Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery

1974 book

Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) is a book by the economists Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. Fogel and Engerman argued that slavery was an economically rational institution and that the economic exploitation of slaves was not as catastrophic as presumed, because there were financial incentives for slaveholders to maintain a basic level of material support for those they held as property. The book was reprinted in 1995 at its twentieth anniversary. The book contradicts the long standing notion that slavery was economically backwards, underdeveloped the South, and was on the path to extinction before the Civil War broke out. It attracted widespread attention in the media and generated heated controversy and criticism for its methodology and conclusions.

The scholar Thomas L. Haskell wrote in 1975 that Time on the Cross had two main themes: to revise the history of slavery and to support the use of the scientific method in history. The authors proposed that slavery before the Civil War was economically efficient, especially in the case of the South, which grew commodity crops such as cotton, tobacco, and sugar. These types of crops were usually grown on plantations that employed a gang system of labor, which was closely monitored and considered more efficient than task based work by smaller groups. Fogel wrote that slave farms were just as productive as free farms. He said that the large plantation style slave farms (16+ slaves) were the most efficient, having a Total Factor Productivity ratio (Ai/Aj) to be around 1.33. Fogel also wrote that if slaves had a day of rest, they tended to be more efficient because of the extra day of rest. They would be able to regain their energy and thus have more energy to produce more. "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." Many in the historical community were impressed with the authors' application of cliometrics. In general historians and economists agree with the conclusion that slavery was efficient and economically viable but had more mixed attitudes towards the material well being of slaves.

In a 1975 review of three works critical of the book, Thomas Haskell of The New York Review of Books said that Time on the Cross "at first seemed exceptionally important, if contentious, [but] now appears at least to be severely flawed and possibly not even worth further attention by serious scholars." In 1975, the historian Herbert Gutman published Slavery and the Numbers Game in which he criticized Fogel and Engerman on a host of issues. He challenged their use of limited evidence for systematic and regular rewards, and their failure to consider the effect public whipping would have on other slaves. He argued that Fogel and Engerman had mistakenly assumed that slaves had assimilated the Protestant work ethic. If they had such an ethic, then the system of punishments and rewards outlined in Time on the Cross would support Fogel and Engerman's thesis. Gutman's thesis was that most slaves had not adopted this ethic at all, and that slavery's carrot and stick approach to work was not part of the slave worldview. He also claimed that much of the mathematics in the text is incorrect and often uses insufficient measurements. In American Slavery, the historian Peter Kolchin suggests that the economists did not fully consider the costs of the forced migration of more than one million slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South, where they were sold to cotton plantations. He wrote that the book was a "flash in the pan, a bold but now discredited work."