Reply #24: see a review

[bobbieinok]

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Not everyone agreed on which of the conclusions was most startling, or which was more in error. On the one hand, Richard Sutch saw the "authors' claim that the physical and psychological well-being of American slaves was much greater than previously believed" as the lightning rod that attracted so much attention to the book (1975, p. 335). Thomas Haskell argued that the 'book's central argument, the claim that slaves were more efficient workers than free men." (1975, p. 36). In a sense it was the conjunction of interrelated claims, or what critics saw as the whole house of cards, that made for so much controversy.

By itself, for example, the finding that farms using slave labor were estimated to have been more efficient than farms using free workers might not have been controversial. It may have been surprising, but that was in part because no one had thought to look before. If that were an isolated finding, only those who worry about the details of estimating production functions would have cared. But it was not an isolated piece of information, it was part of a different view of the slave regime -- the centerpiece of it according to Haskell (1975, p.36). In the Fogel-Engerman scheme the efficiency of southern agriculture was the joint product of shrewd capitalistic planters and hard-working slaves. The innovative, and highly controversial point, was that slaves worked hard because they were rewarded for doing so, not because they were driven to it. Critics pointed out that there was little evidence on rewards; to a large extent this was inferred from the economic outcomes, and from the evidence on the slaves' material standard of living and the hierarchy of occupations in which they were employed, and from the evidence that whipping did not appear to be widely used to motivate the slaves.

Of course, slaves were motivated by a combination of the stick and the carrot. Fogel and Engerman may have exaggerated the role of the carrot, but a more lenient view is that they were attempting to shift the balance towards well-motivated economic behavior and a more reasonable treatment of slaves. In their summary of the traditional view they argued that Kenneth Stampp had come "remarkably close to discovering the true nature of the slave system..." but had overestimated the use of cruelty." In Fogel and Engerman's view, force was necessary, and, although it "could, and often did, lead to cruelty" there was less of it than Stampp believed. Planters, being capitalistic businessmen "used force for exactly the same purpose as they used positive incentives -- to achieve the largest product at the lowest cost. Like everything else, they strove to use force not cruelly, but optimally" (p. 232).

In the opinion of Fogel and Engerman, it was the traditional view in which slaves were lazy and not well motivated that gave rise to the false stereotype of black labor that still plagues blacks today (p. 215). In their revised view slaves were hard working; slave labor was of superior quality. Indeed, this helps explain why large slave plantations were much more efficient than free southern farms. "This advantage was not due to some special way in which land or machinery was used, but to the special quality of plantation labor" (p. 209). Ordinary slaves were "... imbued like their masters with a Protestant ethic" (p. 231). They could not exercise that work ethic in whichever direction they wished, but within the confines of the slave system they could, and to a large extent did, strive hard. This revised view, as you can see, shifts attention away from the effect of slavery on the conditions and behavior of blacks today, and puts it back on the conditions of black life that took place after the Civil War (p. 260). And one can imagine this revised view would have bearing on the question of black reparations.

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http://www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/weiss.shtml