts unquestionably brought the economics of the institution of slavery into much sharper focus.

"The most dramatic new cliometric findings ... have to do with the health and demography of slave populations," however, and Fogel gives full credit to the younger scholars who have investigated these topics (p. 34). He also credits cliometricians with contributing "to the reconstruction of slave culture by destroying the myth of the incompetent black worker" (p. 36). In a statement that repeats almost word for word a passage from Without Consent or Contract, Fogel writes that in the slaves' world where "frontal assaults were suicidal but successful struggles for amelioration of the worst abuses were possible, an ethic which embraced hard work and was responsive to economic inducements was not necessarily an act of collaboration or a sign of weakness of character" (p. 38). And there was no way, he concludes, "that slavery would have died of its own economic contradictions" (p. 47). A final lecture, the weakest of the three in this reviewer' s estimation, discusses the impact of the cliometricians' findings regarding slavery for the broader sweep of American history and historiography.

Clearly Fogel presents us with a closely argued brief in defense of cliometric history. And no student of slavery would deny that economic historians have played a critical role in advancing our knowledge of the institution. But more traditional historians, digging deeply and creatively into archival materials and using sources like fugitive slave autobiographies and Works Progress Administration interviews, have contributed mightily to this advance as well. Some of these scholars, most notably Eugene D. Genovese, receive considerable attention here. But readers will be struck by the lengthy list of historians who published between 1952 and 1990 who are mentioned only in passing--David Brion Davis, Stanley M. Elkins, Winthrop D. Jordan, Lawrence W. Levine, Sterling Stuckey, and Orlando Patterson, for example. Even longer is the list of those who are not mentioned in his text at all--John B. Boles, Paul D. Escott, Nathan Irvin Huggins, Peter Kolchin, Edmund S. Morgan, Leslie Howard Owens, Albert J. Raboteau, George P. Rawick, and Mechal Sobel, to name only a few.

Certainly Fogel could not include everyone in his three Fleming lectures, nor should we expect him to. But it still seems fair to say that the job of pushing back the frontiers of slave scholarship has been the work of a number of able hands, some of whom employed the cliometrician's toolbox and a great many of whom did not.

CHARLES B. DEW

Williams College