Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s book Time on the Cross, analyzes the Southern economy before and after the Civil War. The book’s purpose is to show how important African Americans were to the Southern economy, and tries to “correct the perversion of the history of blacks – in order to strike down the view that black Americans were without culture, without achievement, and without development for their first two hundred and fifty years on American soil.” The authors believe that historians and abolitionists before World War II were racist who believed African Americans were inferior to whites. They believed that blacks were lazy and lied to get out of work. Fogel and Engerman try to provide an analysis of the Southern economy to show that the blacks were great workers with a strong family core and a strong sense of culture.

The first chapter of the book discusses the history of the slave trade in the western hemisphere. The transportation of slaves to the new world began in 1502 and the end did not come till the 1860’s. During this time, the largest importer of slaves was Brazil, accounting for 38% of the 9.5 million slaves brought to the new worl

Data on slave housing was less available than that on slave diets. The book can only speculate on the housing conditions in the South for slaves. The 1860 census counted the number of slave houses but not how many lived in each one. So an average was produced of how many would live in the houses, which was 5.2 slaves per house. There is also no data on the conditions of the houses but there is some speculation. Traveler’s accounts on of some housing and plantation owners journals of chores to be done on the houses gives some indication of the quality of the houses. Traveler’s accounts provided a wide array of quality and sizes. Yet most compared considerably with those of free workers.

Chapter two discusses the occupations and the markets for slaves. The book explains that, “During the last three decades of the antebellum era, slaves were involved in virtually every aspect of southern economic life, both rural and urban.” Slaves actually represented quite well in the skilled crafts. Slaves that were in the skilled crafts were generally small in number. The fact that slaves were well represented in the crafts is quite surprising, but after the civil war the amount of slaves in the skilled crafts had dropped significantly. Yet, slaves were not just laborers and in fact, they had a large array of agricultural activities. “These included the planting, raising, and harvesting of virtually every type of crop, as well as animal husbandry, dairying, land improvement, use and maintenance of equipment and machinery, and the construction of buildings.” This was more of a rule than an exception for slaves. Even though most slaves worked on plantations, this does not imply that all their time was consumed by rising and picking cotton. A third of slaves on plantations were children and another fifth of adults were not involved in field tasks. There was more to the plantations than just producing cotton. Most of the food that was consumed was produced on the plantations. The slaves had to rear the livestock as well as grow the feed. Between producing cotton (34%), rearing livestock, growing the feed (25%), and growing corn (6%), the slaves had a remaining 35% of time available for other work. This working time was spent constructing fences and buildings, land improvement, raising other crops, and producing clothes. So the idea that slaves strictly labored in the fields is false and in fact, they had various tasks around the plantation.

Another startling discovery to me was how slave families were strong and rarely broken up. The families were tight with many morals and slave owners pushed slaves to have families. The slave owners also rarely broke up families to be sold and most slaves that were bought separately were single or orphans. This also lead into the part of the book where Fogel and Engerman talk about abolitionists and how they believed that slavery was inefficient because of blacks laborers. These men were not sympathetic towards blacks and how they were mistreated, although there were some that did. They believed that blacks were holding back the Southern economy. Abolitionists wanted to end slavery because they believed that it was inhumane and immoral. I found that some of the most influential abolitionists were racist and did more harm to blacks than good.

The final chapter combines the information in the rest of the book and analyzes it with the paradoxes of forced labor. The chapter explains that the slave system was efficient and the black labor was high quality. Fogel and Engerman blame racism as the major problem with the acceptance with slavery. The men who wanted it abolished believed that blacks were inferior and incompetent. These men also claimed that slavery had forced the Southern economy backward and was nowhere near the production level of the North. But, in fact, the Southern economy, when compared with the rest of the world, had the fourth highest per c

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