Time on the Cross created a sensation when it was first published, and received largely favorable notice. It claimed to break new ground with its cliometric study of slavery. A notable dissenter from the praise of the book. Although not necessarily of its authors, was Herbert Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game, which I think all readers of this book should also read. Both books are in print as of this writing.

Fogel and Engerman (F + E, per Herbert Gutman) claim that their intention is to reveal “the record of black achievement under adversity,” but it seems that their unstated goal is to make slavery appear in a better light. I am not referring to their major argument, that slavery was efficient and economically viable, or indeed, most (but not all) of their ten “principal corrections. I am referring to their “assumptions which, though they are plausible, cannot be verified at present” and “the interpretations which do not stand on the same level of certainty.” These almost all seem to be sympathetic to the slaveholders.

This subject could have been covered without any reference to abolitionists at all. The study is not terribly in depth or systematic, let alone cliometric. F+E discuss abolitionists as if they were all Northerners with little knowledge of the South. But some members of the movement, writing and giving lectures on slavery were in fact from the South: The Grimké sisters were from a slave owning family. Frederick Douglass, William and Ellen Craft, and Harriet Jacobs were escaped slaves. Indeed, F + E makes a number of unflattering generalizations about abolitionists that are utterly lacking in support. Only the writings of a few are analyzed and dismissed as largely worthless. F + E, in accusing antislavery advocates of allowing or colluding in racist restrictions completely ignore the Reconstruction.

I am not terribly knowledgeable about the subject, nor have I any expertise in statistics. Still, I did have questions about the presentations of some of the data; as shown by Darrell Huff in How to Lie with Statistics and Joel Best's books, presentation can make even accurate figures very misleading. Arguing that on the average, slaves had a .07 percent chance of being whipped each years sounds a lot less consequential than saying that a population of 100 slave would witness an average of 70 whippings. I think that the comparison of 1870 data to 1850 data is so illegitimate that even a paucity of other information makes it worthless. It also seems to me that there were serious gaps: I find it very odd that in a work dealing with slave attitudes and aspirations there is no systematic discussion of slaves who ran away.

In discussing the question of slave concubines and prostitutes, F + E dismiss it as rare. But it must be looked at from two angles. From the perspective of the women, it might be true that few were concubines, but it could still be very common for slave owners to have a black concubine. Surely any cliometrician can see the difference. They remark dismissively that only one to two percent of negro children were fathered by whites on slave plantations. That means that a slave holder who lived on a plantation with twenty adult woman, say for forty years (age twenty to age sixty) would generally have four to eight slave children. Not all concubines would have children, especially if the master changed sexual partners frequently. The Grimké sisters had three mixed blood nephews, Ellen Craft was so fair as to be able to pass for white, Harriet Jacobs was fleeing the sexual importunities of her mistress's father, and Frederick Douglass had a white father. F + E do not discuss the plaçage system in Louisiana which seems like a serious omission.

As a stylistic issue, I would suggest that F + E should have used fewer adjectives and adverbs. To say that such-and-such occurred in a “mere” X percent of all cases is to add an editorializing element to what could have been a simple statement of fact. It is also one of my pet peeves that people confuse the frequency of something with its importance. Most people have little call for say, rattlesnake anti-venom, but when they need it, it is critical.

So I am a trifle skeptical about their methods and purposes. They claim to be showing that the reputation of slaves as unreliable and lazy is a slur and that they are putting before us proof that they were hard working and, in response to a a mixture of positive and negative incentives, identified their fortunes with their owners'. They are also obviously eager to argue that slavery was not as bad as we think.

I strongly recommend reading Herbert G. Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game. His analyses are often devastating, and he includes work by other authors that is not so easily available to the layperson.

As one example, F+E show that in 1790 the slave population was concentrated around the Chesapeake Bay area, but by 1860 had spread far west and south. It has been assumed that this population movement split many slave families. F+E argue that masters attempted to avoid splitting families and that the movement of the population was mostly due to entire plantations moving. They analyze the records of the interregional slave trade and conclude that 84% of individuals over fourteen who were being sold were unmarried. They argue that slaves were rarely sold away from their parents until they were of an age to strike out on their own.

Gutman points out a number of problems with these arguments. The sales records don't state the marital status of the slaves: F+E have assumed that any woman being sold without a small child is unmarried. Obviously, even if, let us say, all children under the age of two were sold with their mother, it does not follow that all married slave women have a child under two. Moreover, F + E have ignored the local slave trade and transfers entirely. Parents often gave their grown children slaves as presents, which is known to have split some families; the death of a slave owner meant that the slaves had to be split up among the heirs, or sold so that the proceeds of their sale could be be divided. Even if whole plantations moved, slaves were more strongly exogamous that their owners, and were often married to slaves on other plantations. And having one's children leave home voluntarily to make their own way is quite different from having them sold away.

Gutman continues in this fashion: throughout his book he argues that F+E have missed and misinterpreted important sources. On the matter of the absence of slave prostitutes, for example, he points out that the professions of slaves are not given, so we have not information on this point. He questions not just their mathematics but sometimes even their arithmetic.

How has the book held up over the years? In 1989, F+E issued a new book Without Consent or Contract which presents “what we have learned during the past 16 years. “Except for the corrections of a few typographical errors and the additions of the sources of direct quotations”, T/C's original text is still in print. F+E call it a “part of intellectual history in the sense that many of the findings . . . were subsequently confirmed and have become part of the consensus on the operation of the U.S. slave system.” Gutman and Bruce Levine, who wrote the introduction to the 2003 printing of Slavery and the Numbers Game might agree that it is best regarded as a piece of intellectual history alone, and disagree strongly with the claim that its findings are now part of the consensus. ( )

Though it may seem to some that it has its moral defeciencies, it really does not. Fogel and Engerman put to bed many of the myths that have arisen around American slavery. The South wasn't an economic backwater, planters did not drive their slaves to death, and the slaves weren't "shiftless negroes" either. ( )