“History is written by victors” (attributed to Napoleon
Bonaparte)
R.B. Fogels’ Time on the Cross must have created quite a stir by its
iconoclastic approach to conventional wisdom about slavery. The ideological
burden of the topic seems to weigh heavily on readers even today, witness the
many emotional comments in my well-used library copy of the book. To this day,
its audience studying American Slavery cannot accept any other summary of the
peculiar institution than utter horror about all its aspects.
Nobody, least of all the author, claims, of course, that
the idea of slavery itself is anything but abhorrent. Moral and philosophical
values of liberty and self-determination are, if anything, even dearer to us
today than they generally were when 19th century abolitionists
undertook their struggle. What is worth noting, however, is that these
well-meaning abolitionists employed as much, if not more, misinformation as
their opponents did. The end may well have justified the means, and society
usually accepts such methodology as valid for attaining purposes of a higher
good (the fact that every ideology, including totalitarian ones, used this
approach, lies well beyond the scope of the present commentary). But, in the
social sciences, one should not confuse ideological and political campaigning
with valid methods of inquiry aimed at yielding verifiable, reproducible and above
all “objectively sustainable” data. And yet this is precisely what has happened
with the topic of slavery in the United States.
It did not help that abolitionists did not really know
or understand the South, so their accounts were necessarily based on
secondary sources. It also did not help that any and all however rare
scientific studies obviously molded the available data to support their theses,
or were not rigorous enough to be objective and authoritative. Hence a de
novo analysis of primary sources such as the one conducted by Fogel shows
that the reality of a slave’s life may well have been quite different from what
has been imprinted on mass consciousness both before and after the Declaration
of Emancipation.
All this is by no means to say that a slave’s life was
anything but miserable. The question is, however, how much more miserable it really was than the
lives of contemporary poor freedmen, or poor white laborers, and how prevalent
gratuitous cruelty and abuse were throughout antebellum society in general.
Leaving further elaboration on these questions to
researchers like Fogel, since it is rather difficult to meaningfully quantify
suffering, we may turn to the main arguments set forth by the more educated among
the abolitionists: that of pervasive exploitation of slaves and of the inherent
inefficiency of the South’s economic system that was primarily based on
slavery.
To think in economic terms, we need to leave aside momentarily
and for the sake of a dispassionate argument any emotional impact of considering
human beings as mere capital. And yet, considering that slaves were, in fact,
an investment, and indeed worth considerable sums on the market (owners in the
United States – whilst not in the Caribbean colonies – would typically break
even only after 29 years of rearing a slave child, and the going rate for a
prime-age adult was anywhere between $1,000-$2,000 at a time when the annual
maintenance of the same slave would cost approximately $48), it would not have
seemed to make good business sense to abuse and neglect a rather costly investment
arbitrarily, much less to enable mere ego trips of white supremacy. Evidently,
there had to have existed a number of sadistic and otherwise mean slave owners
and overseers. But to claim that slaves were systematically abused by beatings,
torture, and starvation, all facts known to adversely affect life expectancy
and thus financial amortization, would testify to very bad economic sense of
their owners.
And that would, in fact, support precisely the second
major rational claim of abolitionists – that slavery was an inherently
inefficient system. Let’s stop and think about it for a moment. How can UNPAID
labor (i.e., a workforce limited on the side of costs to feeding,
clothing, and housing disbursements) be more expensive than PAID labor (such as
the one provided by white workers and freedmen)? To be sure, slavery was most
certainly never abolished in the history of mankind on the grounds of it being too
expensive. Humanitarian, not economic, reasons prompted the repeal of
bondage laws. In fact, slave labor was resorted to whenever a breakdown of
social institutions allowed for such conditions – witness the all but rare
incidents of forced labor in times of war and occupation even in modern and in
quite recent history. If forced labor survived well into the 21st
century (the UN still fights to resolve the problem of human trafficking, and
customary public international law as recognized by applicable treaties and
conventions expressly sanctions forced labor under conditions of “military
necessity” and other select circumstances), why would it suddenly have outlived
its economic viability and utility in the United States before the Civil War?
There is, however, a clear difference between the
disposable nature of slaves in modern history (e.g., in forced labor
camps and concentration camps as instituted under Nazi occupation) and the
economic system of North American antebellum slavery. The former relied on an
almost unlimited supply of free workforce (besides Jews and Gypsies, it
mostly drew on captured Slavs – the Eastern Europeans with their telling ethnic
moniker – and even some Germanic dissidents were sentenced to “re-education” in
forced labor camps). Thus, under Nazi ideology, it made however limited economic
sense to cut maintenance costs below subsistence levels and to use a high
turnover of workers. In the U.S. , however, slaves were expensive, their supply
was rather limited, and, in the later stages of the institution, the economy
relied for supply mostly on domestic breeding rather than on African imports.
To kill off the work base – and its reproductive base along with it – by
excessive negligence would have been highly counterintuitive in view of a rational
optimization of life-long ownership rights to “human chattel.”
But these perceptions are perhaps excessively based on
current-day accounts of slavery. Modern human trafficking is a short-term
business model aimed at squeezing maximal return out of people whose useful
lifespan as a slave is rather short. In the case of trafficking in children as
sex slaves, a few years of “work” brings on not only puberty, but also
communicable diseases that significantly reduce their value, as happens
routinely with child prostitutes in South and South-East Asia. Those children
are usually paid for (to the relatives or traffickers), and needed to work off
the “debt” incurred by their “owners” in order to finance their “acquisition.”
Such a system of indentured servitude (without the sexual component) was
prevalent in 19th century Europe where children were commonly sold
(“rented out”) as servants and laborers for a given period of time. Another
model of modern day slavery is that of women forced into prostitution. The case
of Bosnian sex slaves imported from Russia and Ukraine to service international
observers of the civil war in former Yugoslavia under U.N. command involved a
similar pressure to “work off the debt” to human traffickers who had brought
the women into the country under false premises of legitimate work in hotels
and bars. (For comparison, the compensation for losing such a woman by the
client due to her death or of her running away was calculated to amount to
approximately $2,000-$3,000, which is quite a different valuation from the
going rate of a prime-aged slave of about $1,000-$2,000 almost two centuries
earlier in the American South at a very different purchasing power equivalent.
This comparably low price reflects the increasingly disposable nature of a
modern day slave). Similarly, illegal immigrants around the world (not only in
the United States, but also in Europe) unable to pay their illegal passage into
the country often need to work off their debt to the traffickers through forced
labor in areas such as farming and manufacturing. All such cases include limited
term servitude geared towards deriving maximum profit for the beneficiary of
slave labor, regardless of life-long consequences on the well-being of such
slaves.
Another aspect of the abolitionist argument as to the
inefficiency of the Southern economy was the strikingly blatant racism of their
claims. Slaves were, in their parlance and opinion, child-like beings incapable
not only of learning commercially meaningful skills, but even of doing menial
work well. The fact that many of the most vocal abolitionists were Northerners
without much contact with black people in the first place, who thus based
their opinions on assorted prejudices and literary fantasies, may explain
such an approach. But, again assuming for argument’s sake the accuracy of their
assessment, how would it help the country to free such “lesser” workers, make
them “independent” and thus responsible for their own economic viability, if
they were clearly unable to survive on their own in this society due to lack of
skills and maturity? If the abolitionist claims of far superior efficiency and
utility of white workers for Southern plantations held true and was indeed the
secret of plantations’ prosperity, did they plan on starving the three million
soon-to-be freedmen who were, according to them, entirely uncompetitive in free
market circumstances and thus inevitably headed toward becoming a public
charge? History showed just how wrong all those “economic” predictions of the
abolitionist camp turned out to be: the Southern economy was, in fact, deeply
affected by Emancipation. Slaves were, after all, not economically
replaceable by better skilled white paid laborers. But then, can we blame activists
for using fallacies to obtain a politically desirable and morally commendable
result? Their ends did justify the means, after all.
Approaching the issue from a European background foreign
to the national trauma of U.S. race relations, I am bound to step on somebody’s
toes in matters of political sensitivity. And yet, such an outsider’s view can
be beneficial to people locked into a politically correct indoctrination to the
extent of rejection of any views – or, indeed, facts – incompatible with
popular “awareness” of this horrendous ghost of the past. The remarks left by
previous readers in my library copy of Time on the Cross are a case in
point.
In a way, this fervent belief in an official version of
history, a version whose denial calls for slurs and accusations of lack of
patriotism, reminds me of experiences with the published histories of certain
Central and East European nations. There, a comparative reading of national
historical accounts of various neighboring countries is quite instructive to
see how the idea of national victimhood is incompatible with the competing
claims of another nation arising from the same events. What for one nation was
a heroic recovery of a God-given right to other lands was for the other an
unwarranted attack on similarly God-given ownership of the same tract by the
sovereign that happened to hold it at a given moment in the ever-shifting tides
of history. The painful breaking away of one ethnic group to establish a
separate nation state was celebrated as a triumph of long-overdue and denied
independence by others.
History is
written by the victors. But more specifically, it is actually written by the
more vocal supporters of the idea that won. Relying on anecdotal and
necessarily subjective accounts, often by the proponents of one political view that
has for whatever random reasons prevailed over another, is bound to result in
misinterpretations of history. That is why the underappreciated return to
boring technical sources – cliometrics as propagated by Fogel – while not as
attractive for writers and readers who understandably prefer more colorful
narratives, may shed much more light on what has actually happened. Or it may
not: as one can see at almost every turn in economics, the interpretation of
data is vulnerable to manipulation stemming from the researcher’s own a
priori bias and assumptions, and it is difficult, not to mention laborious,
to disentangle misinterpretation from bona fide analysis without taking
recourse to the entire sample of original data. The vulnerabilities of
quantitative analysis in history are impressively exemplified in the scandal
surrounding Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America. Still, accounting, church, and census records constitute considerably more
reliable “facts” than diaries and written accounts of people simply relating
narratives. Unfortunately, a good story sells much better, not to mention
easier, than sound statistical analysis, even a story conveyed by adequate
verbal interpretation. Maybe readers should reconsider what they want history
to be – an art of the pen and discipline of the humanities, or a social
science. In any case, it is of the utmost importance not to confuse the two,
lest we slide inadvertently into the traps of ideological indoctrination such
as historical revisionism to fit it to a particular view of events and
situations – be that the projection of the image of a racial struggle, of class
warfare, or of any other revolutionary or counter-revolutionary effort.
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