Fogel, a “Time on the Cross.”

[5fish]

Here is a Noble economist that said Slavery by the numbers was not that bad...

Link: https://acton.org/pub/commentary/20...ising-discovery-about-christians-and-american

Robert Fogel (1922-2013), the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was president of Cornell University’s American Youth for Democracy, investing eight years promoting communism. Meanwhile, he married Enid Morgan, an African-American woman, consequently suffering the ugliness of American racism personally. Eventually, he rejected communism. Apparently, the data didn’t support it.

Fogel was driven by data, perhaps the purest pursuer of empirical truth I’ve ever met in academia. He pioneered an approach to history, called “cliometrics,” that relied on quantifiable evidence; that is, countable documentation.

For example, whereas other historians might look to the likes of Fanny Kemble, a British actress who married a Southern plantation owner, to piece together the lives of the slaves, Fogel believed such sources were too filtered through bias. Campaigners, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, tended to dramatize. Cliometrians, though, seek government records, the business ledgers of plantations and the like.

Fogel’s bean-counting approach led to his discovery that plantations, organized in a business-like fashion with their “gang system,” had an assembly line-like efficiency. Hence Southern slavery was fantastically profitable. He calculated, in his books Time on the Crossand Without Consent or Contract, that Southern slavery was 36% more efficient than free Northern farms even though, generally, the soil in the North is better.

(south) adapt slavery to industrialization, been unconquerable if a later Civil War had broken out, and likely would have spread slavery indefinitely. Slavery was on the ascendancy at the outbreak of the Civil War.

Furthermore – and here it sounds scandalous – most Southern slaves were treated materially well by their “owners.” The average slave consumed more calories and lived longer than the average, white, Northern city-dweller. Contrary to the popular myth, slave families were rarely divided up -- only about 3% were -- and slave-owners rarely used their slaves for sexual indulgence, with only about 2% of slave births being by white fathers. Because of these superficially positive findings about slavery, some critics misunderstood Fogel and attacked his work. But it withstood the criticism, earning a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993.

Fogel saw that the American institution of slavery was evil because it depends on unrestrained domination. One group of people determine, in God-like fashion, the fate of others. Slavery was, for Fogel, a “Time on the Cross.” This was the original objection of Christian abolitionists and that caught Fogel’s eye. Christians provided the other-worldly ethics that ended a system that worked in this world that had been normal. But Christians believed that normalcy and efficiency were no excuse if it offended the next world.

The Link is longer than what I posted here but worth a read...

 

[5fish]

This is a forgotten work... Time on the Cross (1974)

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fogel

Fogel's most famous and controversial work is Time on the Cross (1974), a two-volume quantitative study of American slavery, co-written with Stanley Engerman.

Due to economies of scale, (the so-called "gang system" of labor on cotton plantations), they argued, Southern slave farms were more productive, per unit of labor, than northern farms.

The implications of this, Engerman and Fogel contended, is that slavery in the American South was not quickly going away on its own (as it had in some historical instances such as ancient Rome) because, despite its exploitative nature, slavery was immensely profitable and productive for slave owners.

According to Engerman and Fogel, slaves in the American South lived better than did many industrial workers in the North. Fogel based this analysis largely on plantation records and claimed that slaves worked less, were better fed and whipped only occasionally – although the authors were careful to state explicitly that slaves were still exploited in ways which were not captured by measures available from records.

In fact, Fogel objected to slavery on moral grounds; he thought that on purely economic grounds, slavery was not unprofitable or inefficient as previous historians such as Ulrich B. Phillips had argued.

In 1989 Fogel published Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery

In 1989 Fogel published Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery as a response to criticism stemming from what some perceived as the cold and calculating conclusions found in his earlier work, Time on the Cross.

 

[5fish]

Here are some takes from Fogel obits...

https://www.historians.org/publicat...istory/november-2013/in-memoriam-robert-fogel

His next project, which triggered even more debate among scholars, concerned the economics of slavery in the antebellum South (a project on which I was co-investigator for several years). Drawing on a large collection of data from plantation records, probates, census manuscripts, and other sources, the conclusions in Time on the Cross:The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) were that slavery was profitable and that individuals in both the North and South expected slavery to remain so. More controversial were the arguments that slaves were better treated materially than had been believed, that planters were economically rational agents, and that slavery was compatible with a growing and flexible economy.

Many of Fogel’s innovative methods went on to become accepted practice. For example, one of the measures used to analyze the material conditions of slave life was the heights of slaves, recorded in the coastal shipping manifests from 1808 to the Civil War. There were initial controversies about the use of this measure, but after further debate, the study of heights and related anthropometric measures soon become accepted ways of judging living standards.

Next Obit...

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/robert-fogel-won-nobel-prize-economics-1926-2013

His book, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, written with Stanley Engerman, sparked debate from the moment it was published in 1974. In it, Fogel and Engerman challenged the long-held assumption, by then taken as fact, that slavery was unprofitable, inefficient and in decline in the years leading up to the Civil War. Their research found that slave farms were as productive as free farms and that the viability of slavery — as well as the economy of the antebellum South — was increasing. His four-volume Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery continued to generate controversy.

Among Fogel’s recent projects was an examination of veterans of the Union Army, Bleakley said, “which again has been a long, hard slog through data with the intent of seeing how human health and potential have changed dramatically over time, and of understanding trends and reasons for those trends.”

 

[5fish]

I think to work like Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management by Caitlin Rosenthal support Fogel conclusions...

http://bostonreview.net/race/caitlin-c-rosenthal-how-slavery-inspired-modern-business-management

The history of slavery’s capitalism warns against all these expectations. My new book, Accounting for Slavery, as well as work by historians such as Daina Ramey Berry and Calvin Schermerhorn, shows that slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was highly adaptable to the pursuit of profit. Free markets for slaveholders flourished, and their control over men, women, and children expedited production, both by pushing up the pace of labor and by transporting it to new, more fertile soils. Slaveholders’ manipulation of human capital compounded it into massive fortunes—both through financial maneuvering and through human reproduction.

Here are excerpts from an interview... with her...

But in the middle of that research, an economic historian handed me an example of a plantation account book and it was just much, much more sophisticated than the average practices that I had seen in Northern factories. As I began to follow it, I found other examples that showed slaveholders using many of the same practices that are usually considered to be milestones in the emergence of modern business.
So the question I had was: “What would the history of American business practices look like if we fully considered slavery? How could we write slavery back into that history?”

But since then there have been lots of moments where business historians and other scholars have actually tried to remind us of the relevance of slavery to the history of management. So much so that in 2002, there was an article – or I think it’s 2003 – by a management scholar where he said, “You know, actually, we’re in denial about the relevance of slavery to the history of American business practices, because if you read secondary sources on American business and American slavery, you can immediately see that planters are doing some of the same things that business people did.”

Alfred Chandler, who’s probably the most renowned American business historian, wrote in his book “The Visible Hand,” which is the most prominent business history, that plantation overseers were in many ways the first salaried managers in the country. He didn’t conclude then that that made plantations particularly modern. But as I continued to pour through plantation records, I found that not only do we have overseers, but we have under them white managers sometimes called bookkeepers, and beneath them you have enslaved managers – head drivers, head watchman, head smiths and carpenters – each of whom are responsible for managing different aspects of plantation production.

Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” he gives advice on how to appreciate and depreciate enslaved people.

I am trying to point out if slavery was efficient which it seems it was as Ms. Rosenthal argues it was... and notice that there were enslaved mangers that helped run the Plantation... it seems plantations may out be much eviler than Call Centers are today or the Factory floor...

 

[jgoodguy]

I think to work like Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management by Caitlin Rosenthal support Fogel conclusions...

http://bostonreview.net/race/caitlin-c-rosenthal-how-slavery-inspired-modern-business-management

The history of slavery’s capitalism warns against all these expectations. My new book, Accounting for Slavery, as well as work by historians such as Daina Ramey Berry and Calvin Schermerhorn, shows that slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was highly adaptable to the pursuit of profit. Free markets for slaveholders flourished, and their control over men, women, and children expedited production, both by pushing up the pace of labor and by transporting it to new, more fertile soils. Slaveholders’ manipulation of human capital compounded it into massive fortunes—both through financial maneuvering and through human reproduction.

Here are excerpts from an interview... with her...

But in the middle of that research, an economic historian handed me an example of a plantation account book and it was just much, much more sophisticated than the average practices that I had seen in Northern factories. As I began to follow it, I found other examples that showed slaveholders using many of the same practices that are usually considered to be milestones in the emergence of modern business.
So the question I had was: “What would the history of American business practices look like if we fully considered slavery? How could we write slavery back into that history?”

But since then there have been lots of moments where business historians and other scholars have actually tried to remind us of the relevance of slavery to the history of management. So much so that in 2002, there was an article – or I think it’s 2003 – by a management scholar where he said, “You know, actually, we’re in denial about the relevance of slavery to the history of American business practices, because if you read secondary sources on American business and American slavery, you can immediately see that planters are doing some of the same things that business people did.”

Alfred Chandler, who’s probably the most renowned American business historian, wrote in his book “The Visible Hand,” which is the most prominent business history, that plantation overseers were in many ways the first salaried managers in the country. He didn’t conclude then that that made plantations particularly modern. But as I continued to pour through plantation records, I found that not only do we have overseers, but we have under them white managers sometimes called bookkeepers, and beneath them you have enslaved managers – head drivers, head watchman, head smiths and carpenters – each of whom are responsible for managing different aspects of plantation production.

Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” he gives advice on how to appreciate and depreciate enslaved people.

I am trying to point out if slavery was efficient which it seems it was as Ms. Rosenthal argues it was... and notice that there were enslaved mangers that helped run the Plantation... it seems plantations may out be much eviler than Call Centers are today or the Factory floor...

OTOH, just how far can accounting practices take us. Governmental accounting is common across democracies and dictatorships. When slavery died, both cotton production and capitalism continued on without interruption except that caused by war suggesting the relationship was not an intimate as some suggest.

As to Fogal, if he had been right, to begin with, there would have been little need for a revision to his work. If Fogal disabused the idea that slavery was akin to a hobby, the idea that it was hugely profitable also has been disabused. Cotton was hugely profitable, slavery was just a means to profit from it.

 

[5fish]

As to Fogal, if he had been right, to begin with, there would have been little need for a revision to his wo

I do not think it was revised about its core principles but more like trying not to promote slavery... even thou the numbers point to slavery being more benign and efficient institution...

Before Fogel... http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/fogel.htm

Fogel and Engerman feel their research provides corrections to the traditional view of the economics of slavery. This traditional view involves the following assertions about the economics of slavery:

• 
  
  • Slavery was generally an unprofitable investment and depended upon raising and selling slaves to be profitable.
  • Slavery was only profitable on new, highly fertile land.
  • Slavery as an economic institution was economically moribund.
  • Agricultural production based upon slave labor was economically inefficient.
  • slavery caused the economy of the South to stagnate, or at least retarded its economic growth, during the period before the Civil War.
  • Slavery provided extremely harsh material conditions for the typical slave.

After Fogel...


The principal corrections that Fogel and Engerman felt needed to be made in this traditional view are:

• Slavery was not an economically irrational system. The price of slaves was justified by the profits to be earned with slave labor.
• Slavery was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War and there was no evidence that it would have ended without political intervention.
• Plantation agriculture based upon slave labor was not economically inefficient. It may have been significantly more efficient than family farming.
• The typical slave field-hand was not unproductive. On average the typical slave field-hand may have been more productive than a free, white field-hand.
• Slavery was not incompatible with industrial production.
• The slave family was the basic unit of social organization and slave owners encouraged the stability of slave families. Most slave sales were of whole families or of individuals who were ready to leave the family.
• The material standard of living of slaves in the South compared favorably with that of free workers in industry.
• Over the course of a field-hand slave's lifetime he received about 90 percent of the value of his production.
• The economy of the antebellum South was not stagnating. In the period between 1840 and 1860 per capita income increased faster in the South than in the rest of the country.

Compare...

The Relative Efficiency of Slave-based and Free-labor Agriculture
Fogel and Engerman report the results of an extensive method to compare the efficiencies of free-labor farms, north and south, with slave-labor plantations in the Old South and the New South. Their conclusions are startling:

• In 1860 southern agriculture was 35 percent more efficient, in terms of output for an equal amount of inputs, than northern agriculture.
• Southern free-labor farms were 9 percent more productive than northern free-labor farms.
• Slave-labor farms were 28 percent more productive than southern free-labor farms and 40 percent more productive than northern free-labor farms.
• The slave-based agriculture of the New South was 29 percent more productive for equal inputs than slave-based agriculture in the Old South. The free-labor farms of the Old South equaled the productivity of the free-labor farms of the North. The slave-based agriculture of the Old South was 19 percent more productive than the free-labor farms of the North and the slave-based agriculture of the New South were 53 percent more productive than northern free-labor agriculture.
• There were economies of scale in southern slave-based agriculture but these economies of scale may have been fully captured by moderate-sized, sixteen to fifty slaves, operations. Fogel and Engerman's conclusions were based upon economies of scale in production. There may also have been economies of scale in marketing.
• Although southern lands needed more effort to maintain fertility there was not a problem of the land of the Old South being worked out and unproductive.
• The differing size of plantations in the Old South and New South was based upon the nature of crops. Tobacco-growing in Virginia and Maryland and rice-growing in South Carolina and Georgia had differing economies of scale from cotton-growing in the New South.
• The owners of slave-based plantations were not "idlers" but instead self-conscious entrepreneurs who gave great attention to the management of their operations.
• Plantation operators strove for a disciplined, specialized and coordinated labor force. Labor was organized into something like the assembly line operations in the industry. This involved "driving" the slaves' efforts to maintain a pace of production. The "drivers" or foremen were slaves themselves.
• Plantations had a much higher rate of labor force participation, two thirds, as compared with a free population, one third. This was achieved by finding productive pursuits for the young and the elderly and maintaining nurseries so that slave women could work.

The link goes into the formulas he used to come up with his thoughts... http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/fogel.htm

 

[5fish]

Here is this... from an obit... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...is-research-on-slave-plantations-8661030.html

The work on railroads excited economic historians, but it was his collaboration with Stanley Engerman in Time on the Cross: the rise and fall of American Negro Slavery (1974) that brought him wider public attention. Slavery had long been thought to be not only immoral - except by the slaveowners - but also inefficient, maintained in the South for reasons of custom and prestige and based on a black workforce that exhibited low productivity and poor skills. Fogel and Engerman tried, in a back-of-the-envelope calculation, to work out exactly how inefficient slavery had been; to their initial great surprise, they found that it was in fact profitable. Time on the Cross and its successor Without Consent or Contract: the rise and fall of American Slavery (1989) bolstered and documented this finding through painstaking work on plantation and demographic records.

He did change economics...

To reach this conclusion, he employed economic theory and statistics together with a close attention to historical sources, all hallmarks of what came to be called the "new economic history" or "cliometrics" - after Clio, the muse of history.

His primary achievement, cited in the award in 1993 of the Nobel Prize for Economics (jointly with Douglass North), was to integrate economic theory, quantification and history, but his work continued and broadened further, embracing demography, nutrition and ageing.

 

[Andersonh1]

I need to read "Time on the Cross". Sounds like an essential book for understanding American slavery.

 

[5fish]

American slavery.

I am trying to figure out how this work has gone unnoticed by by civil forums in general...

There is a link to the book on this forum the original was a two - volume set... I'm the 80's he wrote another book ...

https://www.jggscivilwartalk.online...-cross-the-economics-of-american-slavery.355/

 

[jgoodguy]

I am trying to figure out how this work has gone unnoticed by by civil forums in general...

There is a link to the book on this forum the original was a two - volume set... I'm the 80's he wrote another book ...

https://www.jggscivilwartalk.online...-cross-the-economics-of-american-slavery.355/

Discussed over at CWT. I have his and other's book on the subject. It is known, even well known IMHO.

Did he change anything or was he doing the typical author's everyone before me was wrong, but now I will enlighten the universe?

 

[jgoodguy]

I do not think it was revised about its core principles but more like trying not to promote slavery... even thou the numbers point to slavery being more benign and efficient institution...

Before Fogel... http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/fogel.htm

Fogel and Engerman feel their research provides corrections to the traditional view of the economics of slavery. This traditional view involves the following assertions about the economics of slavery:

• 
  
  • Slavery was generally an unprofitable investment and depended upon raising and selling slaves to be profitable.
  • Slavery was only profitable on new, highly fertile land.
  • Slavery as an economic institution was economically moribund.
  • Agricultural production based upon slave labor was economically inefficient.
  • slavery caused the economy of the South to stagnate, or at least retarded its economic growth, during the period before the Civil War.
  • Slavery provided extremely harsh material conditions for the typical slave.

After Fogel...


The principal corrections that Fogel and Engerman felt needed to be made in this traditional view are:

• 
  
  
  • Slavery was not an economically irrational system. The price of slaves was justified by the profits to be earned with slave labor.
  • Slavery was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War and there was no evidence that it would have ended without political intervention.
  • Plantation agriculture based upon slave labor was not economically inefficient. It may have been significantly more efficient than family farming.
  • The typical slave field-hand was not unproductive. On average the typical slave field-hand may have been more productive than a free, white field-hand.
  • Slavery was not incompatible with industrial production.
  • The slave family was the basic unit of social organization and slave owners encouraged the stability of slave families. Most slave sales were of whole families or of individuals who were ready to leave the family.
  • The material standard of living of slaves in the South compared favorably with that of free workers in industry.
  • Over the course of a field-hand slave's lifetime he received about 90 percent of the value of his production.
  • The economy of the antebellum South was not stagnating. In the period between 1840 and 1860 per capita income increased faster in the South than in the rest of the country.

Compare...

The Relative Efficiency of Slave-based and Free-labor Agriculture
Fogel and Engerman report the results of an extensive method to compare the efficiencies of free-labor farms, north and south, with slave-labor plantations in the Old South and the New South. Their conclusions are startling:

• 
  
  
  • In 1860 southern agriculture was 35 percent more efficient, in terms of output for an equal amount of inputs, than northern agriculture.
  • Southern free-labor farms were 9 percent more productive than northern free-labor farms.
  • Slave-labor farms were 28 percent more productive than southern free-labor farms and 40 percent more productive than northern free-labor farms.
  • The slave-based agriculture of the New South was 29 percent more productive for equal inputs than slave-based agriculture in the Old South. The free-labor farms of the Old South equaled the productivity of the free-labor farms of the North. The slave-based agriculture of the Old South was 19 percent more productive than the free-labor farms of the North and the slave-based agriculture of the New South were 53 percent more productive than northern free-labor agriculture.
  • There were economies of scale in southern slave-based agriculture but these economies of scale may have been fully captured by moderate-sized, sixteen to fifty slaves, operations. Fogel and Engerman's conclusions were based upon economies of scale in production. There may also have been economies of scale in marketing.
  • Although southern lands needed more effort to maintain fertility there was not a problem of the land of the Old South being worked out and unproductive.
  • The differing size of plantations in the Old South and New South was based upon the nature of crops. Tobacco-growing in Virginia and Maryland and rice-growing in South Carolina and Georgia had differing economies of scale from cotton-growing in the New South.
  • The owners of slave-based plantations were not "idlers" but instead self-conscious entrepreneurs who gave great attention to the management of their operations.
  • Plantation operators strove for a disciplined, specialized and coordinated labor force. Labor was organized into something like the assembly line operations in the industry. This involved "driving" the slaves' efforts to maintain a pace of production. The "drivers" or foremen were slaves themselves.
  • Plantations had a much higher rate of labor force participation, two thirds, as compared with a free population, one third. This was achieved by finding productive pursuits for the young and the elderly and maintaining nurseries so that slave women could work.

The link goes into the formulas he used to come up with his thoughts... http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/fogel.htm

Your assignment, if you chose to accept it is to find what the economics of slavery was before Fogel et. al..

 

[5fish]

what the economics of slavery was before Fogel et. al..

I found this U. B. Phillips ...

Conrad and Meyer were before Fogel...

This addendum was a careful look at the work of Alfred Conrad and John Meyer and their 1958 article "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South" that sought to use capital accounting theory to estimate the profitability of slavery. Their work may very well be considered the beginning of the "new economic history" or "cliometrics."

But first Kenneth Stampp... https://www.historians.org/publicat...tory/summer-2009/in-memoriam-kenneth-m-stampp

The previous generation of historians, typified by Ulrich B. Phillips, tended to interpret slavery as a benign, paternalistic institution fostering racial harmony, “civilizing” Africans, or already facing economic extinction prior to the Civil War.

Stampp is regarded as one of the 20th century’s most formidable scholars of slavery, the American Civil War, and the Reconstruction. His seminal publication is The Peculiar Institution (1956) which overturned the way slavery was taught in the United States.

Stampp’s book challenged these ideas, showing the ways plantation owners sought to control slaves because the institution was still profitable, and the various ways that African Americans actively (uprisings, escapes) and passively (work slowdowns, theft, breaking tools) rebelled against their condition. He also maintained that the morality of slavery was at the heart of public debate surrounding the Civil War. “Prior to the Civil War southern slavery was America’s most profound and vexatious social problem. More than any other problem, slavery nagged at the public conscience; offering no easy solution,” he wrote.

, “Kenneth Stampp helped revolutionize our understanding of two of the most challenging and painful subjects in all of American history: slavery and Reconstruction. In The Peculiar Institution he portrayed slavery as a particularly cold-blooded business in which black people were imprisoned against their will, far different from the romantic and evasive way it had been taught throughout the first half of the 20th century. In The Era of Reconstruction, Stampp showed that the period following the Civil War marked not the willful and malicious devastation of the white South by the North, but rather a clear-eyed and determined attempt to fulfill what emancipation had begun.”

Ulrich B. Phillips was the cold standard... he was a racist.

The link compares Phillips and Stampp work... http://cghs.dadeschools.net/slavery/interpretations_of_slavery_in_U.S/phillips_stampp.htm

Phillips based American Negro Slavery on extensive research in plantation records but also on a deep attachment to the old South and a belief in black racial inferiority. In this work, published in 1918, he treated the slave as the beneficiary of a patriarchal but unprofitable institution designed to maintain the South's cardinal principle of white supremacy. The framework established by Phillips and his followers cast the slaves themselves primarily in the role of objects, whether as victims or beneficiaries. The focus was on slave "treatment", as well as on the performance of the slave economy and the efficiency or inefficiency of slave labor. One of the remarkable features of the Phillips interpretation was its longevity. It survived for thirty years, at least, as the conventional wisdom on the subject.

Ulrich B. Phillips provided numerous examples intended to demonstrate the inherent laziness, docility, and incompetence of blacks, whether enslaved or free. He did not value their worth in any way and held a mainly racist view in his interpretations of slavery.

However, if slavery was even more important for other reasons--as an instrument of social adjustment or racial control, or as a status symbol--owners may have been content to maintain it for those reasons alone, as long as it did not prove cripplingly unprofitable.

I will give what you wanted a link to a book read page s 9 and 10 and it will answer your question...

https://books.google.com/books?id=S... of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South"&f=false

 

[jgoodguy]

I found this U. B. Phillips ...

Conrad and Meyer were before Fogel...

This addendum was a careful look at the work of Alfred Conrad and John Meyer and their 1958 article "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South" that sought to use capital accounting theory to estimate the profitability of slavery. Their work may very well be considered the beginning of the "new economic history" or "cliometrics."

But first Kenneth Stampp... https://www.historians.org/publicat...tory/summer-2009/in-memoriam-kenneth-m-stampp

The previous generation of historians, typified by Ulrich B. Phillips, tended to interpret slavery as a benign, paternalistic institution fostering racial harmony, “civilizing” Africans, or already facing economic extinction prior to the Civil War.

Stampp is regarded as one of the 20th century’s most formidable scholars of slavery, the American Civil War, and the Reconstruction. His seminal publication is The Peculiar Institution (1956) which overturned the way slavery was taught in the United States.

Stampp’s book challenged these ideas, showing the ways plantation owners sought to control slaves because the institution was still profitable, and the various ways that African Americans actively (uprisings, escapes) and passively (work slowdowns, theft, breaking tools) rebelled against their condition. He also maintained that the morality of slavery was at the heart of public debate surrounding the Civil War. “Prior to the Civil War southern slavery was America’s most profound and vexatious social problem. More than any other problem, slavery nagged at the public conscience; offering no easy solution,” he wrote.

, “Kenneth Stampp helped revolutionize our understanding of two of the most challenging and painful subjects in all of American history: slavery and Reconstruction. In The Peculiar Institution he portrayed slavery as a particularly cold-blooded business in which black people were imprisoned against their will, far different from the romantic and evasive way it had been taught throughout the first half of the 20th century. In The Era of Reconstruction, Stampp showed that the period following the Civil War marked not the willful and malicious devastation of the white South by the North, but rather a clear-eyed and determined attempt to fulfill what emancipation had begun.”

Ulrich B. Phillips was the cold standard... he was a racist.

The link compares Phillips and Stampp work... http://cghs.dadeschools.net/slavery/interpretations_of_slavery_in_U.S/phillips_stampp.htm

Phillips based American Negro Slavery on extensive research in plantation records but also on a deep attachment to the old South and a belief in black racial inferiority. In this work, published in 1918, he treated the slave as the beneficiary of a patriarchal but unprofitable institution designed to maintain the South's cardinal principle of white supremacy. The framework established by Phillips and his followers cast the slaves themselves primarily in the role of objects, whether as victims or beneficiaries. The focus was on slave "treatment", as well as on the performance of the slave economy and the efficiency or inefficiency of slave labor. One of the remarkable features of the Phillips interpretation was its longevity. It survived for thirty years, at least, as the conventional wisdom on the subject.

Ulrich B. Phillips provided numerous examples intended to demonstrate the inherent laziness, docility, and incompetence of blacks, whether enslaved or free. He did not value their worth in any way and held a mainly racist view in his interpretations of slavery.

However, if slavery was even more important for other reasons--as an instrument of social adjustment or racial control, or as a status symbol--owners may have been content to maintain it for those reasons alone, as long as it did not prove cripplingly unprofitable.

I will give what you wanted a link to a book read page s 9 and 10 and it will answer your question...

https://books.google.com/books?id=SOEdtuzB9HUC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=Alfred+Conrad+and+John+Meyer+and+their+1958+article+"The+Economics+of+Slavery+in+the+Ante+Bellum+South"&source=bl&ots=djgFE7Q2a6&sig=ACfU3U3yj3QsohxXhrcj3u-X192ffcFpNw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjX87m14ajkAhUBQK0KHdC1BxEQ6AEwCHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=Alfred Conrad and John Meyer and their 1958 article "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South"&f=false

Good Info! The 1950s was the start of the current Civil War Histograpy that slavery was the cause of the Civil War crawling out of the miasma of the lost cause swamp. Andy Hall panned Phillips at one time. Stampp would have been a pioneer in 1956.

 

[Carmel]

Efficient I'll believe. Who benefited? Not the slaves.

 

[5fish]

Efficient I'll believe. Who benefited? Not the slaves.

It benefited the Slaveholding elite...

Think about modern farms are just factories like the old Plantations were... a lot of farms nowadays product on the product like chickens, pigs, cattle and etc... and in many cases, the animals are treated like slaves...

 

[jgoodguy]

It benefited the Slaveholding elite...

Think about modern farms are just factories like the old Plantations were... a lot of farms nowadays product on the product like chickens, pigs, cattle and etc... and in many cases, the animals are treated like slaves...

Except slaves were seldom eaten.

 

[5fish]

I found this old thread lead post#

Here is Fred Law Olmsted thought on slavery... from wiki...

A one-volume abridgment, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom (1861), was published during the first six months of the American Civil War at the suggestion of Olmsted's English publisher.[10] To this he wrote a new introduction (on "The Present Crisis") in which he stated explicitly his views on the effect of slavery on the economy and social conditions of the southern states.

My own observation of the real condition of the people of our Slave States, gave me ... an impression that the cotton monopoly in some way did them more harm than good; and although the written narration of what I saw was not intended to set this forth, upon reviewing it for the present publication, I find the impression has become a conviction.
He argued that slavery had made the slave states inefficient (a set amount of work took 4 times as long in Virginia as in the North) and backward both economically and socially. The profits of slavery fell to no more than 8,000 owners of large plantations; a somewhat larger group had about the standard of living of a New York City policeman, but the proportion of the free white men who were as well-off as a Northern working man was small. Slavery meant that 'the proportion of men improving their condition was much less than in any Northern community; and that the natural resources of the land were strangely unused, or were used with poor economy.'

Southern civilization was restricted to the wealthy plantation owners; the poverty of the rest of the Southern white population prevented the development of civil amenities taken for granted in the North, he said.

The citizens of the cotton States, as a whole, are poor. They work little, and that little, badly; they earn little, they sell little; they buy little, and they have little – very little – of the common comforts and consolations of civilized life. Their destitution is not material only; it is intellectual and it is moral ... They were neither generous nor hospitable and their talk was not that of evenly courageous men.[11]