This ought to be considered a necessary third volume to Robert William Fogel's and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross. Gutman takes a detailed look at the way they have used and misused sources, ignored potential sources, as well as sometimes dubious statistical methods. It is a devastating critique of a book that garnered a lot of positive press at its release, and which has remained in print up to the present time, even after the revision Without Consent or Contract was released. That book, written by Fogel, retreats from almost every position that Gutman criticized, which would seem to validate Gutman's contentions. The introduction to Without Consent or Contract says that it is a new book rather than a new edition because Time on the Cross generated so much discussion that it is a historical artifact. There is in fact so much discarded that it would have been a new book in any case.

I give three examples of problems pointed out by Gutman; page numbers are from the 2003 reprinting by the University of Illinois press. Fogel and Engerman use an 1860 manuscript census of occupations In Nashville, Tennesee to argue that slaves were not used for prostitution, and to suggest, further, that most white men did not find black women attractive. The only prostitutes are 198 white women and 9 light-skinned free black women. One is forced to ask how light-skinned black women came to exist if white men were not attracted to black women, or white women to black men (the latter is likely to have endly badly.) However, the census explicitly does NOT list the occupations of slaves, so slave prostitutes would not be listed no matter how many may have existed. The census tells us nothing about slaves and prostitution. (p.157 ff)

Fogel and Engerman also suggest that the slaves were generally chaste until marriage, which occurred around 20-years of age for women, based on assuming that the oldest child listed in inventories of slaves was the oldest child of his/her mother, born a year after marriage. Gutman points out that there are many weaknesses in these assumptions. Still births, miscarriages, infant and child mortality, fertility problems, and of course, the sale of children away from their mothers could all mean that either the assumption that the oldest child listed is the woman's oldest child, or that the child was born approximately a year after the mother began her sex life, or both are false. (p.150 ff)

Third, Fogel and Engerman argue, based on invoices for the sale of slaves in New Orleans, that it was rare for slaves to be separated by sales from their partner. They calculate this by assuming that women sold with a child are married women, and women sold without a child are unmarried women. They assert without proof that young children were “virtually always” sold with their mother. Gutman points out that a woman sold out of a childless marriage would be single in their view and a woman whose older children were sold separately would be considered to be single by Fogel and Engerman. He also casts doubt on the assertion that young children can be assumed to be sold with their mother. (p.113 ff)

Gutman continues on with examples of sources cherry-picked for desired information, doubtful reasoning, and inappropriate evidence; a truly devastating critique. ( )