Without Consent or Contract: the Rise and Fall of American Slavery.

Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery

Since Robert Fogel (with Stanley L. Engerman) published Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), Professor Fogel has been the acknowledged authority on the institutional and economic history of American slaves: what they did, day by day, and under what conditions they performed; who owned slaves, how they were acquired, and what they cost; the physical circumstances of their lives, their utility, and their practical history. Indeed, Fogel has given the American intellectual community not only all it would wish to know about slavery, but, as I concluded in reviewing Time on the Cross in these pages (March 28, 1975), a good deal more than it was and is ready to digest.

Fogel's conflict with neo-abolitionist mythology, with the view of slavery as primarily a system of physical abuse, will be at the minimum compounded by his even more comprehensive Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. And the aggravation will occur even though Fogel has gone to some trouble to prevent neo-abolitionist hostility. After enduring all the ideological vilification poured out on Time on the Cross, he has attached an interpretative coda to his discursive gathering of the record: an after-the-fact, normative coda designed to protect his own research and the larger project of his University of Chicago Center for Population Economics within the vituperative political context of contemporary American historiography. Except for this cosmetic "Afterword: The Moral Problem of Slavery" (and a few simplistic remarks about the American Revolution), everything in Without Consent or Contract is well done. And even that fashionable camouflage is rhetorically justifiable, given the ruling passions of our time.

The text proper of Fogel's book is divided into two parts: a background study of how slavery was established and then developed in the New World; followed by a narrative of how it was overthrown. Fogel speaks of the concept of slavery as a political anomaly which, despite its tenuous relation to the truth of history, retains a symbolic power to this day. The first section covers ground on which Fogel has already made his mark, a subject concerning which he has directed complicated research for the last 24 years. (Three separate volumes of this "evidence" have also been published, and impressively document the work examined here.) The rest of the book, which incorporates the findings of cliometrics and other descriptive studies, considers the lives of slaves and the economics of slavery, evidence that gives it an affective circumstantial coloring--and puts Fogel directly in conflict with the most virulent political passions of our day, those connected with the "metaphysics" of equality.

But there is a third story, one that emerged as Fogel produced his other narratives, which is the history of research and commentary about slavery. This may be the most interesting tale he has to tell. Concerning the great temptation that, in all three of these connections, he has resisted, Fogel observes: "It is easy to invent an anti-slavery policy [other than the one which brought a Union victory and a new America in 1865] that would be far more congenial to the predominant moral standards of our own age than the policies actually put forward by any of the major historical players." Fogel is affirming that the anti-slavery policy prevalent in 1865 was essentially racist, negative in what it assumed about the American Negro, his capacities, his humanity, and his claim upon the good offices of his countrymen.

Fogel warns that slavery in the American South can no longer be described either as a collection of atrocities or as an economic failure, given the great and (in 1860) ever-growing wealth of the Old South--a wealth that, without war, might have resulted in the economic domination of the entire nation. What finally was wrong with the peculiar institution was its denial that all of us live to become morally responsible, insofar as we are able, and can come to practice that providentially intended responsibility only to the degree that we are free. Fogel understands very well both the limits and the authority of this argument from definition. The generic case, as limited by considerations of freedom from what and for what, is clearly the valid one--even though no one is ever completely free and the generic argument is often beside the point. Unfortunately, Fogel adds to this mix an elaborate apology for the War between the States as a necessary prologue for all sorts of progressive, liberating things: an argument that we need not take too seriously.

Fogel's "Afterword," as suggested above, detracts from the generally high quality of the book. The weakness of his "moral coda" is its presupposition of an equation between statism and progress in "democratic rights." Apparently Fogel wants to be numbered "among the saints." His speculation about what might have been the pattern of American history had the response to secession by the South not been a military invasion reminds me of the old hypothetical title used to dissuade youthful literary critics from concern with evidence not available within their subject: "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" Fogel, attempting to respond to the question David Potter posed in 1971--Was killing 600,000 Americans the best way to restore national unity and end slavery?--answers only that the War gave us "modern (plebeian) democracy," and a government strong enough to undertake whatever can be justified with appeals to laudable purposes. However, in responding properly to Potter it is necessary to specify what will be in the place of slavery, and what is meant by Union. To suggest that (apart from slavery) the South was not "democratic" is intellectually irresponsible. Fogel writes that a failure to have destroyed the South would have preserved in these United States an "aristocratic republic," a limited, constitutional government. One would like to think so. In this speculation, as in other regards, I find much to admire in Without Consent or Contract, even when the lesson is not what Fogel had in mind.

Mr. Bradford teaches English at the University of Dallas. His most recent book is The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary and Political (Sherwood Sugden).