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Book Review
| The Slavery Debates, 1952–1990: A Retrospective. By Robert William Fogel. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xii, 106 pp. $22.95, ISBN 0-8071-2881-3.)Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery. By David Brion Davis. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 115 pp. $18.95, ISBN 0-674-01182-1.)
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| The authors of these two books have both been at the forefront of a massive, ongoing reinterpretation of slavery. Both books consist of short interpretive essays based on previously delivered lectures. There the similarities end. |
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In what he calls "a personal, retrospective meditation" (p. ix), Robert William Fogel provides an account of what he terms the "slavery debates," in the process tracing the evolution of historical scholarship on southern slavery over a period of some four decades. Memory is highly subjective, of course, and every historian of slavery will have a different recollection of these debates. That said, I suspect that most readers will find Fogel's account, whose "personal" nature is accentuated by an absence of any documentation, both interesting and highly idiosyncratic. |
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Fogel frames his "debates" in terms of a continuing struggle to repudiate the interpretive legacy of Ulrich B. Phillips, whose American Negro Slavery (1918) set the tone of slavery scholarship for more than a generation before being thoroughly rebutted by Kenneth M. Stampp in The Peculiar Institution (1956). Fogel's belief in the resilience of the Phillips interpretation—as he puts it, "it has been exceedingly difficult for revisionist historians to break away from the tradition initiated by Ulrich B. Phillips" (p. 4)—rests on his peculiar definition of that interpretation: rather than seeing racism, benign masters, and paternalism as central to Phillips's portrait of antebellum slavery, Fogel stresses Phillips's insistence on slavery's economic inefficiency. He thereby shifts the credit for repudiating Phillips from Stampp to the cliometricians (of whom he was foremost) who in the 1970s and 1980s produced an avalanche of work demonstrating slavery's profitability, efficiency, and viability. |
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Readers familiar with Fogel's works on slavery—Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), coauthored with Stanley L. Engerman, and Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989)—will experience in this book a sense of déjà vu. Once again, one encounters the contrast between the cliometricians' scientific "findings" (p. 23 and passim) and traditional historians' impressionistic interpretations. Again Fogel confuses the widespread belief that slave labor was inefficient with what he terms "the myth of the incompetent black worker" (p. 36), imputing to believers in slavery's backwardness a racist motive that did not always exist. But Fogel's most pervasive theme is the "paradox" (p. 46 and passim) that an immoral institution could be economically efficient, a paradox that proved profoundly troubling to him and some of his collaborators and that he mistakenly considers at the root of most criticism of their work. "To say that the slave South was highly profitable and growing rapidly," he explains, "seemed to be falsely celebrating an immoral system" (p. 8). The realization that economic efficiency did not always go hand in hand with moral virtue caused Fogel considerable anguish and eventually led him to develop a four-point "indictment" of slavery based on the revelation that "technological efficiency is [not] inherently good" (p. 46); in short, "discarding the assumption that productivity is necessarily virtuous resolve[d] the paradox" (p. 47). |
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